The world has changed and the time has passed when the first thing you think about when you have an electrical or electrical related problem at home is an electrician. Now, more than any other time, people are choosing to solve their electrical or electrical related problems themselves. In fact, as you will see in this guide, only the very complicated electrical problems deserve the attention of a true professional. Apart for those complicated situations, most electrical problems can be solved by anyone with minimal electrical problem solving training.
This guide will attempt to provide such training and can also serve as a very efficient and effective quick reference for most electrical problems you will face in your home. Some might think solving electrical problems is complicated but in reality (and like most problems in life) all you need to do is follow a tried and tested process for which we will be describing an example in this guide. The process to take in solving any electrical problem efficiently is to first identify what electrical problem you have followed by troubleshooting the identified electrical problem and then fixing it.
There are several ways to identify an electrical problem, but the most effective is to use a voltmeter to isolate the source of the problem. A voltmeter is a very powerful tool that can be used to solve most electrical because the wiring in most homes is low voltage and hence electricity through can easily be detected by the shunt mechanism in any voltmeter.
For example, if a socket in your home is not working, then you need to first determine if that is the only socket not working. If it is not the only socket not functioning, then the problem is clearly on a larger scale and you should be going to the source of electricity to all your sockets – the circuit breaker – to investigate the source of the problem. In this case, it might just be that your circuit breaker automatically shut off electricity to your entire house to protect it and your house from a dangerous electrical surge. In such a case, solving the problem is just as easy as turning the circuit breaker on again. If however, only one socket is bad, then you can use the voltmeter to troubleshoot where the loss of power is. Most times for such problems, it is actually the socket fuse that might have been blown and all you need to do is to replace the fuse.
