Circuit breaker has inaccurate labels from previous owner.
by
Techymom
+3
Names written on the circuit breaker for parts of the house are illegible; some are repeated, some transposed. How do I re-label them without causing a problem needing an electrician I cannot afford?
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Hi Laguila2,
I'm not an electrician, but when we bought this house, the labels on our circuit breaker box were almost all wrong. What we did was go around our home and turn on every light. We also plugged in something to different outlets in every room. Once that was done, we shut all of the circuit breakers off. Then wee turned them on one at a time. My husband was in the basement handling the circuit breaker and the basement lights, I was upstairs handling the first & second floors. He would turn on one circuit breaker and I went around the house looking for lights, radios or other things we had plugged in to see what was working. Once I had that circuit breaker on paper, we turned that one off and did another one. We did that until they were all identified. We then made labels from address labels cut to size and a Sharpie. The thing to be careful about is that sometimes a room will be on more than one breaker. We found that to be true for our upstairs, where the front of the house was on one breaker and the back of the house (which had been remodeled) was on a different breaker. Wishing you the best.
Use an electric plug in radio loud volume and plug it in outlets. Turn breakers off until the music stops. Label the breaker. Move the radio around to other outlets in other rooms. For lights you will need someone in the room and someone to turn breakers off. Be aware that some breakers will feed more than one outlet or light. If you have AC then there should be a double breaker for that.
Turn on everything in those parts of the house. Then click off one breaker and walk around taking notes to what is on and what is off. Do that with each breaker in question.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-5-Electric-Load-Center-Circuit-Breaker-Panel-Board-Label-Sticker-42-slots/273078305292?hash=item3f94bc420c:g:svEAAOSwXsFajNHU
They also make just the labels for you to apply to the old paper list.
Get a second person to hit the breakers and see what turns off and relabel it. You may have to fix some clocks and such, but you shouldn't need an electrician to relabel them right.