GFCI Question

[thaxboyd]

Have 3 of them on the same level, one in each bathroom and one by the kitchen sink.

Why is it that all will trip when one trips? Furthermore when one trips it also kills the outlet in the garage which is not a GFCI. This is my 2nd house that was wired like this.

 

[Duke74]

whoever did the wiring kept feeding everything beyond the first gfci from the load side of the first one and all the other gfci’s. this really isn’t needed because if one trips in one part of the house, you really don’t need the other ones tripping in other rooms. If you remove the white and black wires from the load side of your gfci receptacles and pigtail them into the incoming power, the gfci receptacles will remain on the same circuit but will trip independent of each other. Take note I am in Canada and our codes may be different from our American friends.

 

[Meursault74]

Pretty much as Duke74 said.

If the 1st outlet in line is GFCI the ones down stream so to speak can also use the protection circuitry of the 1st one. I'm not sure why they'd connect them that way and have GFCI outlets down the line of the 1st when they can all have the protection.

In my garage, the first outlet on one wall is GFCI, the others on the wall are normal ones, but if I induce a ground fault in any of the outlets on that wall, the circuitry from the GFCI outlet will trip and disable all of them all. It was cheaper from me to do it that way.

 

[justsam]

Based on the receptacle locations you gave, these should not all be on the same circuit. How old is the house and how much wiring "modification" has been done.

Assuming they all are indeed on the same circuit, and wired to load side of a head end GFCI, only one of the GFCI should have tripped, the one with the lowest trip threshold for fault current. At that point ALL down stream receptacles will be dead, GFCI type or not.

In the case of your garage, it is fine to be a non-GFCI receptacle as long s it is protected somewhere upstream by a GFCI receptacle, or a GFCI breaker.

Regarding what you observed, and assuming these receptacles are on separate circuits as they should be, I would tend to suspect some more global impairment like a loose neutral at the panel or meter.