Troubleshooting Techniques: Using the scientific method| Tech, No Babel

Transcript:As we’ve been troubleshooting, I realized there’s an overarching theme that I have left out. That is the scientific method. As it turns out, all these things, when we put them together, are really just applying the scientific method to your situation. Some of you might be dubious of the scientific method and there’s some, actually, some logical reasons for that. By logical, I don’t mean common sense. I mean actually logic, the study of logic. I was a philosophy major in college. When I say logic, I mean logic. We’ll talk about that on the future episode.
Right now, let’s talk about the scientific method and how you should use it to approach your troubleshooting. First off, you should start this whole process by asking question. We’ve talked about asking the right questions. Start by asking the question. In this case, you should be thinking, “What is the cause of this problem?” Not, “What is the problem?” That’s a little bit more basic. Absolutely, you need to know exactly what the problem is but you also need to know what the cause of the problem is so that you don’t replace a part that then could working again or that didn’t fix the problem to begin with.
Secondly, you need to create your hypothesis. In our case, this is what you think the problem is. Next, a prediction. If this is true, then what is also true? We need to formulate not only a prediction but if that prediction turns out to be true, what other evidence will bolster this as a possibility. Next, we need to test it to see if this aligns with reality. Then, analyze it to see if the hypothesis is correct if all the pieces fit together and that’s the solution. Finally, we need to repeat this because if that’s truly the problem, it should be repeatable. You’ve make sure your circumstances are identical by repeating over and over and over again. In some cases, that’s going to be pretty simple to do. In others, it’s going to be more hard but it is a valuable step.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. Imagine this as an example. We have a switcher that doesn’t work at all, video switcher. No lights, no nothing, no video coming out of it. It’s just only dead. The first question is why does this switcher not work at all? Hypothesis. The outlet, it’s plugged into isn’t working. Absolutely possible. The prediction. If the outlet isn’t working, plugging the switcher into another should cause the switcher to work. Likewise, plugging something else into the outlet should cause that something else not to work.
Now, we can test it. We can test it by plugging the switcher into another outlet and plugging a known working device. Let’s say, it’s a lamp that we unplugged. We see it light. We unplugged it and then we take it over to the outlet, plug it in there. We plugged the lamp. This is our analysis. We plugged the switcher into a new outlet. We plugged a lamp into a suspected bad outlet. If the outlet isn’t the cause of the failure, there are other possibilities as well. We’ll have to check those.
As we analyze this, we find out that it turns out the switcher starts working when you plug it into the other outlet. Most people stop there. You should not. Take the lamp or whatever you know works. Plug it in there into the suspected bad outlet and make sure it does not work, because sometimes, it will work. In that case, it’s not necessarily that the case that the outlet isn’t working. What are the possibilities in that case? Let’s say the lamp does work but the switch won’t. We could be having some electrical problem where depending on the lamp, if it’s incandescent lamp, maybe less power still causes it to light up and you just don’t know that it’s dimmer. That’s a possibility. It could be that there’s an intermittent short on the cord to the switcher. Just by moving it to the other outlet, you’ve caused the cable to flex a different way and it starts to work. That’s worth testing as well.
It’s always worth repeating this over and over again. If it’s the case, the lamp doesn’t work in the outlet and the switcher doesn’t work in the outlet and you plugged the switcher into the good outlet and it works and you plugged the lamp back into the good outlet and it works and you plugged the switcher back into the bad outlet and it doesn’t work and you plugged the lamp into the bad outlet and it doesn’t work, then, you can say, please say, “Okay, it’s the outlet.” If you get something that doesn’t fit, you have a variable that you need to eliminate somehow. If it’s possibly an intermittent short, maybe your switcher has one of those cords that you can swap out very easily. If it does, swap it out with a cord that you know works because it’s powering up a computer or something like that, you shake it, it doesn’t caused it to go on and off, you know, things like that, swap that out and see if that causes it to work.
If you think it might be that the outlet is still not sending enough power, you should be able to have a technician test, an electrician test that out or use a multimeter if you know what you’re doing because when we’re dealing with household current, this is a lot of power. I don’t want you touching this if you don’t know what you’re doing. Don’t just willy-nilly go to Harbor Freight, pick up a 99 cent multimeter and test it out and say, “Oh, I’m a genius.” No, you might kill yourself. Please don’t kill yourself. I’m not a fan of you killing yourself. If you don’t know what you’re doing with household electricity, then call someone else. In your church, you probably have someone that can do that in 5 minutes right after church, something pretty simple like that.
In that case, test, test, and retest. Find the core problem and address the core problem. Don’t go around the issue. Don’t think that you’ve got it solved when in fact, you don’t. It could be, as we say, if there was an intermittent short and you didn’t retest, the problem would show up later in another outlet. Then, you might think, “Well, this switcher makes outlets go bad,” or it could be intermittent short. That’s what I want you to do when you’re troubleshooting, is you use the scientific method to test, test, and retest your hypothesis so that you know for sure what the cause of the problem is. Even if it’s just getting it down to which piece of equipment has the problem, that’s better than going well at somewhere in this big system. I don’t know where it is. Getting it down to just one piece, you can address the one piece instead of sending it out for a week and they send it back and go, “Nope, it works perfectly fine.” You don’t want that. That’s why we troubleshoot.