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I purchased a electronic cauterization device from China to burn some skin tags. The device's power adapter says 100-240v, so I assumed it's ok to use it in America.

I plugged it into my kitchen outlet, and turned it on, it was turned on briefly, then the outlet just lost power. Then I tried another outlet in the kitchen, same thing happened. I finally wised up and used a surge protector strip, and tried with another working outlet, the device finally was working properly without killing my outlets.

But Now I have two kitchen outlets that doesn't have any power, the rest of the outlets in the kitchen that I didn't plug in the device into still works fine. I checked the breakers and turned them off and on, it didn't help. I test/reset all the GFCI in my house and that didn't help too. Have anyone experienced this before and what could I do to fix this? Thanks

adapter device

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  • what kind of outlets? – jsotola Mar 30 '18 at 1:13
  • standard outlet with 20A breaker – KoKo Mar 30 '18 at 1:42
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    I suspect the non-listed foreign device of dubious quality is a red herring and might be a more typical problem in homegrown wiring. Failed backstab, that kind of thing. – Harper - Reinstate Monica Mar 30 '18 at 4:16
  • i agree with @Harper, since the plug is not a smart plug .... have you ever plugged anything into the plug before now? – jsotola Mar 30 '18 at 5:35
  • GFCI elsewhere on the circuit? – Tyson Mar 30 '18 at 12:34
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I would turn your breakers off to those outlets and remove the outlets, I believe you will find a bad connection in each outlet probably a back stab. But could be a loose wire nut or broken wire. When this usually happens it is with a heavily loaded circuit , but your 120v load is only about .2 amps. With this device being a 2 wire a surge type power strip really won't make any difference. To be able to use a wide voltage input with a specific output it is probably a switching power supply that had some kind of fault that after the second attempt cleared an internal short (I would not use this adapter for risk of fire knowing this). Power strips that have surge supressors work by a device called a metal oxide varistor, these devices dump excessive voltage levels or spikes on the power line to ground. So as I said I would toss this adapter because there is possibly some loose solder floating around or some copper traces from the printed circuit that caused the original problem to your home wiring.

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