Half of the circuits on my home's breaker box are labelled "outlets and lights" with no further info. I want to replace an outlet in my bedroom as its more ran through than a female athletic trainer on a college football team, and things just fall out when I plug them in. Provided I do it in a way that doesn't electrocute me, is there any reason that shorting the outlet to figure out what breaker switch it's linked to would be a bad thing/cause damage?
Just plug a lamp or radio in and start flipping breakers until it's out
No, you get one of them sirens for that
How will OP create the fire hazard he desperately desires to create?
>shorts outlet
>breaker doesn’t blow
Bait thread. Shit tier.
When in doubt switch off the main breaker while you replace the bad outlet. Go through and label the switches correctly by room later so you don't have to do this again.
> is there any reason that ...would be a bad thing/cause damage?
[1] Breakers are only designed/rated to trip a few times. Tripping them purposefully will decrease their useful life.
[2] If your house is old there are probably poorly made connections (think shitty wire nuts in junction boxes covered in old dried out electrical tape). Shorting the circuit will stress those poor connections where the resistance is highest, possibly damaging them.
[3] If you do have bad connections, it may not reach the current threshold to trip the breaker. Whatever screwdriver you lay across the terminals will get welded in place and the wires will heat up (not good).
[4] Risk of electric shock, arc burn (skin), arc flash (eyes).
Instead plug in a radio you can hear from the panel, or have a friend on the telephone watching a lamp. Try all the breakers. Once you find it, label it properly.
>poorly made connections (think shitty wire nuts in junction boxes covered in old dried out electrical tape)
What is better? Soldering?
1. you shouldn't use them as an every day switch but 5 or 6 times is nothing, you are supposed to test them by using a tester that effectively overloads them multiple times to get readings for your installation test certificate, dont use them every day but they aren't fuses ffs.
2 *if your house is american
3 better to find out now while you are there to put it out than when you are asleep and die in a smoke fire
4. just be careful, haha as if a us pole transformer has low enough impedance to dump enough current to vaporise copper hahaha thats why you guys need arc fault interrupters, your supply transformers aren't even gutsy enough to, when you drop a penny on your uncovered shitty plug pins, operate your OCPDs ahahahahahahahahahahahaha fricking dogshit country hashahahaha
>you shouldn't use them as an every day switch but 5 or 6 times is nothing
I recently re did a commercial space where instead of having switches, they just had the lights connected to breakers. So there were like 10 breakers used as light switches for one big room.
and? how many cycles had they seen? were they still functional? did you renew them?
I have no idea how many cycles they've seen. Hundreds probably. If the place was open for years and they used them at least once a day. They still worked though. We switched it so the lights were on regular switches though instead of breakers obviously.
You can specifically buy switch-duty-rated breakers, this is fine
This shit is magic for commercial.
came here to post this
couldnt fricking agree more
>side note
how often do you fellow commercial service sparkies have to flip a breaker because female office workers insist on wearing sandals in the winter and use those little ceramic heaters under thier desk?
i fricking swear to god that i deal with 10 calls a week in the winter for this shit
Electrician threw one of these in the dumpster at work (different brand) because the button was screwed up. Shamelessly dumpster dove, took it apart and put in a switch and now it works great. Was really useful because all the labeling on my breakers was shit tier.
How does it work? Is it like Ethernet over Power and the receiver is picking up the faked internet connection from the breaker?
IDK how that specific model operates, but usually there are 2 different strategies afaik---
It either uses a plug in device which draws a lot of current in quick spikes, several amps for only a few milliseconds or so, and causes variations in the circuit that can be picked up by the receiver
Or they actually inject a AC signal (sort of similar to how ethernet over powerlines works) onto the line which can be picked up by the receiver.
Extremely unreliable. I’ve asked a few people who run public facilities and they have said the same.
>shorting the outlet to figure out what breaker switch
are you fricking moronic
gotta be one of the dumbest things I've heard
you're the reason why home owners are legally required to get a permit before doing work on their house
I do this all the time and I work as an electrician. It's only a problem when the breaker doesn't trip and you get molten metal on the carpet. I'm not saying it's the best way but it works.
There's been plenty of times where I turn on a breaker after installing everything and it blows immediately because a wire was loose and is touching the box. Or you pull an outlet or switch out and the receptacle wasn't taped and it trips on the side of the box.
It's just doing the same thing but on purpose.
> I work as an electrician
> There's been plenty of times where I turn on a breaker after installing everything and it blows immediately because a wire was loose
Reconsider your career choice
>If you do something as a professional you are not allowed to make mistakes anymore
Man I'm an electrician and I very very rarely have a breaker trip due to my installations. If it's happening all the time for you I'm inclined to think you're not putting out high-quality installs.
Contractor here. I can tell the price of scrap copper just by walking through a house after you rough it in. The price of scrap copper is directly proportional to the amount of wire you leave hanging out of the work boxes. 6” feet? Really?
What?
I used to watch the sparkies do this all the time in new construction. They had plugs that were wired together in a dead short, they'd plug them in and trip the circuit and then label the breakers.
I'm an electrician. I might do it on a completely new circuit I just installed, but almost never on old work. Worst-case scenario starts a fire. Only a good decision if you trust the wiring
>[1] Breakers are only designed/rated to trip a few times. Tripping them purposefully will decrease their useful life.
I've seen this claim before, but have yet to find any statement from a manufacturer to back it up. If this were true, why would GFCI/AFCI breakers say to test them monthly?
panel breakers are thermo magnetic. they use heat to actuate the trip mechanism, hence the wear. gfcis are a relay and a current transformer. you test them to ensure the detection circuit still works. it still can wear out but it takes alot more cycles.
That makes sense, but I still would like to see data on how many trip cycles would really be needed to produce any appreciable wear.
its a simple relay so itll be in the thousands if not hundreds of thousands depending on the load. the wear points are the spring, latch and contacts. the best failure case is no reset. the worst is when it dont trip, usually due to water ingress poisoning the trip circuit. manufacturers data may provide what you seek but its an irrelevant spec.
>If this were true, why would GFCI/AFCI breakers say to test them monthly?
They want you to stress them so they break, and you have to buy $100 replacements.
The gucci version of this is wireless testers that you leave in each outlet, which report back to a handheld unit whenever they're on.
Just turn off the main breaker if you don't want to trace it
It would only take like what, half an hour, to just test your breakers one by one to see what they're for and label them more clearly
I don't know. I have done it many times in other people's homes, but wouldn't do it on mine. Use the lamp/radio trick to find it.
i've used a lamp and a battery operated security camera on wifi last time I went through my breakers, it works (router is on a UPS)
if all your breakers were gfci you could use a gfci tester to trip it and find the tripped breaker
but you probably dont have any
I have no experience whatsoever with residential electrical systems, but I do have most of an EE degree and a decent amount of DIY experience when it comes to wood and small electronics. Realistically, would it be feasible for me to move the lights in one room from one circuit to another? Whatever jackass that wired my home put the laundry room lights on the breaker for my two spare bedrooms (and it's worth noting the second bathroom that is adjacent to the laundry room and in between the laundry room and the bedrooms has its own circuit) so when I needed to turn off the bedroom power to install a ceiling fan recently, I had no lights in the laundry room where I keep my tools. Ideally I'd just move them onto the bathroom circuit, since the only other circuit is for the laundry appliances.
>so when I needed to turn off the bedroom power to install a ceiling fan recently, I had no lights in the laundry room where I keep my tools
if thats your problem then buy a portable work light next time you have to work in the dark
moving any outlet to a different circuit is going to be a nightmare unless you're incredibly lucky enough to find two different circuits in the laundry light electrical box, or all the wiring is in exposed metal conduit
>not labeling each outlet
Shiggy diggy
>not mapping out an entire floor with color coded labels for receptacles lights and fans, putting it in a google doc and putting the qr code to the doc on the inside panel door so you never have to print out a new map if something changes
ngmi
I color coded some in my shop. The ones that share a breaker, the rest are one outlet per breaker. If they arent colored its on its own.