Electrical – Bad GFCI or did I wire it wrong

electricalgfci

I just installed a Hubbel GFCI socket and when I turned the circuit breaker back on the GFCI green and red led lights went on and the reset button would not stay in.

The ground wires are pigtailed and connected to the ground screw on the metal box.

The line cable leads are connected to the appropriate colored line screws on the gfci

The existing load cable pair are connected to the appropriate load screws on the gfci.

Don’t know if I have a bad GFCI or something is wrong with my my wiring.

Could another unknown GFCI device on that came circuit be causing this problem

Any ideas what might be wrong?

Best Answer

Always pause in your installation after you have fitted the LINE wires, but before you have fitted any LOAD wires. Power up and run the GFCI through its paces.

This clears a number of problems, including

  • getting supply and downline wires confused
  • accidentally attaching to the LOAD terminals
  • shorts and other problems with the downline wiring
  • having an actual ground fault somewhere downline

If the GFCI works without anything on the LOAD line, then you know that if problems emerge after adding a set of wires to LOAD, this is a problem there, and can troubleshoot accordingly.

Another GFCI device on a different circuit cannot cause this. Another GFCI upstream on this circuit would cause this GFCI to go dark entirely.