by Rick H. Blase

Created on: August 18, 2007

As an inexperienced home owner, you are pretty much relegated to four actions concerning your electrical panel. You can open the door, turn a switch off or on, and close the door. Anything else and you start increasing your risk of a lethal dose of electricity, especially if you haven't a clue as to what you are doing. So let's open the door and see what we have.

The first thing you will notice is that there are allot of thick looking switches that are sideways instead of up and down like a normal light switch. These switches are called circuit breakers. They get their name from the fact that if there is a short circuit or an overload condition, they will literally break the circuit. When a circuit breaker breaks a circuit it is said to have "tripped". You can quickly tell if a breaker has tripped by running your finger down the line of switches, if one isn't in line or has a spongy' feel to it when you push it; it is usually the tripped breaker. It is a good idea to figure out what tripped the breaker before turning it back on. Maybe you plugged a hair dryer, a portable heater, or some other high load appliance into an outlet. Unplug the device before turning the breaker back on. If you have no idea what caused the breaker to trip, you may want to seek professional help. The usual method to reset a breaker that is tripped is to first turn it off and then push it to the on position. If the breaker is warm which can happen as it approaches its rating, they are more likely to trip also. So if the breaker feels warm to the touch, you may have some luck by letting it cool off before turning it back on.

So what do these circuit breakers control? Typically there are listings posted inside the door with numbers that correspond to the "spaces" in the electrical panel. These "spaces" are all equal and are usually total an even number like 10, 12, 16, 24, etc. depending on how big your electrical panel is. A circuit breaker may take up one space, two spaces, and sometimes four spaces. But each space will be numbered and that number should have something written by it on the placard inside the door. For instance the space #8 could have something like "kitchen outlets, kitchen light". That tells you that the circuit breaker in space #8 controls the kitchen outlets and lights. The real question is, does it really? If your house has been recently remodeled or is older, those descriptions may not be accurate so never trust them. If you are working on electrical wiring in

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