Spent 4 hours chasing a phantom ground fault on a simple kitchen circuit

I was doing a final inspection on a remodel in Austin last Wednesday and kept getting a ground fault reading on a brand new GFCI outlet. Turns out the drywall crew had nicked the neutral wire behind the box and it was barely touching the metal box. Has anyone else wasted a whole day on something that should have taken 20 minutes?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_claire25d ago

The whole "chasing a phantom problem" thing is kind of how life works in general, isn't it? You think you fixed one thing, like a slow drain in the bathroom sink, so you pour a whole bottle of Drano down there. Turns out your neighbor's kid flushed a hot wheels car down the toilet upstairs and it just took a few days to wiggle its way into the main line. You spend all Saturday with a snake and a bucket of yuck, when the real fix was just talking to the kid's dad about the toilet. It's the same trick every time, the obvious fix is almost never the right one.

the_nina25d ago

Used to think GFCIs were pretty foolproof, you know, just plug and play. But a tiny nick in the wire? That's the kind of thing that makes you wanna pull your hair out. Now I triple check every box for any little scrape or dent before I even put the device in. Definitely changed how I look at that "simple" final inspection step.