Flickering Lights

The lights in one area of my house (living room and entry hall) are having issues. They were off for an hour last night – all of the circuit breakers were in the full upright and locked position – then they came on for 10 minutes or so, and went back off. Then on again for a little while. Then off. Then I turned off all the switches and went to sleep. No electrical fires overnight, so I’m able to ask the resident electrical types “what might be the problem?”

Standard incandesencet or flourescent?

Standard incandescent lights. There are about four different fixtures, and one wall socket that are going on and off in concert (I presume they’re all on the same circuit, but no circuit breaker is tripping).

I would hazard a guess (based on experience) that there is a loose neutral connection in your breaker box.

Depending on how the wiring is done, it could be anywhere along the path of the circuit. If your handy with electrical work, you could start pulling them off and check for loose wires. Per Myglaren’s suggestion, start with the breaker box and check for loose wires on the hot or neutral size. It could even be a bad breaker. Assuming everything is good in there, it’s a matter of tracing the circuit and finding the problem.

PS You might want to keep the lights off until you find the source of the problem.

These can be absolute boogers to hunt down. The fix is simple, but first you have to find the bad connection.

You could be having a bad switch, a bad connection at a wirenut, a bad (and it’s also a code violation now) “wire-through” at a receptacle, a bad breaker, or even a broken wire.

Broken wires, at least, tend to stay broken, so the chances that a wire broke or got chewed through are pretty slim.

Bad wire-throughs are quite common - common enough that the code was updated to forbid them. This is when you’ve got a wire supplying power coming to one set of screws (or worse, the “back-stab” holes) on the outlet, and the circuit continues along, connected to the other set of screws. The current way is to put all the hots and all the neutrals under wirenuts with pigtails to the outlet.

Bad connections at wirenuts are also pretty common - usually one of the wires was just barely connected from Day One, and it eventually comes loose.

Breakers can go bad in three places - internally, the screw terminal the wire connects to, and the conection it makes to the panel bus under the breaker. Of these, only a loose screw terminal is fixable - the other problems require replacing the breaker, and if the bus got burned from a prolonged bad connection, you may need to relocate the breaker to an empty spot in the panel and buy a filler plate to cover the hole where the old breaker was.

What else is on the circuit? If everything is cutting in and out, start looking at the breaker and go out from there. If it’s just a few things, then the breaker’s OK, and you’ll need to trace the wiring from the affected things back towards the breaker. The pain comes in figuring out where the wires go - if you’re lucky, the switches that control these lights are all in the same box on the wall, and you’ll find your problem there. If not, well, you need to develop X-ray vision to suss out where the wires go inside the walls.

I’m pretty sure its everything on the circuit, so I’ll take a look at the breaker. Thanks!

We had a similar problem in our condo a few years ago. One of the breakers was burning out. Eventually we had to replace it and the bus bar that it connected to.

Power outages are often intermittent. A tree limb will hit a wire and it will fluctuate enough to trip the power company circuit breakers, that reset only to be jarred again later.

You may have an arcing fault in the branch wiring of your dwelling. The NEC requires arc fault detecting breakers in the bedroom circuits of 1 and 2 family dwellings presently, with planned expansion to the entire dwelling in 2008.

Yes, but that would affect all the electricity in the house, not just a single circuit.