On Friday, July 24, 2015 at 6:18:05 PM UTC-4, trader_4 wrote:


So in order to replace the breaker I think that all I have to do is shut off the power at the first box and replace the breaker simply adding the white line anywhere to the neutral bar on the right, yes?

Yes, that;s correct.



After I made the last post, I realized there is one more step here.
That's the problem when you're telling someone how to do it vs just
doing it yourself.

The breaker that is there for the pool light now only has a hot
connection. The GFCI breaker has two neutral connections. One
is the wire that you correctly talked about connecting to the
neutral bar. The other is a screw terminal for the neutral
coming from the load. You need to remove that pool light neutral from
where it's connected on the neutral bar and connect it the the
neutral terminal on the GFCI.

This all gets back to how it works. With a regular breaker,
the breaker doesn't care about the current coming back on
the neutral. With GFCI, it needs to be able to compare the
hot current with the current returning on the neutral. So,
that neutral current has to come from the load, through the
GFCI breaker and then go to the neutral bar.

And then I think things take a turn for the worse. After
realizing this, to guide you through it, I went back and
looked at that pic of the panel again to see where the
pool light neutral is. Take a look at
the two neutral bars. The one on the left only has the
outgoing feed to the subpanel connected to it. The right
one has just two wires. One, the heavier one, is for the spa.
That leaves just one neutral for the circuits for 3 breakers,
which you think a

pool pump
solar pool pump
pool lights

So, something here ain't right. The only thing that would
make some sense would be if the pool pumps are actually
240V motors, which is very common. In that case, they don't
need a neutral and the one neutral would be for the pool lights.
But if that's the case, IDK why the motors would be on two separate
breakers a mile apart in the panel, instead of the way they should be,
ie one double pole breaker. The two breakers for the pumps
are on opposite legs, so it could be and hopefully is a 240V circuit.
From what I'm seeing now, unless I'm missing something, this
looks like amature hour by whoever did this and your best
bet is probably to wait and let the electrician figure out
what's going on.

BTW, does that spa have it's own GFCI? IF not, there should
be a GFCI breaker for that in this panel too.

Funny how something so simple became so much more complicated.
Maybe others here will have comments as to what they think is
going on.