I was helping a friend install wood floors in his 20 yr old house when his SWMBO said the washing machine was not working. We looked at it and determined that the machine worked fine when plugged in elsewhere but nothing worked on that wall socket. I checked it with a multimeter and the voltage was roughly 1.8V. Yes, I was using the multimeter correctly because I checked a different outlet and got 118V. I asked him to turn off the breaker and it went down to 0.5V.
Any ideas on what is wrong? I'm wondering if the circuit breaker is bad. The house has had a room added to it but the previous owner did not add any new electrical circuits, they just overloaded the circuits that were already installed. I've never seen this style of breakers, each breaker has 2 switches, almost like each one is 2 breakers or functions for 2 circuits. He mentioned that breakers are always tripping.
-- Thanks Steve. I did go ahead and replace the receptacle, I happened to have one handy and the first thing I thought of was a loose wire or burned out receptacle. Replacing the receptacle changed nothing.