… “let’s swap all the tires until we find the flat one.” With “tires” being an expression for whatever the not obvious cause was of a technical problem.
That’s the situation I’m in right now. The power company sent a notice yesterday, warning of possible outages, due to high wind. So, I wasn’t surprised this morning to see there had been two of them. But then I saw that the router was offline.
Power was off, not only in the office, but throughout the finished half of the basement. Checking the power panels in the unfinished half, it was easy to see that one of the circuit breakers had popped. Resetting it once, twice, three times, didn’t work. So, something must have shorted out due to a power surge.
The first thing to do was see if Internet service could be restored. With a very long extension cord, I connected the office gear to a test outlet next to the panel. Success! That put me back online. Would the circuit breaker still refuse to reset?
Yes, it did. So, where’s the problem? I disconnected everything else, and tested the breaker again. It held! Yay!
Now the question is, what shorted out? I’ll test each outlet and, assuming they’re all good, reconnect everything one by one, to see what pops the breaker. But not right now, because I have a dentist appointment to fix this damn broken tooth.
