DIYbanter - View Single Post - Adding a GFCI outlet with two-wire (duplex) wire

Jeff Wisnia

wrote:

Joshua Putnam wrote:

snipped
There is no way that a ground is better than a GFCI. Given the choice
of one or the other, I would take the GFCI in a minute. Most of the
items one plugs in today don't even have a ground wire, whether it's a
hair dryer, toaster, or electric drill. Get any of those wet or with
an exposed conductor and grab it while grounded and it can kill you
whether it's plugged into a grounded outlet or not. But if it's
plugged into a GFCI, it will trip at 5ma in a fraction of a second,
whether the appliance has a ground or not, which is much less than the
current required to kill you.

Sure, GFCI's can fail. But so can grounds. Haven't we seen plenty of
posts on here of folks with all kinds of situations with missing
grounds? All you need for a ground to be ineffective is an
interruption in the daisy chain of wiring. So, without actual data, I
would not conclude that grounds are any more or less reliable than a
GFCI.

Since I think I was the first poster on this thread to remind the OP to
apply that "No Ground Connection" sticker, I wasn't against it, just
pondering about the average citizen not even understand what it means.
Well, maybe a techie or perhaps someone trying to test the GFCI with an
artificially created external leak to the ground pin hole. When GFCIs
first began to appearI once stuck the leads of a 10K one watt carbon
resistor between the hot and ground pins on a GFCI to "test" its tripping.

I'm sure that the manufacturers of GFCI outlets are more than willing to
include that sticker to maximize their CYA potential.

And I'd agree that a belt and suspenders approach, with a properly
grounded GFCI would have advantages over an ungrounded one in unlikely
and arcane situations.

Jeff

--
Jeffry Wisnia
(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)
"What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?"