My sister owns a very old house
What happens is that at times the hole or most often part of her house doesn't work.. no hydro. I've checked her outlets for overloading breaker power etc checked the breakers for shut offs but nothing.. and sometimes two hours would go by and for no apparent reason everything comes on! This has been going on now for over one yr and I still can't find the reason for the lack of power and the sudden return of power. I thought it might be a short in the panel but everything seems to be fine... I don't understand much about the actual breakers themselves, now can they be the problem? Can age be what's causing this? How do I know if the breakers a too old and can't provide the proper juice anymore or do they work or not work anymore like a light bulb? I'm at a loose and not sure what to look for now. We also experience allot of power outage in our area. At times 5-6 times within 1 to 2 hours during rainy days or mostly in the winter; could this have caused some kind of damages to the main panel?

It just dawned on me today that the problem wasn't in the house at all. So I called our hydro company and explained the problem and they sent a guy. It just reminded me of our car troubles last yr.. It wasn't getting enough juice to run the car properly. The alternator was going so with this in mind I figured maybe the same was happening here. And was right; they checked all joints from the main line in and found that one of the connectors had broken so that when weather or temperature changes happened it shrank the metal to the point of not having a solid connection which meant that not enough power to run the house. So after the repairs where done even the lights where brighter and everything worked perfectly...