If your breaker trips, go to your electrical panel and open the front cover. There should be two columns of circuit breakers and, hopefully, nice labels indicating what circuits each one controls.

A 10-A thermal circuit breaker will easily accommodate a temporary surge of 14 A. Another common mistake is selecting the wrong circuit-breaker technology for an application.

But how much is a new circuit breaker going to cost you? A new installation in general can run anywhere from $100 up to $4,000, depending on the scale of the job. This doesn't exactly narrow it ...