“How frustrating! We lost power last week and had to reset the breaker. Yesterday it happened, and now we’re dealing with it again. Help! Does my breaker need to be replaced?” 

This is a call we get on a regular basis. I’m sure you have either dealt with this yourself or have heard a friend complaining about this nuisance. If there’s any reassurance I can give you when it comes to this: it’s almost never a bad breaker.

When it comes to your breakers tripping, there are only a few reasons why this would be happening. But first, let’s talk about what breakers are and what makes them trip.

WHAT IS A BREAKER

A breaker is an overcurrent device placed at the source of a circuit with the intention of protecting the wire it feeds. There is a common misconception that breakers are there to protect the appliances and devices we plug in. The truth is that their designed purpose is to protect the actual wiring and the insulation that covers it. Does that in turn protect what is plugged into the receptacle, or the light at the end of the circuit? In a way it does, but that is an added bonus and not the intention. The wiring used in your home was intentionally made for a certain “maximum load.” The size of copper and the thickness of its insulation is made to be safely utilized from its minimum to its maximum. That is insured by the breaker it is supplied from.

Breakers are made up of magnets, springs and a bi-metal conductor. The bi-metal conductor is specifically made to bend and change shape at a certain temperature. That way when the wire heats up and reaches the potential limit, the metal bends causing the magnet and spring to snap into the open position, turning off the circuit. There are plenty of eye-opening videos available that show this in detail.

Now that we know what breakers are and the basics of how they work, let’s get to the meat of the subject. What are some causes of nuisance tripping? Here are the three main culprits.

1. OVERLOADED CIRCUIT

Although this sounds simple, there can be a bit of complexity to this one. Depending on the age of your home you could have several kinds of wiring. If your home was built between the 1950s - 1970s, you most likely have a mixture of knob and tube, and cloth wiring. What we know about these two kinds of original wiring is that they were both installed at the beginning of the modern home, as it pertains to electrical. This means there were not a lot of items that demanded electricity in the home. There was just a few lights and plugs, not all the appliances and comforts of today’s modern home. Due to the lack of need, the wires were rated for fifteen amps instead of today’s average of twenty.

That means if you reside in one of these homes, it’s all too common to overload such circuits as kitchen countertops, bedrooms, and the like. Today we run six to ten circuits in a new kitchen. Back then they only ran one. As you can imagine, trying to run a coffee pot, microwave, toaster, or any other appliances at the same time will immediately trip the breaker. These items average an amp draw of about eight to ten each, so the math tells us using any two will definitely draw more than fifteen amps.

The other repeat offender is the space heater. These little suckers draw anywhere from seven to thirteen amps all by themselves. My money says we have all tried to use several at one time before and ran into this problem.

2. GROUND FAULTS

Another issue we find when tracing down tripped breakers is ground faults. Older homes tend to have metal electrical boxes, housing switches, and receptacles. Its not at all uncommon to find one of the screw contacts in touch with the metal box, or ground wire. This will cause an immediate ground fault and quickly snap open the breaker.

There is also the issue of exterior wiring. It’s reasonable to find out the cause of the breaker that keeps tripping only at night. Maybe it’s because there is an issue with a light that’s on a photo eye, so it only activates at night. Or sometimes it’s a sprinkler system that has a ground issue that activates via timer. We have fun getting to play detective, but we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t enjoy it!

3. DIRECT SHORT

A direct short is when we find the hot and neutral coming into contact with each other. This could be a loose wire nut allowing a wire to slip out, or perhaps the insulation has been rubbed off, or a rodent has chewed on the wiring. We also find builder grade switches and plugs where the back stabbed wire has worked is way out and crossed over to the opposite side. In any case, a direct short will cause the breaker to trip instantaneously.

BAD BREAKERS

When we field calls about this particular issue, here’s what we tend to hear. “Yeah Brandon, we keep resetting this darn thing and it keeps tripping. Must be a bad breaker.” From our experience, this is hardly ever the case. The breaker is tripping as is should and is actually doing its job. Let’s just always make that assumption, because 99% of the time that is the case. That said, we have found a bad breaker before, so it’s not impossible. It’s just very unlikely!