diy in houston
DIY
Hi,
I live in Houston TX and my house was built in 2000.
In my attic, I had a dual socket electrical outlet. My tankless water heater was plugged in to it and the other socket was not being used. Aside from the electrical cable that went into the outlet, there was another electrical cable that came out of it to feed power to a switch form my downstairs ac unit.
A few months ago that outlet began melting. Could have caused a big fire as part of the outlet was bright red when I discovered it.
I replaced the outlet with a gfci, thinking it would prevent the outlet from melting and burning.
About a week ago, the gfci outlet tripped, cutting off our hot water and our ac from downstairs. We have a lot of minor power outages in our area lately so I assumed that was the cause of the issue. I reset the outlet and everything was fine for a week.
Yesterday, it tripped again. I reset it, then it tripped again within a few minutes. So I left it off. I've run an extension cord to the water heater in the attic in the mean time and the downstairs ac is just without power for now.
Any thoughts on what could be causing this? Could something be wrong with the circuit? Could it be that those two appliances shouldn't be powered through a gfci in the attic?
Thanks in advance!
Aaron
I live in Houston TX and my house was built in 2000.
In my attic, I had a dual socket electrical outlet. My tankless water heater was plugged in to it and the other socket was not being used. Aside from the electrical cable that went into the outlet, there was another electrical cable that came out of it to feed power to a switch form my downstairs ac unit.
A few months ago that outlet began melting. Could have caused a big fire as part of the outlet was bright red when I discovered it.
I replaced the outlet with a gfci, thinking it would prevent the outlet from melting and burning.
About a week ago, the gfci outlet tripped, cutting off our hot water and our ac from downstairs. We have a lot of minor power outages in our area lately so I assumed that was the cause of the issue. I reset the outlet and everything was fine for a week.
Yesterday, it tripped again. I reset it, then it tripped again within a few minutes. So I left it off. I've run an extension cord to the water heater in the attic in the mean time and the downstairs ac is just without power for now.
Any thoughts on what could be causing this? Could something be wrong with the circuit? Could it be that those two appliances shouldn't be powered through a gfci in the attic?
Thanks in advance!
Aaron
- TL;DR
- Old outlet in attic, which powered hvac and tankless water heater, was burning and melted. Replaced outlet with gfci. Months later, gfci keeps tripping. What are my next steps?
