NEC revisions. Why...?

[John G]

[e-mail] brought next idea :

In Aus there are of course 230 volt GFCIs but new houses have one GFCI in the main board. My house is 26 years old and has a 3 phase GFCI covering everything including the AirCon. The only time it has tripped in the 12 years I have been here there was a device failure or a wet indoor GPO* that was outside in the rain. 3 times in all.

I fail to understand the comments about starting 2 devices (fridges etc) because GFCIs are not meant to care about load, just leakage to ground.

GPO = General Purpose Outlet. 3 pin socket. By the rules ALL GPOs are 3 pin GROUNDED and have been the same design since about 1935 although Ground was not required in some dry situations untill about 1965?.

[bob haller]

New fridges dont last like the old ones did.

my 1952 fridge gor replaced in 1996 because we were remodeling the kitchen.

my 1996 new fridge died in 2014, and was replaced, it just quit working.

true they use less electric/

Another thing, I rewired a kitchen totally, had the GFCIs in a easy to reach location, feeding outlets where they needed to be.....

theres zero reason to put them in the basement!

[Ed Pawlowski]

In a perfect world, you are right. I've seen them trip for unknown reasons though.

[gfretwell]

Your RCDs trip at 30ma. A US GFCI trips at 5. An AFCI trips with 30a of ground leakage as does a GFPE device(Ground Fault for the Protection of Equipment.)

Receptacles have been available in 3 pin in the US since at least the late 40s and required in the code in the 1962 code cycle.

[trader_4]

The issue about two refrigerators starting at the same time was with regard to them being on the same circuit and exceeding the circuit trip capacity. I think there is general agreement that for typical residential fridge/freezer in at least the last couple of decades that isn't a problem.

It's interesting that you just have one main GFCI. Two immediate things come to mind:

1 - Sounds good because then it protects all the circuits

2 - Sounds bad, because when some outside circuit trips from something getting wet in the middle of the night, out goes all your lights, heat, etc. And if the place is unoccupied and it's freezing, you don't get back in time, some really bad things could happen. Or similar with fridges in summer. With the main tripped/tripping, it must be a bitch to isolate and identify the actual problem. Especially if it's an intermittent thing that could take weeks to investigate.

[John G]

Only have one fridge but I think 2 fridges was brought into theGFCI discussion. GFCIs do not trip on over load.

Has worked well for me

All you say is true but this is SYDNEY Aus and there never has been a frozen pipe since maybe the last Ice Age.

I think our houses are smaller or have less circuits so the last trip I had to locate (rain in an extension cord)I just pulled all the individual breakers and then put thenm back till I got a trip, then walked that cct till I found something unusual. Turns out Daughter had used socket in rain water pump enclosure for a tool then went home without replacing lid of enclosure. :-Z

[gfretwell]

I guess that is why the whole house RCD never caught on here. Nobody wants to lose the whole house just because someone left a Receptacle cover open. That could really be ugly if you were on "holiday" for a couple weeks. Come home, the sump pump has failed and you have water everywhere, the fridge stopped so you have a few hundred dollars worth of spoiled food and your pool is green.

I prefer the protection to be as close to the failure as possible. It makes it easier to figure out what went wrong and you isolate the failure to a part of one circuit.

[John G]

I cant argue with that, It is just the way it is and it has worked quite well for us. There is no sump pump, in fact there is no basement, there is no furnace, the supermarket is only a mile away so the freezer is not heavily loaded and as I said before it has never frozen over in Sydney:-) Seems life is a little simpler here but we are happy.

We do have to put up with all the bans on Incandescents etc.

[gfretwell]

I imagine you have a similar climate to SW Florida then. We do tend to shop in bulk tho and it is not unusual to have a freezer full of food.

)

That was an oversold threat. They banned 120v 60-100 watt A-19s but you can still buy 130 volt bulbs in any size you want. Since my mains power is 124 anyway they are actually better for me.

[trader_4]

The reason they require them for the basement is likely similar to why they are required outdoors. Typical basement floor is somewhat damp concrete, also basements are where people then to have water problems, use shop vacs to vacuum up water, etc. Using a power tool, vac, whatever on a basement floor probably isn't too much different than outside.

[Robert Green]

trips almost without a doubt,especially if it gets foggy with the unit outdoors.

To be fair, he was referring not to reefers, but outside appliances used in heavy fog. (-: I don't know of too many homeowners who keep their refrigerators outside.

The number of nuisance trip complaints we've seen over time are likely a case of early adopters reporting "settling in" problems. The same was true of CFLs. If you were the first to buy CFLs, you got all sorts of junk. None of the very expensive CFLs I bought early on performed well or lasted long. That's changed as designs and manufacturing techniques improved.

I suspect GFCIs are the same. The 30 year old Slater GFCI's I bought when they first became available were junk and nuisance tripped all the time. The last trip I had from a recent vintage Leviton 20A unit was when my gardener hedge-clipped his electrical extension cord. The refrigerator hasn't tripped the GFCI in two years although the older one did. I suspect the older refrigerator (30 years old!) DID have a ground fault of some kind, but I never checked it out to see for sure.

[gfretwell]

I just threw that out there to dispel the rumor that motor loads trip GFCIs. I agree refrigerators that trip GFCIs have a ground fault. I have tested a few and they all do, usually internally in an old compressor. That is why the freon smells burnt when you cut them open. I tested with a current probe on a scope, looking at the ground wire. If someone is a non believer, plug in a 2 prong to 3 prong adapter and tell them to touch the pigtail wire when you plug it in.

[Robert Green]

I meant to test the old compressor but when the refrigerator fails, there's usually not a lot of time left for screwing around, particularly if the vendor is going to take the old box away when they deliver the new one. The old unit *did* trip the much newer Leviton GFCI as well as the 30+ year old Slater GFCI so I assume there was current leak. The new GE unit on the new Leviton GFCI has not yet nuisance tripped.

No thanks! (-: I often wonder why I wasn't electrocuted when I had a color darkroom in the basement. Lots of water, lots of electricity and no GFCI's. I did get some impressive shocks when the Uniroller motor agitator base's internal wiring corroded, but I managed to repair it and make sure there were no outward facing metal parts.

It's hard to believe how much color photography has changed since the

1970's. I went from rows and rows of bottles and tanks to support Ektaprint, Ektachrome, Cibachrome and B&W film to just a tiny compact flash card reader. Now I don't even need to pull the card out of the camera - it connects to the PC via WiFi.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Once in a great while I still miss doing some dodging and burning on the enlarger, but it took me a half hour to get chemicals mixed, get the trays in place, etc. just to get started.

My OM-2 has not been out of the case for years now.

[notbob]

An old friend is a graphic artist and has informed me he's decided to return to film photography. After using digital for several yrs, he's become frustrated by his own lack of experience in this field. This despite pro equipment and computer software and the knowledge of how to use it. One reason is, he likes wide format photography (4x5). I've not adapted well to digital, myself, so I understand his POV.

nb

[Robert Green]

I used to specialize in large color prints and the setup/cleanup was a killer. Oddly, I rarely print anything anymore although I've been promising myself to get a large printer/plotter.

One thing that's really changed is that I am no longer inclined towards dark backgrounds just to minimize dust problems. When you're blowing up a 35mm slide to 20 by 24" dust is the number one enemy. No matter how hard I tried, there would always be some sort of dust blemish. Not a big problem for negative printing (Spot-off) but a real issue for positive to positive printing like Cibachrome.

What I *really* like is not having to pay $160 for a brick of 20 rolls of Ektachrome or Kodachrome and another $100 for 20 processing mailers. That and the fact that you can create multiple originals with the click of a mouse and store thousands of photos on a tiny memory card that cost $20.