I have been enjoying my home theater for almost 9 years and it has had almost no electrical issues in that time. My theater is in a general purpose 18x15 that I did not make electrical modifications to when I bought the house. It has three circuits in the room (two control outlets on either wall and another is used for light switches). I have been using a single outlet for all the components in my rack and it has never been a problem.

Last night was hot and I had the A/C running while I watched a movie. After about one hour I heard a "click" and all the components in my rack went off. The projector and subwoofer (powered on the other wall) were unaffected. I checked another outlet on that wall and it was dead too. I assumed that something had caused a circuit breaker to trigger and I went outside to take a look. Unfortunately all the circuit breakers are in the "on" position and I decided not to play around with all the unlabeled ones (about 7 out of 20) to see what I could do. This morning I took one more look and then ran an extension cord across the theater room to power my component rack. That worked fine for three hours while I finished off the movie I was watching last night and another movie.

Is there anything else I can to troubleshoot this problem further or should I simply call an electrician?

John

Sounds like there may be a GFCI on the circuit somewhere.

Cheers,
Mark

Like Mark said - check to see if there's a GFCI somewhere on the chain. If there isn't I'd check every outlet on that circuit. If they were wired correctly the power goes from one to the next. Somewhere in that series you could have a problem.

My circuit breakers sometimes still appear to be in the "on" position even after they have tripped. You might try switching the breaker to the affected equipment off and back on again and see if that helps.

Same with mine. Mine stay in the on position (or slightly shifted towards off). Mine have an orange area that appears behind a clear plastic panel in the middle of the breaker.

One suggestion: when you do figure out which breaker it is, mark it with a sharpie.

This may sound too basic put it you are using a power strip for that rack it might trip. I have a power strip in my workshop that trips before the GFI outlet and before the circuit breaker. I never even knew it had that feature until one day I overloaded the circuit and it tripped. After a few minutes of W..T..F...? and checking the Outlet and the Breaker I glanced at the strip and noticed the switch had popped to the off position.

The house is almost twenty years old and I am only the second owner. The outlets look very generic and I dont see anything that looks unusual in the breaker box. I guess I need to start testing the circuit breakers.

thanks for the suggestions,

John

assuming all else is fine (no gfci, breaker has been cycled, no powerstrip/conditioners) then i would put good money on betting that your outlets (somewhere in that chain) are "backstabbed."

you've been pulling some amps through there and its likely the back-stabs got weak over time and had a little arcing, that has now carboned up the contacts (and that snap you heard was the arcing).

Not unusual at all with backstabs, which is why they are generally frowned upon....pull all the outlets and check (do every one from the box to the equipment, it could be anywhere)......

Hmmm. I wonder if I may be headed for the same future as the OP. All the outlets in my house are back stabbed. When I turn a TV on off of one circuit, the lights will slightly dim for a split second on another circuit.

Stick your nose near all the outlets on the circuit. When I had a back stabbed connection go bad if your nose was within a foot of the outlet you could tell something was wrong. When I pulled the outlet the back looked like a charcoal briquette.