Skip to main content

GFCI

A lot of old houses have fuses and regular two prong outlets. GFCI sockets are a boon to a no fuss DIY rewiring of the house to make it much safer. A nice description of GFCI sockets is given here (In general stackexchange is awesome and I would recommend joining). A nice description, with pictures, of how to rewire a GFCI socket is given here.
The GFCI protects against ground faults. This means that if there is some problem with the equipment you plug in and any part of the wiring becomes, effectively, exposed, you are protected against getting a shock from that. However, nothing can protect against a deliberate touching of the live and neutral lines.
GFCIs are cool because you can use them for two prong outlets (with no ground). You still need three prong outlets for surge suppression - the surge suppressor redirects the surge to ground (which is basically a fat, extremely low resistance line, allowing the surge to flow past the equipment and into the ground beneath the house).
The typical recommendation is to have GFCIs for any outlets with any water nearby - kitchens, bathrooms, basements and the outdoors. They are more expensive than regular outlets, but there is no harm in replacing all outlets with GFCIs.
Note: Equipment you will need when replacing outlets
  1. Electrical tape
  2. Non-contact tester
  3. Electrical tester
  4. Insulated screwdriver
  5. Outlet tester
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or
Post a Comment
Read more

Using adminer on Mac OS X

adminer is a nice php based sqlite manager. I prefer the firefox plugin "sqlite manager" but it currently has a strange issue with FF5 that basically makes it unworkable, so I was looking for an alternative to tide me over. I really don't want apache running all the time on my computer and don't want people browsing to my computer, so what I needed to do was: Download the adminer php script into /Library/WebServer/Documents/ Change /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to allow running of php scripts (uncomment the line that begins: LoadModule php5_module Start the apache server: sudo apachectl -k start Operate the script by going to localhost Stop the server: sudo apachectl -k stop  
Post a Comment
Read more