GFCIs you cant live with them and cant live without them.
A real problem is that they wear out something that isnt well known. Old GFCIs may pop prematurely or fail to pop. TEST THEM YEARLY! About the hair dryer in the bathtub assuming the water is ground, I cant imagine that exactly the same current from the hot side will 100% flow back on the neutral because, if it isnt, the thing will pop. What am I missing about the bridge and the sensitivity? I had my sister have all her old house sockets (at least the head of a string) equipped with GFCIs. I took a cheap tester to her house and almost 50% of the AC sockets were wired wrong so they needed fixing, too. Many had grounded outlets that had no ground, and ½ had the pins backwards! I guess the folks who sold them the house in 1985 did a band-aid job. If you have customers with older houses and old GFCIs supplying their modem/router, you should encourage them to test and replace before calling you. Anyway, every time my sister had a thunderstorm, the office GFCI would pop probably because the computer was grounded through the cable router and cable modem. The socket was behind a very large, heavy bookcase. Im proud of her, because, by the second time, she got a drill with a ¾ bit and put a hole in the backboard to allow pushing the reset with a pencil eraser. Hence, my recommendation to have your customers understand this since the GFCI that runs your service is the most likely to pop in a thunderstorm. . . . j o n a t h a n _____ From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Blair Davis Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2012 1:37 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] Preventing stupid outages GFCI's are to detect and prevent leakage currents. They monitor the current in the hot and the neutral lines. Ever stood barefoot on the ground and held a drill or saw and gotten shocked? A GFCI, working properly, will prevent that from killing you, or even shocking you for more than a few mS In properly working equipment, basic electrical theory shows that the current in the hot line and current in the neutral lines must be equal. If the currents are not equal, then current is 'leaking;' out of the circuit. The GFCI senses the imbalance and interrupts the circuit to stop the leakage. They are not perfect, though. You can hook up an old 2 prong hair dryer and drop it in a bathtub full of water without tripping the GFCI if you know how. I was an electrician for the Navy for years... I won't plug a tower into one. Every time the lighting flashes for 30 miles around, they trip... On 3/16/2012 11:45 AM, DJ Anderson wrote: I thought GFCI's were to protect circuits from moisture mainly, AFAIK they do not provide any type of protection for devices other than cutting the circuit if it senses a ground fault. DJ Anderson Shelby Broadband On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Ben West <b...@gowasabi.net> wrote: To add to the anecdotal evidence against cheap GFCI outlets, I had to remove one in a building when spontaneous trips started occurring randomly (e.g. once every couple weeks) after an adjacent building received a direct lightening strike. For that matter, the GFCI contributed nothing to lightening protection, still lost a bunch of equipment. -- Ben West http://gowasabi.net b...@gowasabi.net _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless -- West Michigan Wireless ISP Allegan, Michigan 49010 269-686-8648 A Division of: Camp Communication Services, INC
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