I may have found the problem....

August 5

Our property has a lot (I mean a LOT) of outdoor wiring/circuits. the folks who built the place has a real affinity for landscaping and outdoor lighting. Anyway, one of the circuits quit working earlier this year, it had an area light as well as several outlets on it...one that I used for the garden fence charger to keep coons out of the corn. I needed to get that fixed soin tracing what the problem was I found one well hidden outlet had a box that was black as anything you could imagine (duplex from it in the pic). I wound up replacing the entire assembly, with out replacing the duplex, I just wired nutted the load/line wires since this outlet wasn't used for anything and put a blank cover on the new box. Interestingly, when i opened that box up, water came pouring out, I guessing that was part of the reason it was in bad shape. Went down to check the outlet i did use and it still didn't work. So then i checked the (indoor) GFCI it was on. turned out it had failed as well, the test button didn't trip it. So i replaced it. Joy, my circuit worked...until I plugged something into the upper outlet on the duplex, that tripped the GFCI. But the lower outlet worked, so for now I'm just using it. I'll replace it later. Another thing I ran into was that box was full of ants and they had eaten most of the sealing gasket up. But for the moment, i have power for the fence charger.