GFCI Reset

A couple days before Christmas I was sitting on the couch one evening when I heard a loud *POP* come from the foyer near the front door. I got up and looked around but couldn’t find anything that caused it and chalked it up to the cats being dumb. About an hour later I looked outside and realized that the pole light was out along with half the Christmas lights.

As I looked around outside I couldn’t figure out why everything was out. The lights were plugged in but that didn’t explain why the pole light was out when I had just replaced the bulbs a few months ago. Then it dawned on me to check the GFCI outlet inside the house. Sure enough it had popped. Pushing in the top button to reset it fixed the problem and I didn't have any more issues with it. Central Virginia has received a lot of rain lately and I’m guessing water got into one of the light strands and caused a short which in turn tripped the GFCI.

At least on ours if it's tripped the top button will be out slightly and a red light will appear on the left side. Pushing the top button will reset it.

We didn’t have these at our old house but we’ve got them everywhere water might come into contact with a power source here but they’re not on every outlet. (Bathrooms, kitchen, and garage.) In the case of the one for the power outlet on the outside front of the house the GFCI reset button is on the outlet in the foyer by the front door. In the case of one of my neighbors that had the same issue on the same night they found theirs in the garage.

So if you experience a partial loss of power check the outlet first. It might just be as simple as pushing in the button to reset it. In our case the cause seemed to be fairly straightforward and we didn't have any further issues with it. If it continues to trip however it might be wise to consult an electrician to determine the cause and fix it.

Christmas Lights Aerial View

Thanks to one of my neighbors that has a drone I now know what my house looks like from above.

Christmas Lights II

This past weekend I finished putting up lights on the house. While I had grander plans for expanding the display this year I didn’t quite get there. The 22 foot telescoping ladder I bought earlier in the year feels a little flimsy when fully extended so I wasn’t able to reach the roofline of the house like I had originally planned. I did however add lights to the top of the garage (thanks to the wife for crawling out the window to do this), to the tree in the middle of the front yard, and in and around the bushes.

(For comparison to last year’s display see this entry from November 2014.)

More IKEA Finds

As I’ve mentioned in previous entries Jenny and I love IKEA. We took a trip up there a few weeks ago mainly for a new dining table but always end up coming home with a few other things as well.

The main thing we went up there for was a new dining room table. We’ve had a smaller four seat one for years that was the biggest we could fit in the dining room of our old house. Now that we’ve got more space and with Thanksgiving and having both sides of the family over on different days we finally got a larger one. It also helped that it happened to be on sale in November for a hundred dollars less than usual. While it seats up to ten we only bought six chairs for the moment but may get two more eventually.

Along with the table we also wanted a chair for the corner of the morning room. We had picked up a simple couch last year but it took up more space and never got used much. So we replaced it with this chair which was the perfect fit for the corner.

I also picked up two cheap, useful tech items.

Above is how the underside of the desk (also from IKEA) in my home office has looked up until now, a tangled mess of cords. Thanks to this nifty little add on, the Signum cable management bracket, however it’s now completely cleaned up as seen below.

I also found this cheap little stand for all of two dollars. Normally on my desk my 13” Retina MacBook Pro perfectly is docked with an older 24” Apple Cinema Display running at 1920 x 1200. While this is usually enough screen space ocassionally I want to run dual display but I’ve always found it annoying to cope with the lower height of the laptop’s screen when it’s sitting flat on the desk. While the stand is designed for tablets it fits my Mac perfectly and gives it just enough height to make it useful.