I'm not an electrician. I wired my own house (complete 200 amp service, 4500sqft).
I work with several electricians, and asked one "if you were gonna build a new house for yourself, what would you do that most premade houses don't have?"
His answer "I would install gfci outlets at the first outlet of each circuit". (If wired right it protects all remaining outlets on that circuit.)
So, I did that, the inspector said there was nothing wrong with the way I wired it, very safe, but I would have tonnes of "nuisance trips" from the outlets. Well I did, and promptly rewired almost all GFCI outlets so they only protected themselves, not the down line outlets.
I know it was overkill and expensive, but what I did was run 14/3 to my fishtank circuit, which is 2 seperate double plugs. (Be careful if you do this, research it a lot.) The white (neutral) is shared with the 2 hot circuits (red/black). In the panel I put in a double pole 15amp GFCI breaker ( $150 breaker).
I regret running the 14/3, that locked me into a 2 pole breaker, which is more money. If I did it again I would run either 2 lines of 14/2 and 2 single pole 15 amp gfci breakers or better yet 2 @ 12/2 lines and 2 single pole 20 amp gfci breakers. Reason being, if one circuit trips, it trips both breakers, meaning all my pumps die, except my return pump in the basement which runs in the sump and is plugged into a gfci plug on a whole other circuit.
|