A Lesson About GFCIs

I learned a lesson in residential electric today when I went to hook up and turn on a fan in my garage. The fan wouldn't turn on. Checked another electrical device in the outlet and quickly determined there was something wrong with the outlet. So I ran an extension cord from the basement from another outlet to provide an alternate source of power to the fan - still no luck, this outlet was dead too...but the real bummer about that outlet is it was powering my freezer ...by the looks/smell of the food my outlets had probably been out for 12-24 hours. CRAP! What gives?

So I turned to the fuse box, nothing tripped. Then I call my electrician (dad) and after hearing the problem he decides he needs to do a housecall. We tested all the circuit breakers to all areas of the house and determined that I did not have any bad breakers. Then, after almost giving up and resolving to the fact of having to shell out a few hundo to an electrician - inspiration struck. Had a GFCI been tripped? (GFCI's protect you from shock by sensing ground faults (you being shocked) and shutting off juice to the outlet if it senses any change in current caused by a ground fault.) The thought had never occurred to either of us at first because both of the switches that were out did not have the common GFCI 'test' and 'reset' switches as seen below:

We went around the house to all of the outlets with the GFCI switches on them and made sure that they did not need reset. Well - one of them did need reset; my wife's bathroom had an outlet that had been tripped. So why did it have any effect on the outlet in my garage and basement? It turns out that for any given line from a circuit in your breaker box you can monitor for ground faults on all outlets on that line by installing only one GFCI outlet on the line. So in my case all I needed to do was hit the reset button and both of my affected outlets were hot again. Thanks Dad!