Electrical – 40 amp Pool heater hooked up to 60 amp outdoor Spa Box

electricalelectrical-panel

I purchased a Siemens electric panel for a spa with a 60 amp breaker. Is there any danger in hooking up my 40 Amp pool water heater to it?

2nd Question…The Panel comes with 4 slots, can i use the 60 amp GFCI Breaker in the house and use regular non GFCI 40 amp + 15 amp Breakers in the box (15 amp Breaker is for the pool pump)

Best Answer

Double check everything, since Siemens makes several lines of breaker/panel (which are physically incompatible so they plainly won't fit), but it all makes sense to me.

  • You made a canny choice of hot tub subpanel so you could swap breakers - smart economics.
  • The farther upstream the GFCI protection is, the better - and you can't get more upstream than the main panel, can you? :)
  • The breaker in the panel is able to protect the #6 cable and 60A subpanel.
  • The breaker has the correct thresholds for a hot tub (8ma and not 30ma) since it's sold as a hot tub panel.
  • With the subpanel fully GFCI protected, you can put plain breakers in there. Though a typical dumb home inspector isn't going to like it.

Be sure to put "GFCI Protected" labels on the receptacles and subpanel, I recommend making your own with a common labelmaker, as they last longer than the blue paper ones that come with GFCIs.

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