electrical mystery

[johncomic]

Okay, so something weird happened at my place recently. In our bedroom there is a little lamp sitting on the night-table. It plugs into a wall outlet that is controlled by a switch near the door -- so you can flick the light off and on without needing to cross the room in the dark and go to the night-table, y'follow?

So the other night Sharon sez, “The light on the night-table is burnt out”... which struck me as odd, cuz the bulb is fluorescent [saves energy and lasts a long time] and it's pretty new. It definitely wasn't lighting up, but I checked the bulb and it didn't look burnt. Put in a new bulb: still didn't light. Moved the lamp into another room and plugged it in there: it lit. Put the old bulb back in: it still lit.

So the problem isn't the bulb, or the lamp: it's the circuit. I couldn't figure why an electrical circuit that was working fine the day before would suddenly die. I mean, the wiring -- the whole house -- is only two years old. I was mystipuzzled.

After a few hours it finally somehow occurred to me to check the circuit breakers in the basement... and sure enough, one lone breaker was thrown out of position. I clicked it back into line, went upstairs, and lo and behold now the night-table lamp works. Mystery sorta-solved.

My questions is: why did that breaker get tripped? No one here touched it. My understanding is that a circuit breaker will flip off if it gets overloaded... but as far as I can see, the only thing controlled by that breaker is the wall switch that connects to that one outlet where the lamp is. I don't see how one little lamp can suddenly overload a circuit, especially when that same lamp runs on that same circuit just fine every day except that one time. So what gives?

Comments

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, and that matches up with my uninformed gut feeling about such things too! In this particular case, I put it back on once and it stayed on and it's been fine ever since, so like you said guess that's OK!