Friend of mine is remodeling the kitchen in a 40's home. No ground circuit to anything. He wants to add some GFI receptacles to the kitchen. Is this a good or bad idea? As far as we can tell, the wire to the kitchen area is imbedded in plaster. Does not appear to be in conduit. The fuses are screw in plug fuses.
It's supposed to have a little sticker on it that says, "No Equipment Ground". That makes it OK. :-)
The kitchen outlet right by the sink is like that in my house. It's on an exterior wall, so very difficult to run a ground wire to it. I just put in a GFCI outlet and let the ground float. There was just one kitchen circuit, so I ran another one and it's grounded.
The NEC tells you you can replace ungrounded circuits with GFCI receptacles, so you can have some type of ground fault protection.
Can't remember off the top of my head for you actually read it, might be 406 something. Check for 'receptacle replacement'.
As for cons, I've been told many electronic items use the ground to dump excess voltage. So, electronic items might have a lowered life expectancy. Plus, since check with user manuals if you can operate certain applicances without a effective equipment ground.
It is *especially* a good idea to have GFI if there is no ground. The only thing I'm not sure is, does the test button on GFI work without a ground?
When adding new pieces of wire and new outlets to an existing ungrounded circuit, be sure your friend does not connect the ground wires between the new outlets. This could create a dangerous condition where a fault in one appliance could energize the external metal case of another device plugged into the next outlet.
Also check the loading of the circuits. Houses with those old 60A 'Edison' type panels and fuses tend to not have adequate number of circuits.
One house that I bought in had 4 total 120V circuits with only 1 circuit feeding the entire kitchen, garage, and laundry. There was an additional 'Edison' (shared neutral circuit) for DW/disposal which was added at some point external to the panel, but the wires in the rest of the kitchen were uncomfortably warm to the touch. The sellers insurance forced them to upgrade to a 100A breaker panel but the electrician just left everything the same after upgrading the panel. I had to add, divide and run new circuits myself.
Another thing to watch, when i recently went to get some GFCI outlets, all the ones at the store had a "safety feature" that said the outlet was designed to not energize without proper grounding. Make sure you check the box if you decide to go this route.
On the GFCIs I've looked at, the test button would connect a resistor between hot on the load side and neutral on the line side. No ground involved.
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