Situation: Have a jetted bathtub that requires 2 15A gfci outlets each to its own breaker. Problem only have one wire running into tub area (would have to tear up.newly installed floor to run another. Is it possible to use that single wire and connect two wires and run to the outlets and connect two wires to the other end of the wire (wire is approx 8 ft) and run those to the breaker box and attach to two gcfi breakers
Electrical – use a single wire and run two jumpers to two gcfi outlets and on the other side run two wires off the single wire to two gcfi circuit breakers
bathtubcircuit breakerelectrical
Related Solutions
National Electrical Code 2014
Chapter 3 Wiring Methods
Article 300 Wiring Methods and Materials
I. General
300.3 Conductors
(B) Conductors of the Same Circuit. All conductors of the same circuit and, where used, the grounded conductor and all equipment-grounding conductors and bonding conductors shall be contained within the same raceway, auxiliary gutter, cable tray, cablebus assembly, trench, cable, or cord, unless otherwise permitted in accordance with 300.3(B)(1) through (B)(4).
The hot and neutral wires should be in the same raceway to reduce Inductive Coupling. You'll see using the Right-hand rule, that the magnetic fields created by the hot and neutral wires tend to cancel each other out. Thereby reducing the affects of inductive coupling.
I = current flow direction. B = direction of the magnetic field.
The ground wire was required to run in the same raceway, to provide a safe path for electricity to travel in the event of a short. If one of the wires sheathing becomes damaged, it's likely the exposed wire would have come in contact with the ground. The same way an equipment ground provides protection at a consumer, running the ground in the same raceway provides similar protection the entire length of the circuit.
No.
You should not put a GFCI outlet on a GCFI breaker. You need GFCI protection in only one device per circuit. Or stated better, you should not have a GFCI outlet downstream of a GFCI breaker. It's not unsafe per se, but it will be an unpredictable pain to deal with when it trips and you don't know where to go to reset it.
GFCI Outlets do not require GFCI breakers. GFCI Breakers make regular outlets and other devices GFCI protected.
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Best Answer
NO WAY!!!!
If I understand you correctly, you want to run 2 15A circuits over one cable. You can't do that. (There are certain exceptions involving a 3-wire cable, but I assume you are describing an ordinary 2-wire (plus ground) cable.) Depending on how you wire up those two circuits, you would either end up overloading the wires (30A on wires designed for 15A) or just outright zapping everything by ending up with 240V when you want 120V.
Following up a bit more based on comments:
Assuming that each device specified by the manufacturer only actually uses 7.5A, that would be too much for a single 15A circuit (therefore requiring two separate circuits) but small enough (15A is less than the 16A continuous limit for a 20A circuit) to fit on a 20A circuit, and therefore on 12 AWG wire.
However, aside from being a violation of the manufacturer's instructions, which is a big no-no on permanently wired devices, there is a potentially fatal flaw:
If you slam two circuits into one, you have no way to control which circuit actually carries the load! It might go 50/50 (as planned) but it might not. In addition, if one of those wires comes out, you now have all 15A of load going over a single circuit. While technically OK in the short-term, that is exactly what the manufacturer is trying to avoid by having you use two circuits in the first place. In addition, if there are any startup loads then there could be real honest-to-goodness overloads involved as well.
But wait, there's more! This will probably not actually work anyway because not only do you want to nominally split the circuits 50/50 for load purposes, you must split the loads consistently on hot and neutral. That just ain't gonna happen. Which means you may end up with frequent GFCI trips. Which inevitably leads to "who needs this GFCI stuff anyway". Which leads to taking out the GFCI and replacing with regular breakers "just for a little while to test things". Which of course becomes permanent. Which results in serious (possibly fatal) problems when there actually is a ground fault in a bathtub.
NO @#()$@&#$)!@@# WAY!