About two months ago, I purchased an Igloo cube freezer for my basement. I plugged it into a standard 120V grounded outlet and it turned on and ran apparently normally for a three weeks before I found that the freezer had turned off and all of the food had spoiled.
I quickly realized that there was no power to the outlet. Upon inspecting my circuit breaker panel, there were no tripped breakers. I eventually got around to cutting power to the whole house - I wasn't sure what individual breaker the outlet was on - and I replaced the outlet. I noticed that the old outlet was a little beat up, with the plastic around the ground broken off. I figured that the outlet was old or had become defective over time.
Well, the freezer ran fine for about a week, and now the new outlet is dead. No response from anything else plugged into the outlet and again no individual circuit breakers are tripped. I'm at a loss as to why this has occurred. I will likely kill the power to the house again and pull the outlet, however I'm not sure what else I can do to troubleshoot. (I have a multimeter, and can try that tonight. When troubleshooting it before, I couldn't find it and plugged in an extension cord work light to test, with no result.)