Looking for a recommendation in the NE Spring/Oak Ridge/Woodlands area. Small service call. GFCI keeps tripping in my garage & is not able to reset for days. It is tied to our garage door opener unfortunately. Looking for an electrician to come out & repair. Thanks in advance.

Can't help with a recommendation, but I had the exact same problem a while back. Even had to temporarily use an extension cord to plug in my garage door opener to another outlet on a different circuit. Turned out there was an outdoor outlet on the GFCI circuit that was tripping. Despite being on a covered patio and having a plastic protective box, the outlet was tripping the GFCI every time it got wet. And I couldn't reset the GFCI until it dried out, which sometimes took a few days. Some caulk on the plastic box solved the problem and it hasn't tripped since. Might want to check all of your exterior outlets, especially if this happened yesterday when it rained.

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Can't help with a recommendation, but I had the exact same problem a while back. Even had to temporarily use an extension cord to plug in my garage door opener to another outlet on a different circuit. Turned out there was an outdoor outlet on the GFCI circuit that was tripping. Despite being on a covered patio and having a plastic protective box, the outlet was tripping the GFCI every time it got wet. And I couldn't reset the GFCI until it dried out, which sometimes took a few days. Some caulk on the plastic box solved the problem and it hasn't tripped since. Might want to check all of your exterior outlets, especially if this happened yesterday when it rained.

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Great idea on both accounts. My wife will love then extension cord look . I was thinking it was due to the humidity level in the garage & faulty wiring so I was bit baffled. Will check the outside outlet on the adjacent wall. There is an outdoor cover.

Sounds like the same situation as yours. I thought it was tied to possibe outages but only rain yesterday & it happened.

We found the nuisance outlet by spraying them all with the hose. The one that was tripping had water on the inside of the plastic box after being sprayed. It may not be on the same wall. Mine was literally on the other side of the house. There were a few other outlets on the curcuit, too. It definitely took some trial and error to hunt it down. The builder didn't exactly try very hard to make the circuit arrangement make any sense.

I had a really classy ladder/extension cord arrangement in my garage for a couple of weeks. It served its purpose

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We found the nuisance outlet by spraying them all with the hose.

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We found the nuisance outlet by spraying them all with the hose.

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See my note above. They were the outdoor outlets covered by the plastic boxes. Rain water was already getting in one of them (and it was on a covered patio). It's not like we blasted the outlets...it didn't take much of a spray at all to figure out which one was leaking. Not sure how else you're supposed to figure out that the box is allowing water in and causing the outlet to trip the GFCI unless you get it wet.

Just as an fyi electricity can travel through water so it will follow the stream back to the source. Similar to hairspray and a fire source.

I know...im MOSTLY messing with you. I read it and thought I HAD to use the gif.

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I know...im MOSTLY messing with you. I read it and thought I HAD to use the gif.

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Haha! I can take it...my extension cord/ladder set up clearly proves I am not an electrical engineer! But I agree...always be careful with electricity and water. We had the breakers off, and since the outlets we were checking were on the GFCI circuit that had tripped, they weren't working. But I can imagine some idiot blasting a live outlet with water while standing in the puddle that accumulates.

Extension cord draped across the garage to an outlet on a dedicated breaker. Working great.

Pouring this evening but will do a visual check on all outside outlets once it dries up.

If the eye ball test doesn't turn up anything...



If that doesn't work...

Philip Hensley, Hensley Electric in Spring. Great work and good pricing. You can google it

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Philip Hensley, Hensley Electric in Spring. Great work and good pricing. You can google it

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Thanks. Will save that info.