The work we originally thought was needed was just a new meter box. Turned out we needed a new wire run from the meter all the way to our water line, a new pipe for the underground wiring, two additional grounding wires.
The utility said it wasnt their problem as the meter itself is their property but the housing, the way it attaches to the house, and the connection to the transformer was our responsibility to pay for.
Nearly $2000 to get a simple meter box replacement. Edit: Because this work was to be done in tandem with the siding replacement to avoid expensive rework, we didn't have much of an option in shopping around as most electricians did not want to deal with coordination with the utility around disconnect and inspection.
If it’s so simple, why didn’t you do it and save $2,000? Part of that price is uncertainty due to scheduling/coordinating with the siding contractor and utility.
Everything after the meter, including grounding conductors, are premises wiring aka your responsibility.
Having your electrical service properly grounded sure beats being electrocuted.
I manage electricians, and my jobs get charged $110/hr for a journeyman in a service van.
Getting the work done properly was important to me. After the replacement, the random occasional 2-3 second power outages went away and it looks great.
My point was mostly to concur with parent that often you do incur unexpected work when updating legacy electrical, and that adds a bit of cost. To a homeowner, a box swap seems simple but can wind up costing thousands more than you expect.
There are some jobs that I can do, but I hire someone else to do anyway.
UK note: under "Part P" rules, it is significantly harder to legally do your own electrical work. https://www.electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/find-an-electrician...
He probably just checked to make sure you strapped the NM cable within 8-12” of the box (depending on if you have cable clamps or not) and then a strap every 54”. If you get the small details right they won’t be so harsh while inspecting.
If you are careful and follow the rules, it’s pretty straightforward to wire branch circuits in a house. Grounding and bonding a service entrance panelboard to ground rods/natural gas piping/water piping is not as straightforward as it seems.
Think of the old "I could write twitter in a weekend" adage. Sure it seems simple at first glance, but once you get into it it's far more complex.
A layman would think "It's a plastic box with a couple of wires in, surely it can't cost more than $200" and take more than an hour".
Most residential wiring really is as simple as it appears at first glance.
The problem is that there are a few cases where it isn't, and the issue is being able to know when that's true. This is where the skills and experience come into play.
In case I need to cite some authority, I've been wiring my own homes (with permits) for > 25 years, and was licensed by New Mexico to install my own 6.7kW solar array a couple of years ago. I'm not an electrician, however.
For example, I needed a new fence. I got a few quotes and most were DRASTICALLY high priced as they wanted to move my fence to comply with current code. An older, more experienced worker had no problems with permits and said I was grand-fathered in because it was already existing. I even self-checked with the city. He was right.
Sometimes it'll be at home owners discretion. For example, I have a Pushmatic panel. The thing sucks. So even if it's grandfathered when I have other work done, I'm still getting rid of it ASAP.
I did manage to get a few things grandfathered in, like being able to keep a three pronged outlet for the dryer. But ultimately I made peace with the fact that the house's electrical system was in a neglected state and the fixes simply had to be made.
So if you are having a new socket added in your kitchen, then all the other sockets in the kitchen on the same circuit will need updating, and the breaker for the kitchen.
But you probably won't have to have your living room rewired.
However I think many locations in the US way overdo regulation when it comes to residential building codes. When you buy a house, you get a professional inspection. If it comes up dangerous, then you are armed with the knowledge to make a risk decision that’s right for you.
I don’t need spacecraft level engineering on my car; similarly i don’t need skyscraper level engineering on my house.
I’m having a new service entry cable, meter box, and main breaker panel put in next week. By its nature that should impact every single circuit in my house. But my electrician isn’t touching anything besides what I listed above, and I know that there are multiple other things around the house not up to current code.
The price I’m paying for this job lines right up with the national job average pricing you can find online. If it was common to require doing all of that extra code updating I would think the average price should be much higher.
Maybe I’m wrong but my thought is that it isn’t so black+white and some electricians may push upsells harder than other more honest ones.
Doing an addition? Well, now you need to ensure the entire house has fire/C02 detectors wired together with it.
Sorry, is there a requirement that every single wall should have a socket? ...that's what extension cords are for.
That's exactly why every wall is required to have an outlet now, to reduce the use of extension cords.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-55-ft-16-3-Green-Outdoor-Ext...
There's a really good explanation in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_q-xnYRugQ
In a kitchen scenario, every counter top more than a foot needs an outlet and for longer counter top runs you need one every 4 feet.
However, I think the 10 years is a bit pessimistic. At least in the US, the code hasn't changed that much in the last 20-30 years, and many of the changes are at the periphery where they are easy to modify like GFCIs, and tamper resistant outlets, etc, so I wouldn't be afraid of making modifications to existing circuits for houses in that range. Older than that you start running into (AA-1350) aluminum wiring (35 years or older) or two-conductor wiring (65 years or older), and you'll want to take the policy of not touching those old circuits unless you plan on completely replacing them.
It frustrates me that every year quite a lot of people are killed due to old houses not having whole-building GFCI's.
A GFCI costs only $20 and can be installed inside 10 minutes. So it seems crazy to be letting people die...
Yet typically electrical regs require that if an electrician installs a GFCI, they bring the whole house up to modern standards. Suddenly the $20+10 minute job has turned into a $15k and 3 weeks complete rewire. So most people don't have a key safety device added. And still every year people die from not having one.
In the U.K., you just can’t have plugs in bathrooms (aside from the shaver plug), which is probably more sensible.
The latest National Electrical Code requires both AFCI and GFCI protection only in kitchens and laundry rooms, but if you're already doing AFCI, why not do it all everywhere as it is clearly to be required at some point
Main downside is they are expensive. I've recently installed a new 24-slot subpanel and I'm using them everywhere required. At $50 a pop, that's a quick $1200.
That dramatically lowers the cost.
The only real downside is that if you accidentally put your finger in the toaster, rather than just the power to your kitchen cutting off, the power to the whole house cuts off. I think thats a fine tradeoff to save $1200.
The annoying part is when I plug in some faulty device that is not immediately dangerous and that shuts down power to the whole house.
Do you mind, re-reading that statement? I don't even understand that argument. You should not be plugging in faulty devices in the first place...
Fault-tolerance is an important and useful thing.
I would absolutely like that to be safe. And like I said, if it's immediately life-saving, then I don't mind the power to the whole house being cut. But if it's "just" a bad appliance, then, well, I do find it a bit annoying that it reset all my electronics, and I would have preferred it if only that specific outlet was effected.
But I would still very much like the protection.
You'd rather have one circuit go out instead of the whole house, and if all you have is the one AFCI breaker you're going to have a much harder time identifying what device(s) is the culprit.
The only real downside is that if your app accidentally dereferences NULL, rather than just your application crashing, the whole computer crashes.
... Sorry, somehow reminded me of the early days of the Macintosh's OS before it was "true multitasking" (as the Amiga kids would love to tell us).
The AFCI thing is a money grab.
AFCIs are a whole different thing - the plug is trying to predict when arcing is happening somewhere downstream of it and it has very little in the way of 'processing' power to do it, so generally there is a classical filter that is designed to detect the characteristic harmonics of the current waveform that are inherent to an arcing condition. When you experience a sharp upward or downward step in power draw you introduce harmonics, when you have capacitive coupling between SMPS you introduce harmonics, motors often introduce harmonics, etc.
There's like a zillion things that can create AFCI trip conditions and cause spurious trips and frustration for users, and there's very few documented cases of them doing the thing they're supposed to do. I think it's a case of someone being well intentioned but releasing regulatory guidance to use a product that isn't quite there in terms of technology maturity.
Arc detection is also basically somewhat complex RF processing, so there are multiple approaches to it and implementations vary.
Plus (detected) arcs are common with for example brushed motors.
Maybe there's something else the person you replied to would like to highlight, but I wouldn't call them a money grab, just made difficult due to some past choices.
According to the CPSC, who analyzed some 10s of thousands of fires, something like 50% of them were caused by wire arcing that could be prevented with AFCI breakers. This is the exact reason why the NFPA is moving the NEC towards eventually requiring AFCI on every circuit in the house.
Do AFCIs actually do their prescribed function effectively?
See, this is the part I hate. I bet someone patented the design, then the NEC made it mandatory, and now they just rake in the money on something that likely costs <$10 to make. If something is legally mandatory, it should not be patented.
There are definitely bad feelings about these AFCI breakers. The feeling is that the code mandate for AFCI got out front of the reliability of actually-produced AFCI's, and actually-in-use products like blenders that may have small "arcing". This results in expensive call-backs from unhappy customers who are getting nuisance trips.
You do want your refrigerator on one. What when your mom is putting a metal saucepan into the fridge of leftovers, knocks and smashes the lamp inside, and the AC lamp power supply kills her though the metal saucepan?
What when a baby puts a fork into an electrical outlet in the living room?
What when floodwater comes in and kills everyone on the ground floor of your house while you are frantically wading in the water trying to move furniture upstairs?
There are plenty of times you want a whole house GFCI.
GFCIs are notorious for tripping on certain appliances like refrigerators and freezers, and can trip due to RFI from other devices in the house.
AFCIs do not like anything with a brushed motor, especially power tools and sufficiently large vacuums.
I have personally experienced all of these just in the last couple years.
lots of info here[1]
TL;DR: The US regulations prevent small electrical faults into things like swimming pools from causing people to drown. The european regulations will stop you getting killed by electricity directly, but won't stop you drowning if you happen to be in a pool while touching some wiring.
[1]: https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/218700/why-are-usa-c...
US electrical wiring always weirds me out. Cables run through walls without pulling them through hard plastic conduits and sockets that look like something designed seventy years ago. It's probably a matter of perspective, but it seems like such a completely different approach.
Whole-house GFCI is a good thing, but we should be careful to consider what you get for that. In order for GFCIs to coordinate the whole-house device is going to trip at a relatively high current. This is definitely on the edge of what will disrupt the heart of a person. American GFCIs are often at the device level on the outlet, so they are more error prone in terms of spurious trips but they are also much, much safer because they are substantially more sensitive.
In this case a Class C GFCI may be used to provide fibrillation protection, let-go-protection is optional.
A Class C GFCI is 20mA trip current.
This will not spuriously trip your freezer. If you're having issues with this it's because you're designing your power distribution system incorrectly.
I now make sure my fridge/freezer is NOT on a GFCI. I'll take my chances of getting a 120VAC shock from my fridge [which is attention-getting, but very unlikely to be injurious].
I’d be more quickly to find out my fridge died if the lights in the kitchen stopped working.
Not sure why fridges don’t just have a battery-powered alarm that goes off when the temperature gets too high for too long.
I upgraded them to not only a surge protector, but this little neat shut off device. It's a device that goes between the fridge and the wall outlet, and basically if for any reason this device loses power - it shuts off the power to the powered device for a minimum of 3 minutes. This way the power can blink 100 times in 3 minutes, and my fridge won't have to eat 100 surges. It will just happily sit off for 3 minutes, and then come back on.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D7KP8S4
But am not partial to this brand or anything. But it seems to do what it says it will do.
A fridge max power draw is usually during the defrost cycle. My defrost heater measures a bit over 500W.
I don’t want whole house GFCI.
Your second claim could only be made by somebody for whom the first statement is true.
Your fridge scenario is.. fantasy. What is the path to ground? There isn’t one.. you can hold onto a live phase conductor all day and not get shocked if the circuit isn’t completed.
Refrigerator only needs a GFI if it is within a certain distance of a sink.
> What when a baby puts a fork into an electrical outlet in the living room?
The NEC requires tamper-resistant receptacles in all dwelling units.
Also re: flooding and GFIs, all basement receptacles need GFI protection due to flood risk.
Not anymore. NEC 2023 requires GFCI for every 120 or 240V outlets in the kitchen, regardless of their location or proximity to the sink. This was a big change.
It’s a negligible cost change for new construction, AFCI breakers and AFCI/GFCI breakers are the same price, at least for Square D 120v 15A 1P
My (UK) fridge is on a standard 30A breaker which itself comes off a single 80A/30mA RCD which was presumably part of the regs at one point. It's never tripped. All the RCBOs I've seen are 30mA too.
(I have some sockets on a 10A breaker downstream of this which have tripped - the house needs a total rewire, total bunch of bodge jobs from the previous owner, including a 13A socket in the bathroom)
Does a GFCI typically have a lower trip that 30mA?
Disclaimer: I'm not an electrician
My understanding is that is not entirely technically correct.
You can have standard sockets in bathrooms in the UK.
But, and it's a big BUT, 99.999% of bathrooms in the UK are not big enough to be able to place the socket 3m away from the relevant wet "zone" (shower and/or bath and/or sink, IIRC).
However, IIRC, shaver sockets are OK, as are spurs. Irrespective of bathroom size.
Shaver sockets are typically going to have ingress protection.
https://www.tapwarehouse.com/blog/how-to-guides/understandin...
Why not? Here in Belgium they are required everywhere and that works just fine.
I used to work on residential construction jobsites and the only power on-site would be a pair of GFCI duplex receptacles in the basement beside the panel. Tripping the actual overload breaker was rare (and usually only happened when multiple people were running off a single extension cord), but the damn GFCI breakers on the receptacles themselves tripped all the time, particularly when the table saw was running at full tilt for 20 minutes straight. They're just too sensitive for certain applications. Now, you can buy combined overload/GFCI circuit breakers for in the panel, but they're ridiculously overpriced so no one uses them, and they're probably just as sensitive.
But yeah, the law should probably have exception for installing safety devices, it's better to have some than zero because someone can't afford it.
No, that's not true!
A GFCI measures the current going in and the current going out and if they are not equal it trips.
OP is correct that in this case a GFCI would trip all the time.
But on the other hand, GFCI leaks are fairly easy to track down and fix, especially with the right equipment.
If I install an GFCI/AFCI on a branch and it starts tripping and I look and find that there's some iffy wiring, that seems like a problem averted.
If I install these on a branch, decide that because it's not a problem (because the old breaker never tripped) I'm just ignoring the problem.
People ignore problems all the time and aren't always caught out, but sometimes "rely on good luck" runs into bad luck and bad things happen.
What if the return current goes through a different wire that was used as a quick fix for some wiring problem someone ran into 50 years ago?
The circuit repeatedly tripped, so the electrician uninstalled it. To install the GFCI he would need to spend 1-2 days splitting circuits to find the leak(s) so instead of ~$40 + 1 hours labour it's potentially thousands of dollars
So, somewhere you have a thing, that could kill you, a firend, a loved one or whomever. And you decide to ignore it because money. Where I live, if something would happen this could land you in prison.
>> And you decide to ignore it because money. Where I live, if something would happen this could land you in prison.
Well I am glad i do not live where you live (let me Guess EU?)
Further this is an advertisement for never even attempting to install the Whole House GFCI on an older home them, if knowledge == Liability, then be ignorant.
the safety nancy's in this thread are unreal
So the results of my risk assessment might just look a little different, because I am more familiar with the matter and the potential consequences than you might be.
Best of luck to you.
Absolutely not. We will get it fixed, the electrician just didn't have the time at that point, he's coming back to find the leak
I mean...this doesn't seem to apply to the GP, but you do understand that there are many, many people in the US for whom the amount of money needed to install that whole-house GFCI would be fine...but the amount needed to track down the faulty wire and fix it to make the house genuinely safe would bankrupt them?
But if I had wiring that was leaking enough current to trip a GFCI, I'd rather find the fault in the wiring.
When I rewired an old house, the livingroom circuit kept tripping the GFCI breaker. It took a while to find, but apparently at a junction box, the bedroom circuit was connected to the livingroom neutral, so that neutral was connected to 2 circuits and was potentially overloaded.
Do you understand what this actually implies?
There is also a good reason why you would like to know.
A tripping RCD is annoying, but not as annoying as dying from electrical shock and hurt all the way till you are dead because, guess what, you don't have a device that switches off the circuit if current flows where it should not.
Ah, and it could also kill your friend and make you liable for life. It could start a fire and ruin your whole existance. But yeah duh, so annoying.
Seriously, get an RCD. If it trips find out which part of your house sinks current into the environment in potential "he was killed in his sleep"-fashion.
Where I live RCDs are mandatory in every electrical installation.
If you have one guy spending 10 mins in every house on a street, he can probably fit GFCI's to 40 houses in a day. But that's only possible if it's a government/power company scheme. Installation could be even quicker and cheaper if it's installed internal to the electricity meter by the power company, and then you don't even need the homeowner home to do it.
Power companies have an incentive to add GFCI's, because ground leakage costs them real money, and those power flows are only 50% measured by the power meter (depending on the meter design). A 100 milliamp leak at 230 volts costs ~$30/yr or so.
$150, $1000, all of these are smaller than $15,000. One is a surprise laptop breaking and needing replace. The other is a surprise car purchase and cash purchase.
IMO there should be standardized trip curves so that outlet GFCIs can coordinate with branch breaker GFCIs, which can coordinate with whole-house or other larger GFCIs, etc.
You really don’t want a 5mA GFCI on your house. You do want a 5mA GFCI somewhere involved for a regular outlet, though, especially if it’s anywhere damp or wet.
(And you probably do want a GFCI tripping at a larger leakage current on any outdoor circuit. Leakage on crappy outdoor wiring is very very common and can go undetected for years. And for some reason code allows new outdoor circuits to be run in galvanized steel conduit, and there seems to be little enforcement of the use of appropriate wire nuts and such outdoors. You can buy actual high quality submersible wire nuts, and stainless steel outdoor electrical boxes exist (at absolutely obscene prices), but they’re rare. So even nominally very fancy newish buildings do things like using regular galvanized steel outlet boxes outdoors by the ocean with predictable results.)
(A GFCI outlet does not help at all of your whole outlet box floors. A 100mA GFCI upstream would presumably trip very quickly.)
Not sure I'd want one, to be honest. There are some devices that trip GFCIs and I don't think I'd like my mains to trip that easily. I just use GFCI breakers as necessary. And certain circuits I go with AFCI instead.
IIRC, in the US, code now requires AFCI pretty much everywhere except when GFCI is required.
And AFCI is a bit of a PITA, to the point where electricians advise me against adding anything new to existing circuits in my house (because then the local inspector would require a new AFCI breaker, apparently in other areas the inspectors are less picky and would be satisfied with an AFCI outlet).
I agree on them being a PITA sometimes. They're somewhat prone to thinking that electric motors (e.g. fans) are trying to start a fire.
In Germany where I lived for the past decade I have never seen a non-faulty device trip a RCB. The ones that tripped it hat the full 230V on their metal case.
1. Deep freezers are prone (for reasons unclear to me at my level of knowledge) to tripping GFCIs. For this reason they're allowed to be on a non-GFCI outlet in the garage (must be a single outlet receptacle by itself on the circuit).
2. Downstream GFCIs are prone to messing with upstream GFCIs, so you should not put them in series. My RV has it's own power distribution panel with GFCI, so it gets plugged into a dedicated TT-30 RV outlet without GFCI protection.
3. My Tesla doesn't like GFCIs at all. It does a brief ground check before charging and trips the outlet. Known issue, solution is to find an outlet that isn't protected by a GFCI. In a pinch, when I was renting my first Tesla from Turo I stole the freezer outlet in the garage for a few hours at a time to charge the car. When I bought my own Tesla, I put in level 2 of course, problem solved.
I'm all for GFCIs on individual circuits, that makes total sense. Just not on the mains.
Weirdly enough Samsung fridges work over here without tripping RCDs.
How do telsas charge in Australia ?
My kitchen's circuits are to code (as far as I know). I've asked Vitamix themselves and on various forums (eg r/homeimprovement) about how to fix this. No joy so far.
The grid, wiring, connectors etc can also be tested.
In Germany any company is required to have external contracters carry out these tests every 24 months due to work safety laws, this test is called DGUV and I think there is an ISO equivalent. If you ever have an electrician over that is worth their money they should be able to carry out those tests.
Guess when the compressor kicks on you get sharp current spikes in units that do nothing to prevent that from hitting the grid.
> 2. Downstream GFCIs are prone to messing with upstream GFCIs, so you should not put them in series. My RV has it's own power distribution panel with GFCI, so it gets plugged into a dedicated TT-30 RV outlet without GFCI protection.
I don't know if this is an english word, but in German this known under the term selectivity. You cannot just put any RCD behind any RCD, you must select them specifically to have the downstream one trip first (otherwise, what is the use of having two in a row)?
3. My Tesla doesn't like GFCIs at all. It does a brief ground check before charging and trips the outlet. Known issue, solution is to find an outlet that isn't protected by a GFCI. In a pinch, when I was renting my first Tesla from Turo I stole the freezer outlet in the garage for a few hours at a time to charge the car. When I bought my own Tesla, I put in level 2 of course, problem solved.
Might be an issue with the wiring or the connector (some current is flowing where it should not flow), but it could also just be a broken GFCI.
Also, a GFCI install here is a simple and cheap affair. Does not require checking everything else or inspection or upgrading of fuse boxes or consumer unit.
We don’t have the fancy GFCI classes and selectivity that Europe seems to use.
GFCI, you gotta figure out which one popped. If the wiring's not great, it may well be in a totally different room from the outlet that stopped working. On top of it, they seem to outright fail (get stuck in a broken state, start tripping under even very light load, simply stop working at all) much faster than breaker-box switches (I'm... actually not sure I've ever seen one of those fail? I've had several GFCI outlets fail, across multiple houses).
I get why they're good to have, but they're really annoying. And expensive.
For example:
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/oGJ0LxRFZ9FNcRtpABAlXPnUApM=...
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21847995/iStock_1169476062.jpg){kind=link}
Edit 1: If you're in Europe, my apologies - I have no experience with the wiring outside of the US. It sounds genuinely annoying and a bad user experience indeed.
Edit 2: Thank you all for your replies!
> If it's even possible, such a wiring configuration seems like an obvious building code safety violation.
Norm in every house I've lived in in the US (except one so old it had knob-and-tube wiring... hahaha) is one GFCI for a set of outlets. Like, if you have a long vanity in a largish bathroom, you might end up with two or three outlets, one GFCI, the others following after it so they trip it, too. The only times I've seen a single one used with nothing hanging off it is when it's the only outlet in the room, or for under-sink outlets for dishwashers and disposals to plug into. This can turn into a real mess if anyone got "creative" with wiring at any point. We've had a garage GFCI kill a couple outlets in the house proper (in a nearby laundry room, not super distant), plus an outdoor outlet probably 30 feet away, all of which were evidently attached to it.
What OP is saying is that one of those downstream outlets can trip the GFCI and if you don't know which GFCI it tripped, then you have to go looking.
For instance, here is an 'Eaton' 3 phase breaker with integrated ground fault protection circuitry:
https://www.omnical.co/products/eaton/1742431/2259595
Note the little yellow 'test' button. That's a 30 mA fault current device, you can have higher permissible fault currents for certain gear that tends to be a bit more leaky which would otherwise cause nuisance trips. These little things are quite the work of art inside, if you ever have a faulty one I would encourage you to pick it apart to see what makes it tick.
GFCIs protect against current leaking to ground, by detecting if the current flowing on a hot and neutral leg are different. If they're different, the current must be going somewhere else: to ground, through you, etc. The GFCI breakers do this in the breaker, the outlets do it at the outlet. As someone else mentioned, you can also have other non-GFCI outlets chained to a GFCI outlet, so that upstream outlet is the one that pops if there's a fault.
TL;DR they detect and protect against different fault conditions.
In any case, new houses must use arc fault breakers which do the same thing and more for most things.
I would add that big motors will trip these every time, so they aren’t usable for every circuit.
In the UK, where ground fault interrupters can be part of the sockets it can be hassle, but then again that is strictly optional: in most other countries the ground fault interrupters are always integrated into the circuit breaker at the distribution panel. The upside of that it is that it also protects the wiring.
Did you mean US? I've never seen that, and searching 'ground fault interrupter UK' images all look like US sockets.
They're usually called RCDs (Residual Current Devices) in the UK, and they're fitted in the Consumer Unit.
https://internationalconfig.com/icc6.asp?item=72300-S-10MA
or
https://www.screwfix.com/p/british-general-900-series-13a-2-...
It's the only place where I have seen these.
Example US looking one I was seeing: https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/e9c29ec0-5eeb-40c3-8cde-e2f...
I suppose Earthed sockets are less common there anyway right, so that limits how common these could possibly be.
FWIW, you can have the same thing with GFCIs. I recently wired my garage for woodworking and installed all GFCI breakers in the breaker box, so a GFCI trip is just like a regular breaker trip (not that either of those has happened with the new circuits). The GFCI breakers cost about $50/ea [1] and protect the whole circuit.
> GFCI, you gotta figure out which one popped. If the wiring's not great, it may well be in a totally different room from the outlet that stopped working.
I once couldn't operate my garage door for a few days. There were no tripped breakers in the box. Eventually, it dawned on me that the circuit was labeled "GFCI" so maybe I should go check the GFCIs in the house, and I found that the GFCI in the upstairs bathroom had tripped. The upstairs GFCI is nowhere near the garage (and in the opposite direction from the breaker box). Since then, I've talked to several people in the area whose houses are wired the same way. I guess GFCIs must have been really expensive in the 80s, when these houses were built.
The moral of this story is that GFCI breakers can save a lot of headache. (Plus, those GFCI outlets are kinda ugly IMO).
[1]: I see they're about $60/ea now: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Square-D-Homeline-20-Amp-Single-...
A whole building GFCI sounds like a bad idea, throwing the entire house into darkness as well as cutting off the refrigerator and HVAC because a contractor plugged in a damp power tool in an outside outlet sounds like a bad idea. Worse if you were out of town when it happened.
Whole building GFCI - that is just nuts!
There are many ordinary motors that will leak just a bit to ground, enough to trip the GFCI, but no hazard exists — this would mean disabling the whole building, computers, refrigeration, water pumping, etc. just turning on that device. I've actually got one in a treadmill, and also a wood router tool - they trip the garage GFCI every time. At first I was concerned and "what's wrong with these things?". but as far as I could read, there is no issue, just an issue with certain types of motors that is no hazard, but a basic incompatibility.
And yes, being able to kill the entire power to the house merely by plugging a device into one of the outside outlets would be an insane vulnerability, not just by the contractor's accident you mentioned, but also by deliberate action - great way to start a burglary or home invasion, don't even need to find a wire to cut.
Yikes!
There are a few things that aren't practical to protect with a GFCI, such as high voltage grid power transmission cables. But people killed by those I wouldn't think are included in deaths 'at home'.
[1]: https://www.cullanlaw.com/blog/2015/may/may-is-national-elec...
Or they conveniently misunderstood the regulatory requirements.
Which means you have to fix the main box. Which is most expensive part to fix.
The US is way worst about this than most other places though. Here they inspect your insulator, lead-in wires, meter, and distribution panel and then ask what if any problems you are having (they is the power company) every four years. Mostly the electrician/contractor does the work and there's no inspection of that.
They aren't just about electrical safety directly, but also about not potentially confusing people in the future.
If the cable was black, then someone may not have known that it was an earth cable, and might have cut it, which would leave your electrical installation unsafe.
Thats the reasoning why using the wrong color for a wire can make it illegal.
It is only required to be "primarily green". So the common alternative of green with yellow stripe is also allowed.
You can reidentify black cable if it's large enough gauge (6 awg currently).
rimshot
They must be > 6 awg to pull black and use green tape on the ends.
See 250.119.
This has been the case for a very long time though, at least since 2007 NEC. I don't have handy copies around for before then.
* I own a house that was built in the early 20th century. As was typical of the time, the house has a small number of fused circuits, which do not have a ground wire, and where the wire gauge is thinner than would be required for a modern circuit of the same capacity. Just the same, it's perfectly legal to: * Add new outlets to existing circuits without changing the fuse to match the wire gauge of the circuit or adding a ground wire. It has to either be a NEMA 1-15R receptacle (no ground plug) or a GFCI receptacle with a label that says there's no equipment ground. * Replace the fuse boxes with modern breaker boxes without re-wiring the house to have grounded outlets. The only limitation is that the new breakers would have to be smaller than the existing fuses so that the wire gauge meets current code for the breaker size.
* I have a 1998 house which has several pairs of circus on opposite phases which share a neutral wire. This is legal still, but requires that the circuits are connected to dual-throw breakers, so that it's not possible to have one circuit hot with the other dead. But this house doesn't use dual-throw breakers like it should. As far as I know, that wasn't even code when the house was built. But electricians can still add new circuits without fixing that.
* Some years ago I was remodeling a 1956 house. Initially, the inspector asserted that we would need to replace a staircase whose width and pitch did not meet current code. But he was mistaken. Even though we replaced the stair treads, because we didn't make any changes to the structure of the staircase, the head county building inspector agreed that we didn't need to bring it to current code.
Requiring common-disconnect (but not common-trip) breakers I think was a requirement since before 1998, but because it only needs common-disconnect, a listed handle-tie between the two breakers will suffice. (In other words, this should be a quite inexpensive situation to remedy. $8 for 3 of them at Home Depot for one particular common panel: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Square-D-QO-Circuit-Breaker-Hand...)
The handle-tie would get you common-trip too, wouldn't it?
If you have a breaker in your hand (now or at a home center), you can slap it briskly against your thigh and it will “trip” allowing you to see how the handle will look when tripped. To a cursory glance, it will appear on (but you will notice the handle can be moved about 1/8" more than normal).
That small movement is not enough to induce a trip or disconnect on the handle-tied breaker. (The requirement is only "Each multiwire branch circuit shall be provided with a means that will simultaneously disconnect all ungrounded conductors at the point where the branch circuit originates." That's to allow for safe servicing.)
So I took quick look into what it would actually take to upgrade the main circuit breaker in the house assuming a 100A to 200A upgrade is needed to accommodate both an EV and a heat pump. I thought it was $5000 or so.
As it turns out, $5000 is for pole mounted service. It's range is actually around $15,000 to $25,000 for underground service, as it requires digging the line from the street to the house. Unknown how much cost there if too many houses here need to upgrade as well which would necessitate upgrading transformers feeding this area (most houses here are 100A AFAIK).
The actually switching out your circuit breaker from 100A to 200A is cheap (2-3k?). Almost all of the cost is for the utility to run you a bigger line, and they can pretty much charge you anything they want (what is your alternative if you don't like the price?)
Reality? I had a peak draw of 23 amps from the grid in the last year. Luckily the NEC has an escape valve for folks who can prove that.
I legit hit 100A several times a month. Have hit over 150A.
Easy way for me to draw 100A at once:
40A: EV charging
32A: Electric Oven warming up at max
24A: Electric Dryer
40A: HotTub jets on
40A: AC ON Max
Unlikely all of those are on full max, but it's pretty easy to imagine getting past 100A before we even touch things like lights and computers.
EV + Dryer + Hot Tub pretty much pull max for the entire run, the other stuff is more likely to cycle up and down.
2/0 copper would work but would cost more, so likely not used.
From the EV it seems the former, but in that case I'm horrified at how power-hungry your appliances are.
A typical new oven sold in Europe is 3.6kW, 16A @ 230V.
A new tumble drier is 600W, so about 2.5A at 230V.
There's such a range of hot tub and AC sizes I can't compare these.
[1]: The 120V rails in the middle of the breaker panel alternate between each split phase, so if you connect a circuit to any two adjacent breakers you will get 240V. A 120V circuit is connected to neutral and a single breaker.
They're inefficient relative to a 250-500% efficient heat pump.
* EV Charging
* Electric or Induction Oven
* Electric Dryer
* AC
* Electric Water Heater
are all doing to be 220. The amps will vary, and most will not peg the required wire 100%, but may for example do a big pulse to startup (ACs are famous for this).
Only a handful of countries actually us 110/220
If it is North America, I think you mean 120 and 240
Electric tumble dryer is 5.6kW at 230V. It's from 2017. Maybe yours is gas, and 600W is the motor?
I have a smallish 1900sqft 1950s house with average or smaller appliances.
I love doing appliance comparison with European houses, though.
New condensor tumble dryer, 2600W: https://www.siemens-home.bsh-group.com/uk/productlist/laundr...
My dryer is 8 years old and similar to the second one -- half the power of yours, and I'm still not sure what the 24A from above would mean.
Fist, North America is a 120/240V system, not 110/220. For the life of me i will never understand the confusion over why some people, including North Americans keep referencing 110 volts?
The code is clear, 120 Volts +- 5 to 10 percent?
Perhaps because the "allowed range" is 110 to 125? If i measure my house right now, it is 121 volts and this is pretty typical.
Your dryer example seems like it is running on gas?
In North America, electric dryers use anywhere from 1800 to 5000 watts.
AC depends on the home size, the location, etc. Mine has a 60A 240V breaker but again the "code" states you can only have an 80% "continuous load" on a circuit so technically this circuit can not pull 14,400 continuous watts.
One thing Europeans dont grasp is the difference in house sizes vs north ameria and so naturally our appliances are larger and more power hungry.
What may take a European washer 2 loads, most north american washer/dryers will do in one. So the "power usage by load" is the same?
Using a device like a range's maximum power draw is dishonest. If a north american range is twice the size of what is available in EU, but not all the elements are in use at once... does that mean something?
> Your dryer example seems like it is running on gas?
This is part of my horror. You can't imagine that an electric drier might only use 600W? Try [1]. From the EU site of all rated driers [2] (click "Models distribution") 23% of driers on sale are this efficient. A further 44% with A++ rating are around 900W. (Note the measurement is of the energy needed to dry a load of clothes to the required standard, the maximum power draw is related but not a criteria.) The worst one is still only 2300W!
From a 2013 news article "Europe's Clothes Dryers Consume Half As Much Energy As America's" [3]:
> The study, which was funded by the Super Efficient Dryer Initiative (SEDI), concluded that Europe's heat pump dryers can dry the same amount of clothes as North American conventional dryers using only about half as much energy. The catch is that European heat pump dryers also took about twice as long to dry a load of laundry as North American conventional dryers.
I'll add that American driers appear to be cheaper to buy.
> house sizes ... naturally our appliances are larger and more power hungry
That explains the AC -- though I can still criticise the waste of energy heating/cooling two, three or four times as much space per person -- but it doesn't explain the drier. Do you wear twice as many clothes as I do?
[1] https://www.siemens-home.bsh-group.com/uk/productlist/laundr...
[2] https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/tumbledriers
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/06/11/euro...
But A full EV charge can be 6-7 hours, so could easily be all evening. A hot tub could easily be an hour of overlap in there. So someone turns on the Oven? Would def pop 100.
I’m sure their equipment overheated. The roof is not insulated and the attic fan is pushing against a louver that’s the wrong design. It gets hot up there without any equipment.
My house is a really big house built in the 50s. It was initially 2x100A service as I don't think 200A service at home was really a thing. It had 2 meters and everything. Sometime in the 80s they tore out the feed from the pole and put in a proper single 200A line, and just left the second meter as defunct.
100A service is fairly normal here for smaller homes. As heating here is primarily done by natural gas furnaces rather then electrical heating. Which make sense; gas is way cheaper to heat with here then electricity. And it saves a dollar for the developer.
I don't know about larger homes though; I'd imagine that they'd have 200A circuits but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't unless the builder specifically requested it.
Smaller House: Default 150, pay a little more to get 200
Bigger House: Default 200, pay a little more to get 2x200
This has never been a problem for us.
Stove, furnace, and dryer are gas. So the only "power hungry" device we have is our Air Conditioner.
To redo my service to single phase 800 amps, which required a new transformer on a pole, new commercial panel, 100 feet of large underground drop (parallel MCM 600), etc, georgia power + electrician total cost was 10k.
If i had wanted to drag 3 phase power to my shop, which was a mile away, they would charge 10 bucks a foot, total cost 55k.
(I convert the large single phase instead with a digital 3-phase converter)
PGE/California electricians is particularly horrible about costing - i've seen combined costs (IE between PGE + electrician) of like 15k for panel upgrades that require 10 feet of trenching
I’m looking to get some new cabling placed since I can’t navigate within the walls
Those that keep up actually don't have much issue as it's gradual.
Current breakdown is:
25 states - 2020+ NEC
17 states - 2017 NEC
2 states - 2014 NEC
2 states - 2008 NEC
8 states - Very local
Some of them take 5+ years to update the NEC. Virginia adopted the 2017 NEC in late 2021.
When that happens, upgrades can be costly.
Though most major changes around AFCI/GFCI usage, pipe types, etc to NEC happened in the 2014/2017 code cycle.
So there were definitely some code cycles that were "extra bad" in this sense.
Right. There must be a reliable metallic path to ground.
This is a big problem with PVC pipe retrofits. In older houses, plumbing and conduit are metal and good grounds, and grounding to plumbing used to be permitted. Once PVC pipe came in, you have to assume that no pipe is grounded, and you need extra ground wires and stakes. This can happen due to a plumbing repair. Otherwise, a short to "ground" can energize the structure's entire water system.
In the original article, if your house doesn't have three-prong outlets, it's time for an full upgrade. You're at least half a century behind.
As for training new electricians, "In the past, Reyes recruited workers out of high school and trained them. But he’s reluctant to do it again. It costs his technicians time, it costs him money, and there’s no guarantee that the people he invests in will stick around because the job market is so competitive." Well, welcome to the free market. Maybe you have to pay more.
There are International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers apprenticeship programs not mentioned in the article. Here's Local 6, San Francisco.[1] They require high school graduation, a grade of C or better in algebra and trigonometry, and drug testing to become an apprentice. The apprenticeship is three years.
"Grid Alternatives partners with local organizations, like Homeboy Industries, a gang-intervention program, to introduce former inmates as well as other underrepresented people, to careers in solar. Those admitted to Grid’s training receive “wraparound supportive services” that address barriers they might have to participating, such as helping them get driver’s licenses, open bank accounts, or, for those formerly incarcerated, find attorneys." That may be starting too far down the food chain.
"But this past year, Laney’s program almost fell apart after one of its teachers, Forough Hashemi, announced she would be retiring at the end of the spring 2022 semester. Hashemi had been teaching six classes each semester, essentially holding the program together".
Laney College seems rather disorganized. Their web site says "Fall Classes Start August 24, 2020 – Enroll Now!". If their idea of recruiting is "we sent some letters and nobody responded", that's the college's problem.
Do you have a citation for this?
I was under the impression that using plumbing as equipment ground was never allowed, but that conductive plumbing has required to be bonded to ground for some time. I was further under the impression that by code, plumbing repairs couldn't leave behind unbonded sections of conductive plumbing.
> by code, plumbing repairs couldn't leave behind unbonded sections of conductive plumbing
I assume that's correct, but I think shady / lazy / amateur contractors can assume the inspector won't check work in the crawl space.
You could look it up yourself. It's not hard.
Here's a guide to the 1981 National Electrical Code. See page 297. section 250-23, grounding for alternating current systems:
"grounding electrode conductor ... which runs to building steel and/or water pipe or driven ground rod".
Page 299, "water pipe and/or other suitable electrode" as grounding point for neutral.
Page 365, section 250-81 goes into water pipes as ground in more detail. It usually can't be the only ground. That's in 250-81(a). But back then, there was an assumption that water pipes were a path to ground.
By 2011, use of a water pipe as ground was more restricted. It's still allowed, but you have to attach directly to the metal pipe where it comes out of the ground. See[2], page 238, section 250-51, "Grounding electrodes". (You're allowed 5 feet of pipe from building entrance). Also see 250-53(D)(2), where the risk of future replacement of a metal water pipe with plastic is discussed. Water pipes are now valid grounds only if they meet the general ground rod criterion - six feet of conductor buried in earth. (3m for pipes.) You can see the general progression from "pipes are grounds" to "only grounding rods driven in the ground can be trusted." Which is reasonable enough, given that most new pipe is plastic. At this point, grounding pipes is more about preventing them from becoming energized if something shorts to a pipe. Just as all electrical boxes must be grounded.
[1] https://archive.org/details/mcgrawhillsnatio00mcpa/page/296/...
[2] https://archive.org/details/nationalelectric0000unse_d8w8/pa...
Since they're a union, the pay scale is public: https://ibew46.com/media/6924/020623_020424_residential_area... Apprentices start at $21.30.
That McDonalds had a big "now hiring" sign out front, advertising $21 an hour. Hm. Not sure if the extra thirty cents would be worth tying yourself to construction's boom and bust cycle.
So for instance, one of the folks I know can do residential but also spent a year in the midwest learning how to wire up windmills. I guess that paid off in the last cycle when they had to pivot back and forth on jobs.
I just hate physical labor as a job, personally, but he makes almost as good of money as I do now, but my back will last past 50.
But you were taken advantage of. It's just that with the level of collusion in North America regarding electrical work and plumbing you are not going to be able to avoid it. I've seen the weirdest requirements which only a particular person with a particular license was able to perform and doing it yourself would be an automatic fail on an inspection even though the work was identical. I've also had some of these people make outright dangerous suggestions because they knew how to read their rule book but they didn't actually understand enough of what caused the rules to be written in that particular way to see when an exception to those rules needed to be made (case in point: someone wanted me to ground a 60' windmill tower at the house instead of at the base of the tower, which in case of a lightning strike would lead the lightning into the house).
Really, don't get me started, I've seen way to much of this to have anything but really bad memories of electrical inspectors, I'm sure there are good ones but I just haven't seen any. What I have seen is a bunch of little people with a lot of power to inflate costs resulting in no change or improvement.
Where was that? In my (medium-aged) American house and in some newish romex cable I bought last year, the ground wires are all bare copper cables, no green sheathing at all. I've had electrical work done in the last couple weeks, and no one even mentioned them.
IIRC (not an electricial) bare copper and green-sheathed wires are both acceptable for ground wires.
If it's been without issue for decades it likely will remain so if left as is. Once someone modifies it the risk of fire, electrocution, etc increases dramatically. That's why it needs to be brought into compliance as a general rule.
I replaced a panel that was rusted out (there was literally a hole rusted through in the back due to water intrusion in the wall) in a house that was built in the 1940's, re-wired with circuit breakers sometime in the 80's.
The electrician said I didn't need to replace any breakers, just the panel. I asked the local inspector if I had to put AFCI's and GFCI's everywhere required by modern code, he confirmed that it was highly recommended, but not strictly required for existing circuits, only for new circuits. I also didn't need to install a cutoff before the panel.
Since I was buying new breakers anyway, I ended up putting AFCI/GFCI's as required by code.
I kind of wonder if some of these safety devices will get people killed because they will fall tromping down to the basement or garage to muck with their panels.
When I build my own residence from scratch, I'm going for a more industrial loft aesthetic vibe where all utilities are run outside the walls where they are easily accessible to frequently modify them as I please. I want to be able to frequently update to code without making a giant, expensive mess, followed by a validation inspection from a licensed electrician. How we build residences today is not compatible with my desires for a sustainable, durable, maintenance- and repair-friendly implementation.
For commercial or industrial work above a certain scale and complexity, you probably won't even be able to find a licensed electrician to validate work done by non-licensed personnel for sign off to send up to an inspector. I wouldn't consider a 1MW+ (or anything starting off with a 480V three-phase service) data center appropriate to install with non-licensed staff. There are gray areas the smaller and more residential scale you get. I've seen some pretty awful work funded by apartment complex flippers using non-licensed personnel, for example.
Once you are talking about common residential (anything less than 300A, where the average US house is usually around 100-200A, dual single-phase 110V service) though, it depends more upon finding a licensed electrician who agrees to a proposal to validate your work. This is not very popular because it is considered like a mechanic called in to inspect a shade tree mechanic's work or your relatives you only see around Christmas time proposing to pay you to inspect their attempt to clean up after a ransomware attack. But it does happen.
Assuming you can find and convince such a licensed electrician, you can do practically anything in such a residential context. It's a lot of work, and if you're a decent software engineer you aren't really saving much money. It would be the sort of thing to do if sloppy electrician work that doesn't meet the standards of r/wireporn or r/cableporn for example just drives you bonkers, and you happen to really like nerding out over strictly interpreting the intricacies of NFPA 70, National Electrical Code (NEC) with others, and you simply like having the satisfaction of knowing your electrical subsystem that well. If you squint hard enough, the NEC almost takes on a life of its own like source code, which appeals to a lot of technical types, so it isn't hard to find engineers and technicians of different stripes in aerospace, mechanical, civil, etc. doing this kind of DIY.
Code compliance inspections are required, but unless you are lighting up new service for example, enforcement varies pretty dramatically between locales. Again, I've seen some pretty shady disasters waiting to happen from flippers, but the city is none the wiser because no permits were pulled.
I understand that these regulations exist in the name of safety, just be aware that any electrical updates to your home will likely involve a lot more work than you initially think. Depending on what you are getting done, the inspector may need to recheck your entire home. And, you're probably going to scoff at a good number of the required changes.