I have a high performance laptop for work and the travel charger is 90w. In the office the workstation larger brick that powers a docking station and the laptop is 130w. I've never seen the travel charger trip the breaker, but I'm certain I am consuming nowhere near 90w as that would require both charging a dead battery on rapid setting and having the processor maxed out with full brightness display.

Anyway, yes the tip about plugging in something with low load is good. I've had to do that on some flights where the outlet had no light, so I simply plugged in my power supply with it disconnected from the laptop and it went green. If you pull too much power the outlet will shut itself off and take a little bit to reset as mentioned.

However, I have yet to get a red outlet to switch to green by doing this. Apparently the red is some internal fault/trip indicator. I was on a flight where they had multiple red outlets and the captain cycled the seat power breaker and it all returned to green.