Welcome to another episode of CircuitBread practicals where we talk a little bit about
how to do some of your own work on your house if you're comfortable with it.
You need to turn off the electricity so you don't accidentally hurt yourself and frankly,
if all you get out of this is the ability to talk about it intelligently, then I feel
like we’ve succeeded.
Today we'd like to talk about GFCIs.
So people get GFCIs and breakers confused a lot and they serve very different purposes
and there are people that may quibble on the details and stuff like that, but in essence
a breaker that you have in your main service panel is designed to protect your wires.
So as we talked about our ampacity video, you have different size wires that can handle
different amounts of current and so if you have a wire that's only able to handle 15
amps of current, you want to have a breaker that will limit the amount of power or, excuse
me, the amount of current going through that wire to 15 amps and if you put a 15 amp wire
to a 20 amp circuit breaker, you are being dangerous and against code and please don't
do that.
That is the point of the breakers is to make it so you don't melt your wires, and burn
down your house, and kill yourself.
GFCIs on the other hand are not here to protect your wires.
They are here to protect you.
So the way a breaker works is it measures the amount of current going through it and
if there's too much current well, it pops the breaker and says, Hey I'm not doing anything
else.
Now what happens with a GFCI is it basically is counting the amount of electrons that are
shooting out on the hot wire and counting the amount of electrons coming back on the
neutral wire and saying, “Do they match?” and if they don't, that means that there is
current going somewhere else and it trips really quickly.
And that's another thing about GFCI, they are very, very fast so that they can actually
save your life.
Breakers, being usually rated for 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 amps, you're gonna die with 15
amps, if you don't, yes that would be great.
So this is a lot more sensitive, a lot faster, and it works under different operating principles
and it is here to save you.
That being said, they are a pain and they cause trips all the time, but you know, that's
the trade off and by code they are required in certain places such as the kitchen, the
bathroom, and actually a bunch of other places now.
When we were putting in our master service panel and putting in GFCI things, I was amazed
at how many GFCI circuits and AFCI circuits, which we're not going to talk about right
now, were required in the modern home.
Very crazy.
So, now, with that a GFCI outlet, because you can have a GFCI outlet or a GFCI breaker.
With a GFCI outlet, it's basically wired up like a normal breaker, excuse me, normal outlet
but with one very important difference.
So this only helps protect you when it is at the beginning of the circuit that goes
out.
So as I learned, the very first outlet or switch or whatever in the house that comes
from your circuit breaker box, your master service panel, it's called a home run and
so that is where it goes from your breaker box, goes to an outlet, and then it goes out
from there.
These need to be on that first one, that home run, and then everything past it will be protected.
However, you still have to be careful in how you wire it.
As you can see back here, there's a couple of different lines, a couple of different
things going on.
It says hot on the side.
So this is where you put your black wire, white on this side, which is where you put
your white wire, and this is very similar to a normal outlet up to this point.
However, you'll notice that it says line right there.
Maybe turn this right side up so you can read it, which is weird because that's backwards
from there.
Anyway, it says line on this side and load or charge on this side.
So basically, as I mentioned with the home run, you need your incoming power to go here
so you could put your white and your black here and then you have your outgoing power
to the rest of your circuit on the load side.
And the thing is, if you hook that up backwards, it won't protect you.
It won't do any good and you will be completely unsafe and you will be against code.
And so you do need to make sure that you know which wire is coming in from the master service
panel so that you can put it in line and which line is going out to the rest of your circuit.
So you put in here or else you're not going to do anything.
Well, you're not gonna protect anything.
As part of that, you only need one circuit breaker per circuit.
I was helping a friend at his house.
He had some electrical problems and we're just talking about it and he had just bought
this house and the previous owners had put GFCIs on almost every single outlet and it
made it such a huge pain to figure out what was going on because we'd fix something and
then something else would trip and we didn't know what was the cause and not only was it
confusing, it was completely unnecessary and cost a lot because this costs like 5 or 10
times more than your regular outlets and they're also a bigger pain to work with because you
need to get them in right and they use up a lot more space.
So, use them correctly, put them in the first spot, make sure that you have your line going
in the right spot and your outgoing load going to the right spot and you'll save money, everything
will be simpler, and it will be much safer.
With that, if you are just replacing an old GFCI because they do go bad, make sure that
you say, Oh Hey, this one was connected to the line, this one was connected to the load,
and mark it somewhere so that when you pull off you still know what's going on and you
can get those plugged in the right spot.
If you're doing a new construction, such as in this case, you need to have it either well
marked before you enclose the wall or just a really good memory.
And you know my memory is so bad that I think that you should just mark everything so you
know exactly which one is coming in and which one is going out.
And you don't need to do that with most outlets, but with your GFCI outlets, you do need to
do that for exactly this purpose.
So that's basically the concept of it.
I'm not going to put it together because of the way that these are, it's actually just
a real pain and you don't want to watch me struggle for 10 or 15 minutes trying to curl
this around and fighting all of this extra protection layer that they have on the GFCIs.
So if you're struggling with it, I'm sorry, I do too and maybe again that's something
where an electrician can say, Oh the best way to get that in there is to go another
way because there's just not as much room to work in here as there is with a typical
outlet.
But the most important thing is the concept of making sure you have everything in the
right spot and you’re at the right location that you install it and that you are protecting
everything.
And they have testers out there for like 8 bucks or whatever where if you put this in,
you can go to the next one down the line, stick the tester and push the button and if
you wired everything up properly, it will trip the GFCI and you will be good to go.
So it's always good to verify what you've done to make sure you've done it right, to
make sure that you are protected like you think you're protected.
But that's it for the GFCI.
I hope that helps.
Good luck in your own projects.
If you like this video, give a like, subscribe to our channel, we'll be getting back to the
electronics and all that other good engineering stuff that if it interests you please go check
it out we're very excited about all the things that we get to do here at CircuitBread.
Have a great day and we will catch you in the next one.