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Which country? In the U.S., GFCIs only need to be installed in specific locations, which is good. I do not want my refrigerator or computer on a GFCI. In the U
by anikom15 4y ago
Which country? In the U.S., GFCIs only need to be installed in specific locations, which is good. I do not want my refrigerator or computer on a GFCI.
In the U.K., you just can’t have plugs in bathrooms (aside from the shaver plug), which is probably more sensible.
- londons_explore 4y agoThey only need to be installed in specific places... But they ought to be installed for the whole house. You do want your refrigerator on one. What when your mom is putting a metal saucepan into the fridge of leftovers, knocks and smashes the lamp inside, and the AC lamp power supply kills her though the metal saucepan? What when a baby puts a fork into an electrical outlet in the living room? What when floodwater comes in and kills everyone on the ground floor of your house while you are frantically wading in the water trying to move furniture upstairs? There are plenty of times you want a whole house GFCI.
- anikom15 4y agoMy mom doesn’t live with me (the bulb inside the fridge is LED anyway), I don’t have a baby (babies don’t carry metal forks), and I live on the second floor (but the power would be out long before the first floor floods). I don’t want whole house GFCI.
- abakker 4y agoI agree that over-zealous GFCI is annoying. BUT, as a new parent, I can assure you that babies will manifest dangerous objects and do dangerous things.
- dionidium 4y ago> I don’t have a baby (babies don’t carry metal forks) Your second claim could only be made by somebody for whom the first statement is true.
- bityard 4y agoLet know when GFCIs and AFCIs are robust enough against spurious tripping and I will readily install them everywhere. GFCIs are notorious for tripping on certain appliances like refrigerators and freezers, and can trip due to RFI from other devices in the house. AFCIs do not like anything with a brushed motor, especially power tools and sufficiently large vacuums. I have personally experienced all of these just in the last couple years.
- londons_explore 4y agoEuropean GFCI's are 30mA, and don't false trip. US GFCI's are 5mA, and frequenty false trip. lots of info here[1] TL;DR: The US regulations prevent small electrical faults into things like swimming pools from causing people to drown. The european regulations will stop you getting killed by electricity directly, but won't stop you drowning if you happen to be in a pool while touching some wiring. [1]: https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/218700/why-are-usa-canada-using-individual-gfci-circuit-breakers https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/218700/why-are-usa-c...
- Freak_NL 4y agoThis thread is really baffling to this Dutchman. All houses have a house-wide residual-current device here; it is not a topic for debate at all. And indeed, these don't false trip. US electrical wiring always weirds me out. Cables run through walls without pulling them through hard plastic conduits and sockets that look like something designed seventy years ago. It's probably a matter of perspective, but it seems like such a completely different approach.
- idiotsecant 4y agoThose hard plastic conduit are not providing much in the way of mechanical protection. wires in studs works pretty well, really. Whole-house GFCI is a good thing, but we should be careful to consider what you get for that. In order for GFCIs to coordinate the whole-house device is going to trip at a relatively high current. This is definitely on the edge of what will disrupt the heart of a person. American GFCIs are often at the device level on the outlet, so they are more error prone in terms of spurious trips but they are also much, much safer because they are substantially more sensitive.
- sokoloff 4y agoI have twice lost a fridge full of food due to spurious GFCI trips, once when I was a recent graduate and it was a painful experience financially. I now make sure my fridge/freezer is NOT on a GFCI. I'll take my chances of getting a 120VAC shock from my fridge [which is attention-getting, but very unlikely to be injurious].
- Scoundreller 4y agoAlso funny how fridges are required to have their own circuit, but newer fridges are increasingly vfd/inverter drive, and don’t have surge power draws anymore. They use a few hundred watts continuously and that’s it. I’d be more quickly to find out my fridge died if the lights in the kitchen stopped working. Not sure why fridges don’t just have a battery-powered alarm that goes off when the temperature gets too high for too long.
- brianwawok 4y agoI have a lot of power surges in my area. Recently, the old power shut off, then power back on in 3 seconds thing happened - and the surge was enough to pop my fridge motors and cause a $900 repair. I upgraded them to not only a surge protector, but this little neat shut off device. It's a device that goes between the fridge and the wall outlet, and basically if for any reason this device loses power - it shuts off the power to the powered device for a minimum of 3 minutes. This way the power can blink 100 times in 3 minutes, and my fridge won't have to eat 100 surges. It will just happily sit off for 3 minutes, and then come back on.
- armen52 4y agoCan you share what device you're using for the 3-minute shut-off and recovery?
- brianwawok 4y agoI have this guy https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D7KP8S4 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D7KP8S4 But am not partial to this brand or anything. But it seems to do what it says it will do.
- nsxwolf 4y agoA whole house GFCI would ruin all the food in my refrigerator several times a year.
- quickthrowman 4y ago> You do want your refrigerator on one. What when your mom is putting a metal saucepan into the fridge of leftovers, knocks and smashes the lamp inside, and the AC lamp power supply kills her though the metal saucepan? Your fridge scenario is.. fantasy. What is the path to ground? There isn’t one.. you can hold onto a live phase conductor all day and not get shocked if the circuit isn’t completed. Refrigerator only needs a GFI if it is within a certain distance of a sink. > What when a baby puts a fork into an electrical outlet in the living room? The NEC requires tamper-resistant receptacles in all dwelling units. Also re: flooding and GFIs, all basement receptacles need GFI protection due to flood risk.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoYes, the pan would complete the circuit. Not to mention the whole scenario being extremely unlikely.
- jly 4y ago> Refrigerator only needs a GFI if it is within a certain distance of a sink. Not anymore. NEC 2023 requires GFCI for every 120 or 240V outlets in the kitchen, regardless of their location or proximity to the sink. This was a big change.
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- quickthrowman 4y agoOh I wasn’t aware of that change, my state hasn’t adopted NEC 2023 yet and I haven’t received my NEC 2023 code book from my employer yet. It’s a negligible cost change for new construction, AFCI breakers and AFCI/GFCI breakers are the same price, at least for Square D 120v 15A 1P
- tibbon 4y agoYou need a AFCI in most places now. In the 2020 edition of the NEC®, Section 210.12 requires that for dwelling units, all 120-volt, single-phase, 15- and 20-ampere branch circuits supplying outlets or devices installed in dwelling unit kitchens, family rooms, dining rooms, living rooms, parlors, libraries, dens, bedrooms, sunrooms, recreation rooms, closets, hallways, laundry areas, or similar rooms or areas shall be protected by AFCIs. The latest National Electrical Code requires both AFCI and GFCI protection only in kitchens and laundry rooms, but if you're already doing AFCI, why not do it all everywhere as it is clearly to be required at some point Main downside is they are expensive. I've recently installed a new 24-slot subpanel and I'm using them everywhere required. At $50 a pop, that's a quick $1200.
- londons_explore 4y agoSome countries you have a single one for the whole building, rather than one per circuit. That dramatically lowers the cost. The only real downside is that if you accidentally put your finger in the toaster, rather than just the power to your kitchen cutting off, the power to the whole house cuts off. I think thats a fine tradeoff to save $1200.
- chaosite 4y agoWell, if the power shuts off and that saves me from electrocuting myself, I couldn't care less how much of the rest of the house lost power. The annoying part is when I plug in some faulty device that is not immediately dangerous and that shuts down power to the whole house.
- nemo44x 4y agoIt's funny, In was doing a huge renovation once and during the work my refrigerator had to be plugged into another outlet that happened to be GFCI. We had to be very mindful about making sure power was flowing. Sometimes, certain combinations of things being on at the same time would trip it. It was an old house with only 100A service and who knows what with the wiring.
- iso1631 4y agoMy understanding is a GFCI is an American term for an RCD or an RCBO? My (UK) fridge is on a standard 30A breaker which itself comes off a single 80A/30mA RCD which was presumably part of the regs at one point. It's never tripped. All the RCBOs I've seen are 30mA too. (I have some sockets on a 10A breaker downstream of this which have tripped - the house needs a total rewire, total bunch of bodge jobs from the previous owner, including a 13A socket in the bathroom) Does a GFCI typically have a lower trip that 30mA?
- londons_explore 4y agoYes. USA GFCI's are like RCD's, but trip at 5mA. Thats why they false trip pretty often.
- traceroute66 4y ago> In the U.K., you just can’t have plugs in bathrooms (aside from the shaver plug), Disclaimer: I'm not an electrician My understanding is that is not entirely technically correct. You can have standard sockets in bathrooms in the UK. But, and it's a big BUT, 99.999% of bathrooms in the UK are not big enough to be able to place the socket 3m away from the relevant wet "zone" (shower and/or bath and/or sink, IIRC). However, IIRC, shaver sockets are OK, as are spurs. Irrespective of bathroom size.
- nixgeek 4y agoYou’re correct, bathrooms in UK are zoned and most houses aren’t big enough to meet the distance requirements from the “wet zones” to accommodate a regular socket/outlet. Shaver sockets are typically going to have ingress protection. https://www.tapwarehouse.com/blog/how-to-guides/understanding-ip-ratings-and-bathroom-zones https://www.tapwarehouse.com/blog/how-to-guides/understandin...
- CorrectHorseBat 4y ago> I do not want my refrigerator or computer on a GFCI Why not? Here in Belgium they are required everywhere and that works just fine.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoWhole-house GFCIs are far less sensitive than the GFCIs built right into the receptacle.
- CorrectHorseBat 4y agoThat does not explain why you wouldn't want a GFCI? It's not like you can't chain them.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoBecause they trip much more easily, and they are sinply not needed all the time. Plugging a motorized refrigerator full of perishable food to a GFCI receptacle is a bad idea. I used to work on residential construction jobsites and the only power on-site would be a pair of GFCI duplex receptacles in the basement beside the panel. Tripping the actual overload breaker was rare (and usually only happened when multiple people were running off a single extension cord), but the damn GFCI breakers on the receptacles themselves tripped all the time, particularly when the table saw was running at full tilt for 20 minutes straight. They're just too sensitive for certain applications. Now, you can buy combined overload/GFCI circuit breakers for in the panel, but they're ridiculously overpriced so no one uses them, and they're probably just as sensitive.
- anikom15 4y agoAmerica has 110 V which is more of a nuisance than a threat when it’s dry. Our GFCIs are specifically for wet applications (like bathrooms) and so are much more sensitive than European GFCIs.