"Ground fault interrupters (GFIs) are designed to protect from electrical shock by interrupting a household circuit when there is a difference in the currents in the "hot" and neutral wires."

They usually take the form of little buttons on your electrical outlets in the bathroom in case electricity and water get too friendly.



The outlet in my bathroom wasn't working when we got back from an overnight trip, so Mr. Troutbend undertook to deal with it. He discovered the outlet in the downstairs bathroom was also not working. Although this house was built in 1994 we don't have GFIs in the bathrooms, probably because the building code at that time didn't require them. I am fairly certain it was code in Colorado at least as far back as the early 1980s. But this is not there or anywhere else.

Come to find out we do have a GFI that works for the whole house. It is part of an innocuous-looking outlet on the garage wall nowhere near the breaker box.

Mr. Troutbend discovered it hidden by an old kitchen cabinet in the garage when he was rearranging things out there. So today when he was called upon to reset it, he called me out there to show me where it was. I would not have been able to figure this out for myself because I would have been looking for red and black buttons for the Test and Reset functions, and would not think that some random outlet in the garage had power over all the bathroom outlets.

I said "Put a sign on it so I don't forget" and later that's what I did.

Are you wondering what caused it to flip? Apparently a night light bulb in the upstairs bathroom burned out, maybe with a spark. But it could be something else. Since there is only the one GFI for the whole house, locating the problem could be a challenge. So we are choosing to think it was that night light.