I am looking for a reasonably priced electrician or someone that has the tool to check electric current. About a year or so ago I had the 'harnett johnston lee community action' winterize my home. Well after blowing insulation into my attic one of my outside lights and doorbell stopped working. I did change out the switch but still the light doesn't come on. Or at least I though. My neighbor usually tells me when she sees it come on. She said the light was flickering then went off then came back on for a bit during the rain. Thanks in advance
A lot of older homes had the transformer for the door bell mounted on a junction box from which it was fed the AC current (door bells work on lower voltage DC current) which were exposed in the attic so they could be replaced as needed. Transformers can fail when they are overheated, which would be more easily done if they were surrounded by insulation holding in the heat they were generating. That does not solve your problem, but it might allow you to save some money if there is a way to check to find that transformer using someone paid less than electrician wages since it is going to involve looking through layers of insulation. If the electrician has a set minimum amount of time for a call it might not save you anything though.
Wayne, I know I have seen those transformers before. They are about the size of my fist. I am not sure I have one of them. I can not remember where I had seen it. The house was built in 1995. I know electricity is getting to both the front and back door bells because I can see the light on in both of them. Does that matter?
If the buttons are lighted they are, as you said, getting the low voltage current. Where is the bell itself? If neither button works and both are lighted, the probable cause is the connections to the bell or more likely the bell itself. The "ding-dong" type bell has a coil that causes a rod to go up and down to hit two different bars. The front button causes both to be struck giving two tones while the back gives just one. That coil could have failed, which is not uncommon given the age, or the wires connected to the bell may have been pulled by the weight of the insulation and separated. If that happened it would be most probable near the bell since both are affected. A simple check would be to check the connections to the bell itself and then, if necessary, replace the bell to see if that fixes the problem. Of course, it still leaves another problem with the light, which seems to work intermittently at best to your knowledge. Is it a flood type light with a dusk/dawn and/or motion sensor or is it a wall/ceiling fixture with just a switch to operate?
Wayne. Sorry it took so long to reply back. I got distracted by other things. The door bell itself is in my hallway near where the opening for the attic is. I replaced the doorbell about 10 years ago myself and it worked fine up till the attic got blown with insulation. That is about the same time both the door bell stopped working and the one outside light stopped working. The other outside light (on the opposite corner) still works flawlessly
You have been to my house. You know where the outside floodlights in the front of my house facing my neighbors house. It's those lights and the door bell in the hallway. The floodlights on the opposite corner (facing the back deck and driveway) work fine. As does outside light by the back door and the outside light by the front door both work fine.
