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catherinet11

GFCI wiring question

catherinet
10 years ago

I'll try not to confuse you too much.

We have service to our barn. From there, it goes to my chicken coop service.

There is an outside regular (covered) outlet. Inside there are lights and 3 GFCI outlets. Apparently, from what we saw today, the electricity comes in and one of the wires goes to the GFCI by the service box. Then a wire goes from that outlet to the outside outlet. Those 2 outlets are on one breaker. (The others are on 2 other breakers.)

Both the outside outlet and that inside GFCI outlet quit working. We assumed it was a bad GFCI, so we tried to replace it today.
It still doesn't work. I read online that a bad outlet downstream might cause the problem in the GFCI. So now we're thinking we should replace the outside one and then see if the inside GFCI works. Does that sound good?

At first we were thinking it might be a bad breaker.....but it never tripped. Hmmmm......should it have?

So......any suggestions as to how we might proceed? All the other outlets and lights are working.

It bothered me to think that the outside outlet wasn't a GFCI, but since its connected to the inside GFCI outlet.......it is protected, right?

Another question for you: When we removed the GFCI that we thought was broken, we discovered that it had the wires on different sides of the outlet than the new one. Might different outlet manufacturers place the line and load sides on different sides? That seems like something that would be consistent across the board.

Thanks for your help!

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