We recently bought a house and have since learned that the Kitchen, Living Room, Garage and our Bedroom along with half the dining room and the lights on the way down to the basement ALL run off of the same breaker. I do not know how to fix this or to tell what amp breakers to buy if I want to run the rooms on their own individual breakers. Is it ok to have this many rooms running off the same breaker?
We can't even run a space heater with anything but one room turned on or most of the outlets and lights throughout the house go off. I also had an outlet in our 2nd bedroom stop working completely after running a space heater off of it. Please tell me what I can do to fix these problems.
Most outlets in the house will have 2 cables going to them, in and out. find one in the center of the circuit and pull in a new cable from the breaker panel and wire nut it to the existing cable that is not hot with the power turned on. the exsisting wiring may be #14 so use a 15 amp breaker for each cicuit.
hopefully those of you that posted in response to this will read this again :) anyway... I wanted to clarify that my husbands line of work is very similar to that of an electrician but he is not a certified electrition... however i believe he is capable of doing pretty much anything he would need to do to update the house... my concern is that he wants to put all the rooms on their own individual 20amp breakers but i think the wiring in the house may be old enough that 20 amps is too much for each room he thinks it will be just fine and said he'd be happy to update the house for me if i wanted him too i'm just not sure how much it's going to cost and how quickly he'll get around to it... We can't take any legal action against the seller because it was a HUD home that we bought as-is... we did get an inspection done on it before we bought it and knew we had to replace the septic system and most of the plumbing and that has been done but the inspector didn't really say anything about the wiring in the house... as far as we could tell the wiring was just old... my husband commented that we'd need to do some updating just because of how old the wiring looked (old style feeds(is that the right term?)and such where you can see where the wires go into the house) but we had no idea that nearly all the rooms in the house were connected at the same breaker it is labeled as though they are all on their own but if one room goes out half the house is out. We have an 8month old son and i am getting ready to go back to college in the fall so money's a little tight and i'm worried that he'll just throw each room onto its own 20amp breaker until we have the money to literally rewire everything and replace every outlet and that 20amps may be a bit much for the wiring in this house.... did that make any sense?? anyway... thanks for the responses.... please help me put my mind at ease and help me to have any idea as to what i'm talking about before i try to question what he's doing since he works with stuff like this every day... Thank you! -Tawni-
Check with the electrical inspector. You may have some legal recourse to force the seller of the house to pay for bringing it up to code. Get a qualified electrician to sort out that mess, BEFORE the house burns down!
Even if it costs you $1000 to bring it up to code, that is probably less than the deductible on your fire insurance.
This is not a do it your self job. Hire an electrican. Have the job done correctly to the electrical code for your area. At the same time have your electrical service updated to at least 200 amps. Most codes today specify that bathrooms, kitchens and outdoor receptacles be ground faulted to prevent electrical shock. Have the other rooms on a separate circuit.The electrican can explain what is best for your home. PLAY IT SAFE.
I can't tell you how to fix it, but it's definitely not good. In particular, new codes require kitchens to be separate from other parts of the house. Ours was partially fixed by an electrician. We had the kitchen separated from the rest of the house. If we'd known at the time, we'd have separated a few others rooms as well, especially those that have the computer and the TV. (I'd put the rooms on multiple breakers.)
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