It’s always something. Got home late tonight, after what I admit was a fairly successful sojourn of Christmas shopping. Carol reported that the light under the over-stove microwave oven was out. So I got a Phillips head screwdriver and removed the cover.
Both bulbs were out, which seemed a little strange. The bulb on the right came out easily, but when I tried to unscrew the bulb on the left it looked like this.
So… not knowing which circuit breaker the microwave is on, because most of the breakers aren’t labeled, I took a pair of insulated needle nose pliers and deliberately shorted out the socket. There was a little explosion, and knowing the bulb’s current comes straight from the 120V outlet, I could assume that the circuit breaker would pop with no damage likely to the microwave oven.
With the power off, I was able to get the screw cap out of the socket with the pliers. Then I took the other bulb, intact but burned out, to Lowe’s — a five mile drive — checked the wattage (40), and bought a couple of replacements.
Got back home, installed the bulbs, and screwed the glass cover back in place. I went downstairs, reset the circuit breaker, went back upstairs, turned on the lights and — voila! — problem fixed. And after all of that I didn’t feel like writing about anything else.
Hi! Just thought of a hint I’ve read if you have a light bulb base stuck in a socket without the glass bulb and that is take a potato and it’s supposed to act as a filler and allow you to screw the base out. I’ve never tried it but they claim it works. As for labeling breakers, when our neighbor’s handyman friend put our service up to 200 (or is it 400?) amps, we had a little problem hearing each other when labeling and I swear one outlet is wired on 2 breakers, which would not surprise me since the electrician who wired this house must’ve been following a mouse thru a maze hallucination. A switch in an adjacent room controls the GFCI outlet in our laundry room…O-KAY! So anyway, one of these days I plan to redo the mapping/labeling of our breakers.
Hi Doug! Sounds like you had an excellent adventure, dude! We just had to replace the condenser motor in our 9-year-old Amana fridge (to be fair this was our only problem ever with it). 2 days later I was using our 9-year-old Kenmore microwave, (our parent’s housewarming gift to us), when it knocked the circuit breaker off. I went down to the garage and turned the breaker back on. The microwave had bit the dust and had no sign of life. Now to be fair to it, my sister and I love to nuke and used it alot, and recently noticed it was groaning and whining quietly when it would run. We murdered our microwave thru overuse! So we decided to spoil ourselves and got a 1500-watt Kenmore Microwave/Convection combo oven. Now I’m deciding what all I want to make in it. I love to cook and it shows, but I want to try new recipies with loads of veggies!
Well, if I’d really been smart, I’d have remembered the unit isn’t hard-wired, but has a plug in the cabinet above it. I could have simply unplugged it!
Most of the breakers on the electrical panel weren’t labeled when we bought the house. The panel was replaced a few years ago, and the electrician copied the labels and added ones for the work he did. But I just trace down the unlabeled ones when there’s a reason to know what they do — which, as I said, really wasn’t necessary last night!
As the wife of an electrical engineer, I’m very impressed, Dougie! But you STILL didn’t label your circuit breakers? Ours are all neatly labeled, but what else would you expect? Even I can re-set them if part of the house goes off and Tom’s not home. And the best part of being married to Tom? I understood everything in the above blog entry! Not only did I PLAY a German electrician in “Black Comedy,” high school, I MARRIED one! 😉
And light bulbs popping must have been catching, because our refrigerator bulb went out last night, and Tom had to go to Lowes for that, too! Say, speaking of electricity, has all of the juice been restored to the people affected by the ice storm?