When an outlet is located in high-risk areas for shock-like outside, kitchen countertops, and in bathrooms, GFCI outlets are required by code. This code exists to keep homeowners safe. If there is an issue, the GFCI outlets disconnect power right away to avoid a possibly lethal shock.
Occasionally, these outlets can trip. Eric, our Service Manager explains how GFCIs work to keep you safe and how you can reset them.
Video Transcript
Hey, guys today we’re going to be talking about a device we have, most of us have, in our houses. The GFCI outlet ground fault circuit interrupter. It’s the square outlet in your house that usually has two buttons on it. It’s commonly found in your kitchen, your laundry room, your garage, your bathrooms, outside. This outlet’s main purpose is to keep you alive. It’s located in those areas because you have the potential of using an electrical appliance and coming into contact with water.
So the main function of this device is to make it real simple as power flows into this device and this device is going to trip if there’s any loss of power out of that circuit and at that point, it’s going to trip. It actually makes a little sound like that and then we’ve lost power. Not only to this outlet here, which is and the confusion comes in that when this thing trips if it’s protecting any other outlets those are going to go dead too. So we just want to go through with you guys today and kind of show you how to reset these devices, drill home the areas of the house where you’re gonna find these devices, and hopefully with a simple push of a button you guys have saved yourself some money on a service call.
So once again they’re there in the kitchen, and this particular outlet here is not just protecting this Keurig, but you can see the power is on here. (can you get the lights) It’s also protecting the outlets over here. So say we were using an appliance that had a frayed wire and there was a loss of power in the system. When this outlet is working correctly the power is going to trip off. Power went dead to the Keurig, you can see over here that power went dead to our light. So the way we want to restore power to that is walked over to a GFCI and there are two buttons on it and you’d have to look close it’s really hard to see one says test and one say reset and what you need to do is push that reset button. And what it’s going to go ahead and do is restore power to my coffee maker, which is good in the morning, and my night light.