A few weeks back, during a storm, we lost power for about five minutes. When it came back up, not everything returned to normal. The garage door wouldn't open and the outlets in both downstairs bathrooms also were dead. If we'd looked a little farther, we'd have discovered the outlet in the powder room didn't work either, but only guests use it, so we didn't notice or check.
I immediately went to the circuit breaker box in the garage and reset the breakers for those places. Repeatedly. But the garage door and outlets remained dead. My dad called the electrician, but Georgia had just gone on lockdown and they couldn't come out. Either they weren't essential or our problem didn't qualify as essential--I'm not sure which one it was--but we had to live without a garage door opener.
That was the kicker. The outlets in the bathrooms? We could get by without them, but no garage door opener???
Every time we had to put the trash and recycling out, every time we had to bring the can and box back in, every time I had to go to the grocery store it meant manually lifting the door. Closing it was easy--gravity was on my side--but opening it required muscles. I've only been using two-pound weights since my gym closed! The door weighs more than four pounds. :-)
After about two weeks, I was so tired of this. I decided to search online and see if there was some other way to reset the circuit breakers. What I discovered was that the GFCI outlets had one button on the circuit. (Not to be confused with the circuit breaker. No one told me this!) I had to find the button--and it could be anywhere--and press it.
I found the one for the garage door easily. One down!
Finding the button for the bathrooms proved more challenging. No reset buttons on any outlets in either bathroom. No reset buttons on the kitchen GFCI plugs. I was about to go upstairs and look when I thought of the powder room. There it was! I pressed that button and the bathroom plugs came back to life!
Now if I'd only been as successful fixing the leak inside my refrigerator.
