What could cause two of my receptacles to stop working?

Question

Problem: No power in two receptacles.

Note: Both receptacles on same circuit.

What I have done:

Checked the 15 amps circuit breakers with a volt tester. Each breaker reads 125 volts.
Bought a Commercial Electric Outlet Tester (MS6861H) from Home Depot. Used the tester on both receptacles. Tester shows “correct” on both receptacles.
Checked GFCI. GFCI was O.K. I do not believe the two receptacles are connected to the GFCI. I have one GFCI and it is in the bathroom.
Checked all the receptacles in the home. These are the only receptacles not working.
Checked out a receptacle in another room. The examination showed that they used the push-ins to connect the wires to the receptacle.

Back story: I used one of the receptacles (nearest to the breaker box) to power my computer, printers, small TV, etc. I used three multi-outlets to connect all the stuff to the receptacle. If everything is on the watts would be around 400 watts. When I connected my 1500 watt portable electric heater to the system the power went out. I checked the breaker. It was not tripped. Next, I thought it may have been one of the multi-outlets. I checked the multi-outlets and they checked out O.K. I then checked the receptacle. I found out that that there was no power to the receptacle. I checked the receptacle downstream of the “computer” receptacle. It had no power to it.

Note: I have been connecting the portable heater to the “computer” receptacle for the last 6 years and up to now no problems.

Note: I have not looked at the “computer” receptacle. The reason is that it is a bit difficult to get to being that my computer table is in the way. I also wanted to know what could be the problem before working on the receptacle.

Questions:

Could the “computer” receptacle be bad even though the outlet tester reads “correct”.
Could I have a short in the circuit? If so, how can I check for this?
Could the breaker be bad even though it reads 125 volts?
Why no power????????

I would appreciate any help you can give me.

It is late as I write this so it may not be until tomorrow (4-01-2014) before I can respond.

sborsher · Answer

If you are using a simple outlet tester you could get a false positive. You should always use something that draws some decent current, like a lamp. Here is a related story. I unplug the electric clothes dry recently while cleaning the ducting. My wife plugged it back in afterward. From then on, although the drum turned fine, the heat was intermittent. After checking a couple other things, I pushed the plug all the way in. Apparently, the motor ran on 120V, where the heater coil ran on 220V. Needless to say, I checked the plug and outlet for burns.

Answered by sborsher on July 21, 2021

Murray1575 · Answer

You need to start from the circuit breaker and figure out which outlet is first in the line. Plug something into it and see if it works. Even if it does you need to pull each outlet out in order (after turning off the power of course) and most likely you will find a broken wire or bad connection at the last one that works. The other possibility is that there is a junction box somewhere that has a bad splice or broken wire. However with home wiring usually the receptacles are wired sequentially so that if you have a break in the middle of the chain everything after it will not work.

Answered by Murray1575 on July 21, 2021

What could cause two of my receptacles to stop working?

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