In considering which jobs to tackle, you must first think in terms of SAFETY. Never make electrical repairs with your feet in water. Do not pick up any electrical appliance out of water while it is still plugged in. Generally it is best to avoid attempting to repair electrical systems that involve high voltage such as 230-volt power. An important principle to remember is: If something is part of a system, such as electrical or water, shut down the part you are working on or even turn off the whole system.

Electrical Repairs You Can Make

Did you know that you could easily fix about half of your electrical appliance problems? “Nearly half of all appliance problems involve a break in the electric cord” or a defective plug. Especially where the cord enters the appliance is it easily broken. How do you proceed if an appliance will not work? Remember the need to be careful when working with any electrical equipment.

Now, plug in something else there, say a lamp. Does it work? Then you know it is not a fuse or a defect in the wall outlet itself.

Next, plug in the appliance that will not work. Do you have it turned on? Does the plug of the appliance wiggle around or seem loose in the wall outlet? If so, pull it out and bend each of the metal prongs outward a little. This will make it fit tight. Or, depending on the type of plug, you may be able to slip the fiber or plastic insulator off the ends of the prongs and look inside the plug. There you may find that the wires coming into the plug need to be rehooked around the screws inside the plug and the screws tightened.

If the appliance still does not work, then it is time to unplug the appliance again and unscrew its casing or cover (sometimes hard to remove; the manufacturer’s booklet often helps). Now study where the cord attaches to the appliance. Have any of the cord wires become disconnected? If not, it is most likely that a wire or wires within the cord are broken. This is often true even if the outside covering of the cord does not show a break. Since electrical cord is so inexpensive, you may well feel at this point that it is worth while to put a new cord on. How is that done?

There are two (sometimes three) wires running through an electric cord. Using wire strippers, make some of each wire on the new cord bare (about a half inch). Connect these to the appliance where you took off the old ones. Normally this is done by wrapping the wire clockwise around the screw under a screwhead and then tightening the screw down. With a three-wire cord it is important to connect up the new one exactly as the old one was. Usually each wire has a different colored covering, as black, white and green. Just be sure to attach the new green wire, for example, to where the old green one was.

Then put the other end of the new cord through a plug, making the ends of the wires bare and attaching one to each of the terminals or screws inside the plug, as the old ones were attached.

When an electrical wall outlet will not work, though all the others do (thus indicating the problem is not a blown fuse or open circuit breaker), the problem could be in the wall outlet itself. What might you do then?

Remembering the safety rule of shutting down the system, go to the home’s power box and either pull out the fuse for that outlet or shut off all the power by throwing the main switch. Then remove the screw from the outlet cover and take the cover off. Inside there is a whole unit with wires attached. Make notes of what wire goes where and then disconnect the whole unit and buy another one just like it. Then carefully reconnect the wires to the same places on the new one as they were on the old. If it still does not work, it is time to get help from someone more experienced.

These same steps can be applied to fixing a light socket or a wall light switch. In fixing some things, however, it is not a matter of replacing, but restoring or adjusting.