HomeVision Inspections LLC
Services Include Termite Inspection and Radon Testing
908-268-6118
We'll be there for you.....
..for as long as you own your home
Good Stuff to Know About GFCI's (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters)s)
If your house has one or more of these (you know, those outlets with the trip & reset buttons in the middle?)...and most homes do...you probably know that basically they protect you from being electrocuted by shutting off the power to the outlet if an electrical appliance you are using gets wet.
This is why they are found in areas around the home such as bathrooms, kitchens, basements, garages, and as exterior outlets where the use of electrical appliances near a water source is common.
Without getting complicated, if there is any imbalance in the flow of current, it trips the circuit.
It is able to sense a mismatch as small as 4 or 5 milliamps, and it can react as quickly as one-thirtieth of a second.
The flip side is that this same very quick action and sensitivity that can save your life can also cause the GFCI to trip even if their is just a slight variation in power supply within your home or from your electric company to your home. This can happen for any number of reasons without your knowledge. If it does, the GFCI will trip and it will not have power again until you push the reset button.
No big deal, right? Wrong.
If you have a freezer and/or a refrigerator plugged into a GFCI outlet as is often the case in basements and garages and it trips, there will be no power to that outlet and therefore to those appliances until the GFCI button is reset.
As GFCI's are not always connected to each other in sequence, one could trip while the others don't trip. Therefore, your other GFCI outlets could be working just fine, falsely leading you to think that all is well until you open the door of that fridge or freezer and find the power off and the food starting to spoil.
If this should occur while you are away on vacation, this would be a very unpleasant surprise to come home to in terms of odor, to say nothing of the cost of replacing the spoiled food.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure....don't use a GFCI outlet to plug in a refrigerator or freezer, and if any changes are to be made to your wiring, always hire a licensed electrician to do the job.
John Cagliostro
Home Inspector Lic# 24GI00051800
