When I Push The Reset Button, The Breaker Trips!

[Julie Moriarty]

Just around the corner from us, they finished replacing seawall panels from Irma damage. One of our friends lost the feed to his boat lift so he stopped by to get some help. We replace the pipe, pulled in wire and I terminated the wires on the breaker. I had to go but all that was left was to splice three wires in JB at the seawall. He said he could finish no problem.

A few hours later he called and said, "Bad news. The fuse blew." (He's 77 and still calls breakers fuses :rolleyes:) So he undid the splices, checked for shorts, but everything was okay. I asked him if the breaker tripped as soon as he turned it on. He said, "No. When I turned it on it was fine but when I pushed the reset button it blew."

Then I said, "Bob, that's not a reset button, it's a test button and is found on all GFI breakers. You push it to see if it's working. If it trips, it's working. The bad news is you did all that troubleshooting work for nothing."

"Oh. Guess I'll have to put it all back together now." He has a very wry sense of humor.

[Bill McNiel]

Julie - Thank you for the second post today that brought humor into my life.

[Bruce Volden]

One is never too old to learn!
Glad things worked out.

Bruce

[Wade Lippman]

My mother once tried to fix a vacuum by untying a knot in the cord. A belt had fallen off.
Of course, my father once tried to heat a frozen dinner, but didn't know how to turn the oven on.

[Karl Andersson]

Back in my early days inspecting construction sites for safety, we used plug-in GFCI wiring indicators to check if the temporary wiring was done correctly. There was a test button on the tester which would induce a fault and trip the GFCI externally because some of the outlet GFCI's test buttons were simply mechanically tripping the spring. They wouldn't trip the breaker...until jobsite electricians started using GFCI circuit breakers. Then when Joe safety weenie plugged in the tester, someone had to radio back to the trailer to get someone to reset the breaker -you learned to ask before testing.

We had one old crusty jobsite inspector who liked to walk around cutting the plugs off of subcontractor's extension cords that were missing their grounding pins with a pair of wire cutters. The time he forgot to unplug the cord before cutting it became legendary.

[Julie Moriarty]

We had dinner with Bob and his wife. They wanted to treat us to dinner in thanks for helping out on the dock power feed. At dinner Bob's wife elbows him and says, "Tell her." I'm thinking something was wrong with the dock feed. He then says, "There's another problem. You know that other conduit I installed?" I nodded. When I was there he had dug a second trench and I saw 1/2" PVC in it. "Something's wrong and I can't figure it out. Guess we'll be taking you out to dinner again." He's a character.