General > General Technical Chat
Anything I should know about putting GFCIs at a work bench?
jlmoon:
Not sure why anyone would want GFCI breakers on their workbench unless they're working in their bare feet or standing in a pool of water or if you have a metal grounded bench it might be a great idea. But for the most part sounds like more trouble than they are worth.
Any slight leakage of suspect equipment you might be working on is going to trip them, adding another unknown to the path of troubleshooting. I prefer to treat all my bench areas as plug in appliances to dedicated and isolated grounds as to reduce the common mode noise and any ground loops that are easy to create.
cdev:
Actually, I could probably be a poster child for how everything is increasingly low voltage and DC centric.
I just think its a kind of matter of principle to have even more- an extra level of protection.
gwideman:
--- Quote from: jlmoon on April 08, 2015, 07:28:14 pm ---Not sure why anyone would want GFCI breakers on their workbench unless they're working in their bare feet or standing in a pool of water
--- End quote ---
I realize this is rather an old thread, but to answer this point:
You are right to observe that the GFCI will only trip on current that "escapes" from the Line-Neutral path. That can easily happen if you inadvertently create a path from any live part of the device under test to a grounded terminal or case of some test equipment, for example a scope.
As to a grounded workbench surface -- this sounds like a terrible idea. The user would almost always have some body part in contact with that surface, so any single arm touching a live part of a circuit will always give a shock. Ie: The "One hand rule" would become useless.
Psi:
This is not GFCI/RCD related but make sure your work-bench/work-room has a master power switch.
So you can flip one switch off and walk away with everything powered down.
Accidently leaving something on is quite a high fire/safety risk with electronics. Hot air/ soldering irons/ pre-heaters / solder pots / reflow ovens / high current circuits ... All things that get HOT and are able to catch on fire and burn your house down.
If you are in the room you can easily stop problems from becoming fires, but if your asleep in another room or out of the house you can't.
Just last month my hot air gun slipped out of its holder and was point blank pointing at my wooden desk.
It had already made a rather large burn hole in the desk and was well on its way to starting a fire before i noticed the problem and stopped it, and i was in the room.
JustMeHere:
So I had a house that had no earth but a GFCI panel to get it up to code. (Well the bathrooms still had to be grounded, so I had to pay for that.)
These things trip when less power comes back in N than goes out on Load.
N is connected to Earth in the panel. So it's I'm not sure it can "fault" to Earth. It can become disconnected.
I did ultimately run a grounded line to my office. That circuit would trip every time lightning would strike too close.
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