this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
833 points (99.1% liked)

Funny

6928 readers
397 users here now

General rules:

Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

It depends honestly. Here in the states, we GFCI kitchens, bathrooms, laundries, garages, crawl spaces underneath houses, and exteriors, basically anywhere it could be reasonably expected to come in contact with water or an unexpected grounding/earth source. From there, you can either do a GFCI breaker or receptacle. Both will protect everything downstream from the device, but the choice comes down to convenience of operation. I'll generally do GFCI breakers for dishwasher, disposals, refrigerators, etc, just so that if the GFCI trips you can reset it in the panel so you don't have to pull the equipment out to get to it, but I'll do kitchen and bathroom counter convenience plugs as a GFCI receptacle (and daisychain all downstream kitchen receptacles from the GFCI receptacle) to be able to reset it right there at the point of use.

You could in theory GFCI protect an entire house/flat, but it likely comes down to cost saving and avoiding nuisance trips. Motors as they age tend to leak current and trip GFCIs, and any number of delicate electronics can be finicky, so that's typically why we only use them in wet locations.