Your Breaker Tripped. Now What?

Let’s do some troubleshooting together.

Did you plug something new into this circuit? If so, you may have overloaded it, or your new device may have arced, which in turn tripped your super sensitive arc fault breaker. To test this theory, you need to unplug the new device and reset your breaker. What does that mean? We want you to turn the tripped breaker all the way off and then all the way back on. It will make a loud clicking sound and, depending on the age and shape of the breaker, could be really hard to reset.

Now, you might look into your panel and not see a tripped breaker. This means your breaker tripped internally, but nonetheless is in an off position and needs to be reset. Most new homes have lots of specialty breakers called arc fault and GFCI breakers. These are reset the same way as the regular breakers.

So, you have reset the breaker and now you test your circuit again. Is the appliance or device working now or did the breaker trip again? Everything is working again? Excellent! You’ve essentially passed the first month of electrician qualification–cheers to that!

But if your breaker tripped again, let’s sit down and have a cup of coffee. We have to think about our new strategy.

Has this breaker been tripping a lot? Then it might be worn out. Is the device causing the breaker to trip? If so, how can we test this? If it was a portable heater that caused the breaker to trip, most likely it overloaded the circuit because these kinds of appliances require a lot of power. If it was just a low-voltage appliance like your phone charger, then test it in a different room. If the breaker that the device is on trips, you know your device is faulty.

home electrical panel also called breaker box

For any further testing we recommend using the testers our electricians use. Not only can they check if there is any voltage drop that causes breakers to trip, but they can see whether the polarity is correct, whether there is damage in the wire, and they can even test the strength at the breaker. We also recommend reading our other post: Why did my plug stop working?

We hope you found this information helpful! If you’re having trouble with your panel and these solutions are not resolving your issues, Amp Champ will come to your rescue! Trust your electrical doctors, and let us heal your electrical system.