I had an interesting weekend. I damn near had my house go up in flames.

Actually, it wasn't quite that scary, but I did get a bit of a shake-up.

Saturday morning my wife woke me up and told me that there was no power in part of the house AND that she had checked the breaker box. I wasn't too flustered yet as we do have one quadrant of the house that gets pretty taxed as far as power usage goes.

I got up and, like any normal man, checked the breaker box even though my wife had already done so. I was indeed surprised to see that the breaker hadn't been tripped.  Hmmmm ... Normally the quick flick of a switch does the trick. Not this time.

She and I unplugged everything from that part of the house, still thinking that it might just still be an overload, but to no avail. Still no power. I then called a couple of friends who are less nervous around electricity than me to see what they thought. They first checked the box again. No blown fuses and power was flowing into the house. Now what?

We started checking every outlet and they too all seemed to be getting juice. It was then that my wife remembered that there was a wall outlet in my 10-year-old son's bedroom that we had forgotten. It was a GFCI receptacle. We tried to test it and reset it but again, no dice.

Thinking that outlet was faulty causing the break in the circuit, my buddy Darin came over and brought a spare outlet. He removed the old with the new. STILL no power!

He decided to check the outlet next to it and the next words that came out of his mouth I cannot type here. What we found was an outlet with a loose connection internally that had gotten so hot, it short-circuited and melted the outlet! (See: photos below). Since it was in my son's room we all immediately thought of the worst possible scenario and are now making plans to have the house checked over to avoid a possible disaster!

The moral of the story? Check your shorts before you have to change them!

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