Do I need a GFCI Circuit Breaker for EV Charging?

if you have a 240 volt outlet in your garage to charge your car and you don't have a breaker with a little test button on it like this one you're not compliant with the current code i'm going to tell you more about that and how to resolve it coming up [Music] welcome to handy dad tv i'm chris heider your virtual dad in the cloud and today i'm going to tell you why the breaker you have installed for your ev charging may not be compliant if your ev charger is plugged into an outlet that uses a breaker that looks like this and it doesn't have any kind of a test button on here that's not compliant with the 2020 national electric code every outlet in a wet location has to be protected by ground fault circuit interrupter gfci you look in your bathroom you'll probably find or your kitchen for that matter you'll probably find a little test button right on the outlet well they don't make outlets like that for car charging so the circuit protection has to be built into the breaker and that's what this little test button is for and i found a really good reference here online about the changes in this part of the code regarding gfci protection for dwelling units and you can see here from 2017 here you can see that it just required gfci protection for 125 volt outlets but in 2020 you can see the highlighted sections here indicate what changed and here it says all 125 volt through 250 volt receptacles in location specified below absolutely need to have gfci protection for personnel basically to keep you from getting shocked and this applies to garages as well as outdoors so that's why they change this for your safety and for your kids and anybody else and so anyway this is now the code and that's why i have to replace this breaker so what does that mean have to well if you are putting in a new outlet and you're getting it permitted then chances are the inspector is going to make sure that that is a gfci protected receptacle because that's what code says so you're going to have to put in that breaker now if you have a pre-existing one and it doesn't have it do you have to upgrade it no but you do have to realize it's there for your protection and your family and and all the guests in your house to make sure nobody gets shocked from that receptacle regardless i'm changing mine partially so i can show you guys how it's done that's really why and uh you know i'm gonna have grandkids someday and if they're playing in my garage i don't want to have to worry but it's your call and i got news for you this costs about 10 times as much which i guess stands to reason because a gfci outlet costs about 10 times as much as a regular outlet but this is a beefy piece of equipment that costs over a hundred dollars but it's there for your protection to prevent anything from happening anybody from getting shocked all right here's my outlet that i use to charge my car and this is my circuit breaker panel is right here above it so that made the installation really easy but this is the breaker that i use it's a 50 amp breaker but it's a normal breaker it's not a gfci breaker so i'm going to turn that off now you can see the tesla logo is off but i want to turn off the whole power in the house i want the panel to be dead before i open it up so to do that i'm going to shut off the main breaker and before i do that i like to turn off each one of the branch circuits that just make sure that nothing is on and then i flip that and now the house is dead now i can open the panel [Music] okay this is the inside of my panel and the reason why i turn all the power off is because these two plates down here those bare metal plates they would be live they would be hot if the main breaker was on okay these lines up top here are still hot but you can tell they're covered so i'm safe and i'm not going up that high anyway i'm going to work all down here i'm just going to replace this breaker now the outlet i have here is a three conductor outlet that means it has two hots and a neutral and you can see this is the cable that comes in from there you can see it has a black a red and a white it also has a ground as well but mine is wired so that the black and the red go into the current breaker and the white one goes into this bus bar underneath now depending upon the type of outlet you have installed sometimes it only needs two conductors so these may actually be black and white whatever they are just note which ones are connected to the breaker because you're going to need to know that for the the gfci breaker mine pops from the middle out and then out of here so you can see the way that i took it out but that happens to be mine mine's a square d yours may be different now what i'm going to do is take off the black and the red from the breaker okay those are those two wires and then i need to take the white one off of here too if you have a three conductor outlet like i do the white one will go here that's the neutral and the two hot ones the black and the red will go here if you only have a black and a white they will go here and you won't use this one in the middle okay so that's the breaker installed and now i can put this white wire i'll bring it down here now you can see why i have the power off in the whole box because my hands are all over this and i'd be sweating if i didn't turn the whole all the power off in the house okay that one's good and tight okay at this point i'm gonna put my red one on top and the white one is gonna go in okay i tighten them as tight as i possibly can and i think they're good at this point all right so here you can see it is completely installed i've got the red white and black coming up the side they all go in to the gfci breaker just like this red black with the white in the middle the white is always the neutral if you don't have a neutral if you only have a two conductor wire again you don't you only use the outside you don't use the inside one this is only for like a nema 1450 like i have okay if you have a nema 650 you're not going to use this at all and then of course the coiled white wire gets connected to the bus bar down here and that's it now i can cover up the panel and turn the power back on again all right to turn the house power back on i'm going to do the opposite i'm going to turn on the main breaker and then all the branch circuits and finally my gfci all right now before i plug any load in i'm going to try the test and it doesn't pop maybe it needs a load well clearly i have a defective breaker here so you can see the umc has power so the breaker is on it's just this test button is not working for some reason all right several weeks have gone by and i exchanged that breaker for a new one i put it in let's see if it works this time all right so i just installed this turning it on and i have lights down on my umc so i know the power is on and now i'm going to try the test that's what's supposed to happen it's as if there was a short circuit and the breaker has kicked off and then to turn it back on you have to turn it off completely and then push it all the way and then the power is back on again now this is protected for shocks hey one final editing note here is that you can avoid having to install a gfci breaker if you use a hard wired charger such as the tesla wall charger or a third-party wall charger if it is hardwired there is no receptacle there for someone to get shocked so just a thought if you want to take the money that it would cost for that breaker and and put it towards a permanent wall charger you can do that that's your prerogative if you are a diy video creator struggling to find an audience join handy dad tv and get instant access to an established audience that will provide more views and income than you're getting on your own just go to handydad.tv join for more information

Channel: HandyDadTV

Views: 45,228

Keywords: handy dad tv, handydad.tv, handydadtv, ev charging, tesla charging, level 2 charging, tesla umc, nema 14-50, gfci circuit breaker, nema 6-50, tesla home charging, do I need a gfci breaker?, gfci breaker, ground fault circuit interruption, electric vehicle, ev, home charging

Id: BixGQisysDc

Length: 9min 48sec (588 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022