GFI saved my life tonight

[Polscot]

Your house break would have tripped b4 it would "shock" you, GFIs work to prevent surges that can damage equipment, you can stand in your bathtub and drop a running hairdryer into it and you'll be fine (house breaker would trip)

-Your Friendly neighborhood Electrician

[mark]

gfi work by comparing current between hot and neutral and trip on an milli-amp imbalance. Cause of the imbalance could be me in the circuit by at a lower level, but fatal, than a panel breaker would trip.

[rishu_pepper]

Bought myself one of these:

http://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/4-outlet.../6000109954969

Yay or nay?

[vaporize]

Originally Posted by Polscot

Your house break would have tripped b4 it would "shock" you, GFIs work to prevent surges that can damage equipment, you can stand in your bathtub and drop a running hairdryer into it and you'll be fine (house breaker would trip)

-Your Friendly neighborhood Electrician

Can you do a demo video?

[FishyFishy!]

Hahaha yea!!! Demo!! Ive been zapped numerous times, not once did the house breaker trip.

Not only that...the powerbar that the bad equipment was plugged into didnt trip either. Stray voltage stays in the aquarium for sure. Thats why they make grounding probes lol.

[mike31154]

Originally Posted by rishu_pepper

Bought myself one of these:

http://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/4-outlet.../6000109954969

Yay or nay?

That'll do it. I have one of them as well, but don't use it for my fish tank since I installed a couple of in wall GFI outlets. I haven't read the specs for this power bar lately, but one thing to be aware of, especially for workshop type ones, is that many of them will not automatically reset after a power outage. The reason for this is that if you're running a portable power tool that trips the device, you may not want it to start up again unattended while you go reset the circuit breaker. Most of the built in/replacement wall outlet GFI devices will generally not trip when there's an outage & when power is restored by the hydro company, they will be on & continue to run whatever is plugged in to them. This is probably a good thing if there's an extended power outage & the power comes back on while you're away.

Quick way to confirm is to plug the GFI power bar in, go trip & reset the circuit breaker & see if it's still live after cycling.

For those folks who think they are safe using a grounding probe without a GFI device at the same time, do a little research. In the end, it's your choice & risk, but you could be liable if a friend, visitor, child gets injured when they stick a hand or arm into a tank with unsafe electrical components.