I rewired an old house a few months ago. The owner has not moved in as of yet, since a lot of remodeling had to be done. I wired the dining room circuit on a AFCI. The breaker had been tripping when a wet vac was plugged into the circuit. I traced the problem to one outlet on a shallow wall on the back side of a fireplace. Every time I would disconnect the feed to that outlet, everything worked fine. I went up into the attic and cut the wire just before it went down into the wall to the outlet. I tried plugging something into the other outlets on the circuit then and everything was fine. I then proceeded to fish another wire down to the outlet, assuming that there was a "nick" in one of the wires. This was of course after I had checked the outlet itself. After I fished the new wire down to the outlet and hooked it up, IT STILL TRIPPED THE BREAKER!!. Since I had already spent around 3 hours checking the different outlets etc.... I proceeded to put a regular breaker on that circuit for now. The only thing I can figure is, that when I was pulling the new wire down the wall, it got scraped or something on the way down. It was a rough pull since it was right against the concrete on the back side of the fireplace. Only problem with that thought is, that I checked the wire I pulled out and didn't see any evident signs of anything wrong with it. Does anyone have another idea other than the thought that I'm crazy?? It had to work with a new wire, right??? Only thing I would know to do would be to pull another new wire down and hope it don't scrape the same thing the other two may have come in contact with. The wall was sheetrocked and paneling was put up on the lower half of the wall. Possibly a nail??
After going through with that, I just got my tools up and went home.... Thanks
