Hi Everyone,
I have a question regarding GFCI AFCI Breakers in my main panel. I have a Siemens residential household box with QP breakers. I wanted to replace a standard one with a GFCI AFCI Breaker. I noticed that the cable conduit that houses that circuit has a black, red, and white wire. The Red wire goes to the breaker load and the white goes to the neutral bar. The Black wire in the same conduit goes to the load on the breaker below that one.
So what I did was replace the breaker with the red load wire with the GFCI Breaker and moved the white neutral from the bar to the GFCI AFCI breaker and then took the white pigtail on the breaker and moved it to the neutral bar. The issue that I am finding is that I can’t have power on to both that breaker and the normal breaker below it that share the 1 wire in the conduit.
Are there suggestions to handle this situation? Both worked fine with when using normal breakers but I can’t figure out how to use the GFCI AFCI breaker in this scenario. Thanks
Replies
What you have is a multi wire branch circuit. It should have been on a 2 Pole circuit breaker. It will not work for what you are trying to do. You wold have to have individual neutrals for each circuit.
On your multi-wire branch circuit it had to have black on one phase and red on the other. Thus the two original breakers. Then the neutral stayed 120v switching phases when the power loads switched. Now the neutral passes back through the AFCI+ breaker. Chances are you will need to run a new neutral wire with the black load/circuit. Check with local electricians or code officials.
Thank you for thoughts here. Fishing a new white white seems daunting since I am not exactly the first entry point that they lead to where I would have access. Any other options that I could look in to? I didn't create the multi branch myself, I think that was original to the house.
I would check how much load (how many lights and receptacles, for example) is on each circuit and see if I could safely combine them to one circuit. If a significant portion of the load is lighting, switching to LED's might give you enough headroom to make the circuit a single gfci/afci circuit. Then you only need to pigtail the red and black together. When I started wiring houses in '81, we often combined circuits like this on a 15 amp 14-3 or 20 amp 12-3 wire.