this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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I just bought a house from a guy who had been renting it out since the '80s and this hits especially hard. So many fucking layers of paint on everything. Couldn't even be bothered to remove the outlet and switch covers first, to the point where I can't find the damn screws or even the edges of the covers.
I wish he had painted over the breaker box, though, since that might have prevented the last tenant from installing a GFCI outlet that somehow trips the circuit breaker if there's no high-amp appliance plugged into it.
I had a place like that in school. There was so much paint on the walls they were squishy.
This is my "I might have read the box right on the GFCI outlet I put in my shed" but this may indicate that it's wired with the hot and neutral backwards.
Are you saying that it won’t keep from tripping unless something is plugged into it and turned on or that it trips under any circumstance that something draws power from it. Have you been able to confirm all the junctions in the circuit? Sounds like something is terribly miswired or the GFCI and/or breaker is bad. I wouldn’t use it until you get it corrected.
This particular outlet was switched, and whenever I would flip the switch to ON I would hear a humming for a few seconds and then the circuit breaker would pop. The seller told me the tenant had a CNC router or something of that nature plugged into the outlet and apparently that worked without tripping the breaker. I have no idea, maybe the dude wired up the polarity wrong or something. I deleted the whole outlet (along with the wall it was in) and the rest of the outlets and lights on the circuit are working normally, so I'll never know what the exact problem was.
Yeah. That’s really bad. It sounds like it was grounding out or something equally terrible. The device probably had something capable of moderating the draw, but it was basically like electricity was escaping places it should not have been going.
Yeah, and for bonus points it was all with 80-year-old wiring.