I need one for my stick welder. I wont weld in the garage because I started a fire in there once (I was able to make it out). So, I weld outside, in front of the garage door. This is fine, except when the ground is damp. I have gotten zapped far too many times when changing the welding rods.
Why not just have one huge GFI for the entire electric grid. Then just hire a guy to sit there all day and reset it every 10 seconds. But, hey, look at the bright side of this. You would not need a flasher on your christmas lights...... :)
You don't need to shut down the whole house for one fault.
In the US we have individual GFCI breakers, or outlets, so you can protect any area without killing everything in the house. I prefer our method. Especially when I am working out in my shop after dark. I have trouble walking, and I would have to wait till daylight peeked into the air vents along the roof so i could see well enough to make my way out of a metal building with no windows.
Do you like to eat spoiled food? What happens if you are gone for a couple days and that GFI trips? with no one home to notice, you have a big mess to clean up, not to mention the cost of replacing all the food.
Peter Bennett wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.supernews.com:
Thank you...
Wayne
"Louis Bybee" wrote in news:QO9ub.28242$Dw6.139682@attbi_s02:
Thank you...
Wayne
I'd guess they did a study and concluded that more people would die of food poisoning than would be saved from electrocution.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
The TEST button puts the R between Line Black and Load White, or the inverse. This so TEST works on GFI's with no ground. (At least on the ones I've fiddled with..)
In actuality, they are often set up to protect only recptacle circuits.
I believe most european contries have a GFI, certainly we have them in Denmark where I live. I'm very happy we have those installed in the main power inlet because it is a lifesafer. Many houses fail to have correct or even installed ground/earth protection at all (before 1970 or thereabouts it was not illegal to run appliances without earting). In these cases the GFI serves a great purpose and which is why it was installed in the first place
I have only experience lightning strikes mistakenly triggering the GFI two/three times over 30 years, so I see no reason to apply them only to certain areas in the house. The only times I have been bothered by the GFI is when I'm doing experiements in my lab, and in these cases I have been surprised sometimes because I did something stupid (like connecting the scope to the phone wire, tripping the GFI because the phoneline neutral is grounded also)
Cheers
Klaus
It's clear your codes are far stiffer than ours.
But part of it is we have a different approach. By making individual GFI's near the load, we have a lower setpoint than you can have for the whole house.
We do not, as far as I know, require separate circuits for residence lighting & outlets; in many rooms, the only lamps plug into outlets. Sometimes the outlets are switched. (Commercial building DO have separate circuits.)
Virtually no residence in the US has 3-phase. Considering the US's saturation of whole house air conditioning, we would do better if we did. Does your home have AC/electric heat?
In general, the code required is the one in effect when the house was wired, or last rewired. When the code changes, the house does not; it is "grandfathered" in to the old standard. Is that true there?
Hi:
I like the ideia of having more GFIs but this is not usually done as they are expensive, i think they are putting one for the bathrooms now, but i'm not sure. Only the whole house one is mandatory.
We use mostly electric space heaters, and the electrical water heater is as common as the gas one. However about 5 years ago the country had a network of natural gas installed and 99% of all houses build now come pre-equiped to use gas for central-heating.
Regarding 3 phase, I believe that the main reason is that until some 15 years ago all houses had their own well(sp?) and the water-pump motor was always 3 phase. The evolution was: people had their fields, then electricity came and most people got a water-pump for the field, then houses were build on those fields, etc. But it's also a "policy" because 3 phase is more balanced, doesn't need so heavy wiring, specially if you consider that all the old houses had fuses, not breakers. Now i have 3x15Ax230V=10350W. I would need 45A breakers and wiring otherwise, quite a difference. However in most other aspects the code is very poor, like inspections, what's not allowed, etc. Yours is much more detailed.
Yes, i think you can still have a wiring box with just fuses! But hey, they did update the meters to new models a few years ago... ;-)
Interesting. All of the wiring in my house when it was built in the 60's was all non-grounded. Uses the round branch fuses... Since then a lot of the wiring has been upgraded, but even now some outlets are not grounded properly, and there is no GFCI's in any room. In the garage, the outlets are grounded to a metal rod in the ground, which barely passes as a ground, especially when cutting steel with a 380v cutter... :)
A whole-house GFCI would be a nightmare for my residence. Some drills and other power tools out in the garage are the old metal ones, which do leak some parasitic conductance. I'm sure if my whole house was GFCI'd, I'd have a remote-reset for it.... :)
GFCIs monitor current in hot and neutral *after* the (unprotected) line input. You can create an imbalance current by introducing a
*finite resistance[1]* between protected (load side) hot and *unprotected (line side) neutral*. That's how the GFCI test button works, with no connection to ground (witness the 2 prong GFCI in hair dryer plugs). It is not the same as simply loading the circuit. A GFCI tester that could not access the unprotected neutral would have to use some other path, ground being the most convenient.%mod%
[1] An open circuit is infinite resistance.
There is no such thing as "infinite" resistance!
With the appropriate instrumentation any resistance could be quantified. What you think of, or even measure, as an open circuit, is merely a circuit which has exceeded your, or your instrument's, ability to measure. :-]
Louis--
********************************************* Remove the two fish in address to respondI read in sci.electronics.design that Louis Bybee wrote (in ) about 'GFCI Failures + Gadgets', on Wed, 19 Nov 2003:
Quite right. I have a very old (well, around 50 years) Twenty Million Megohmmeter. I don't suppose the EF37As still have low enough grid current. (;-) I keep it for the huge meter, which I can't bear to throw away.
What the HELL kind of monster are you building in there?!?!?!
You know, a riot, is a terrible thing, but I think it's about time that we had one!!!
Ok, I see. It's not that the breaker is better, per se, it is the position it occupies in the circuit.
Ok - that's a technical reason for breakers over receptacles but only if it is true. Are GFCI breakers known to be more reliable then GFCI receptacles, to your knowledge?
So that falls under "easier to use" (or whatever you want to call it.)
Thanks! I don't necessarily agree that the points you raised make a GFI breaker better than a GFCI receptacle, but I can appreciate your rationale.
It is a horrible idea, even if using only theoretical knowledge. I suspect that you have something different in mind when you say theoretical knowledge. I'm using it to mean the things below:
The pole feed will rarely, if ever, have equal currents on the two hots and the neutral. If a different design was used that did not depend on imbalance, there is still the problem of tripping at 5 mA ground current to protect people. One could easily have 5 mA current to ground on one total service with no fault - and he's talking about protecting multiple services. False trips would be common. If the trip level was set higher, then there could be a current at that higher level through a person into ground. The size of the contacts would have to be enormous to handle the current.
What does the word "they" refer to - a "whole house GFCI" ??
In actuality, there is no such thing that could be set up to protect only receptacle circuits. You can protect 1 branch circuit at a time with a GFI breaker or a GFCI receptacle. With a GFCI receptacle, you can also protect only a part of the circuit. A GFCI receptacle can be installed such that it protects all outlets wired downstream of it, or only itself. There's no such thing as a "whole house GFCI" in any event.
Yes.
Have you seen a European DIN panel setup? With the way they can be configured you can have certain groups of circuits protected, others not.
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