Will GFCI work with items without equipment ground
I know it's probably a dumb question but my wife's hair dryer is old and has no equipment ground. Wanted to be sure she is still protected if it should be dropped into water or otherwise shorted.
Forum Discussion
Harvard wrote:
The under lying issue with "unexpected" GFCI tripping from an RV sub system is called "stray capacitance" which allows for stray current leakage. Every foot of wire has some stray capacitance and some loads have RFI capacitors across their AC input circuits. All this "Normal Capacitance" soon adds up to be a 5 mA current leakage.
That is assuming you don't have a neutral/ground fault somewhere in the RV wiring, or a bad water heater element, or a bad fridge element, or water intrusion in some electrical box, or some other problem.
It takes hundreds of feet of Romex to get sufficient capacitive coupling in the cable to be problematic, somewhere around a few thousand feet I think. The current requirements for electronic devices are no more than 0.5 mA leakage in RFI filters, etc. A properly constructed RV, one with no ground faults, generally should not cause a good quality, properly functioning GFCI to trip. I suspect, albeit without proof, that more than a few RVers have actual electrical problems or faulty appliances that go uncorrected because they chalk things up to "RVs and GFCIs don't work well together" rather than looking to see if there really is a problem to be fixed.
(I'm also a little surprised the NEC doesn't require GFCI protection for outdoor RV receptacles as they do for standard outdoor receptacles.)
