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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

They only need to be installed in specific places... But they ought to be installed for the whole house.

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.

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> 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?

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.

Yes, the pan would complete the circuit. Not to mention the whole scenario being extremely unlikely.

> Refrigerator only needs a GFI if it is within a certain distance of a sink.

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.

Oh I wasn’t aware of that change, my state hasn’t adopted NEC 2023 yet and I haven’t received my NEC 2023 code book from my employer yet.

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

Let know when GFCIs and AFCIs are robust enough against spurious tripping and I will readily install them everywhere.

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.

European GFCI's are 30mA, and don't false trip. US GFCI's are 5mA, and frequenty false trip.

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...

This thread is really baffling to this Dutchman. All houses have a house-wide residual-current device here; it is not a topic for debate at all. And indeed, these don't false trip.

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.

Those hard plastic conduit are not providing much in the way of mechanical protection. wires in studs works pretty well, really.

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.

GFCIs also have a lifespan. Ideally they’ll be easily replaced at the breaker panel, but most of the time they are put on outlets. Those outlets could be in a difficult to reach location. They are about twice the cost of a regular outlet/breaker. AFCIs seem to be about three to four times.

If the system voltage is between 150 V and 300 V, then either double insulation or a separate safety ground with the same gauge wire as the hot conductor is required; the purpose of the safety ground is to keep the equipment case or cabinet from reaching 150 V in case of a fault.

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.

My mom doesn’t live with me (the bulb inside the fridge is LED anyway), I don’t have a baby (babies don’t carry metal forks), and I live on the second floor (but the power would be out long before the first floor floods).

I don’t want whole house GFCI.

I agree that over-zealous GFCI is annoying. BUT, as a new parent, I can assure you that babies will manifest dangerous objects and do dangerous things.

> I don’t have a baby (babies don’t carry metal forks)

Your second claim could only be made by somebody for whom the first statement is true.

I have twice lost a fridge full of food due to spurious GFCI trips, once when I was a recent graduate and it was a painful experience financially.

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].

Also funny how fridges are required to have their own circuit, but newer fridges are increasingly vfd/inverter drive, and don’t have surge power draws anymore. They use a few hundred watts continuously and that’s it.

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 have a lot of power surges in my area. Recently, the old power shut off, then power back on in 3 seconds thing happened - and the surge was enough to pop my fridge motors and cause a $900 repair.

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.

Can you share what device you're using for the 3-minute shut-off and recovery?

I have this guy

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.

What kind of fridge do you have that draws several hundred watts continuously? I haven’t tested my fridge, but I have a very large chest freezer that never draws more than ~35W. Surely a fridge can’t be 10x worse than that.

I seriously doubt that your freezer max draw is 35W. An Energy Star freezer can only average ~25W across the entire year. I doubt that the peak is less than 1.4x the average draw.

A fridge max power draw is usually during the defrost cycle. My defrost heater measures a bit over 500W.

You’re probably right, but I did watch my freezer plugged into a kill-a-watt for a while, and even when the compressor first kicked on, I never saw anything higher than 35W. Maybe the kill-a-watt is inaccurate, or maybe it doesn’t update fast enough, I’m not sure. Another factor, too: it doesn’t have any sort of auto defrost.

Different models and different designs and everything, but just as another data point, I recall my chest freezer pulling 300W+ when the compressor kicks on, and likely higher transient spikes, as it kept burning out the fuse on my 500W transformer, and I had to switch to a 1kW one.

Check out the YoLink temperature sensors on Amazon. They are amazing for monitoring our secondary freezer. All their sensors have been great. Temp for fridge/freezers, leak detectors, temp+humidity for basement, they have a motion sensor that is a magnet you can place in the back of your mailbox if you want to know when mail is delivered. Their door sensor can be installed on overhead garage doors by a magnet and a velcro strip for the part that goes on the wall. They also have a 1/4 mile range and the sensor can be inside your fridge/freezer and still connect. App is great, no monthly fee, you get notifications on your phone you can also get a small number of SMS messages for free. All notifications/limits are configurable.

A shock on 120VAC can absolutely kill. It’s not the volts which kill you, it’s the amps, and it’s specifically why GFCI trip at somewhere between 5mA and 30mA (depending) — it’s because those are not levels as likely to cause fibrillation.

A whole house GFCI would ruin all the food in my refrigerator several times a year.

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