The other day, my son came to me and said his monitor wouldn’t turn on when plugged into the surge protector and that the “building wiring fault” light was lit. I told him to try the surge protector in another outlet and circuit and he said that it was still lit on the same circuit, but not on other circuits.

As I was working, I told him to wait until my father came over later and that they could troubleshoot it then. When my father came over, they started looking at the problem and I jumped in to help check the outlets. I opened the first outlet (with the power off, of course) and tightened the wires and re-wired the quick connects so that the wires had a better connection with the screws (I dislike the quick connect because there is a piece of metal in them under pressure that if the metal loosens, we’ll end up with a problem). Unfortunately the problem persisted. I repeated this on another outlet to no avail. On the next outlet, we determined that it was the home run connecting to the panel.

We disconnected the legs going out from the outlet and had the same result. This narrowed down the problem to being between the breaker and the outlet. My dad suggested we swap the breaker with one that didn’t have the problem; no luck either.

As we were looking at the panel, I happened to notice that 2 of the neutrals screwed into the bus bar were burned! The wires hadn’t been properly secured (we had the house remodeled 12 years ago) which caused resistance and could have lead to a fire. I snipped off the charred bits and properly wired the neutrals.

Luckily we caught this problem as who knows how bad this could have been. Fhew.