Resetting a Circuit Breaker

Of all the home electrical problems that anyone can attempt to do on their own, chances are the easiest, and least complicated task that a person can do on their own is to reset a circuit breaker. While this task is not one that is complicated, or even extremely difficult to work out on your own, it is a task that takes a few precautions on your own to make sure that you are being safe, and therefore will not get injured. When working with electricity, you want to make sure that you are being careful to keep yourself, as well as your electronics safe from being fried or damaged when you have finished resetting the electrical system.

To begin, you want to make sure that you turn off all the appliances and electronics that were working in the room where the power went out. This is to make sure that there is no feedback, or sudden surge in the system when you turn the electricity back on. After you have switched off the radio, television, or whatever else that may have had on in that room, you are going to go down and double check your home's breaker box. Do this to make sure that you know for sure that your breaker has been tripped, and does in fact need to be reset. If, when you go down to check the breaker, you find out that none of the breakers have been tripped, then you are probably faced with a short in the electrical system, and should call an electrician in to try and take a look to see if they can find that short and fix it.

If the breaker is tripped, before doing anything else, you need to make sure that your hands are in fact dried off, and not damp or wet. While this may seem to be a fairly rudimentary step, but it is a basic safety measure, since water and electricity do not mix. After making sure that your hands are dry, go ahead and identify the breaker that has been tripped. The breaker that has been tripped is going to be in, or at the very least pointing in the direction of the off position. If the breaker has not gone all the way over to off, then push it over into that position. Once you have done that, move that breaker back into the on position.

You have now reset the breaker, and you can now go back and turn on the electrical equipment that you had previously turned off. If you notice that the power turns off again immediately, then you might have a problem with one of the problems, or with a short, and is going to take more trouble shooting to find.