Electrical – Will gfci receptacles trip before a gfci breaker on same circuit

electricalgfci

A 2nd floor bathroom I am remodeling has receptacles protected by gfci breaker in the panel which is in the basement.

A previous contractor put gfci receptacles at two locations over vanity.

Is there a good reason for having these receptacles gfci’d? For example would the receptacle trip and prevent the breaker from tripping?

That may be nice since it would prevent a trek down 2 flights of stairs to reset it.

Is that sound reasoning?

Edit: I double checked and the breaker is a gfci not an afci.

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Best Answer

They'll both trip

Both GFCIs will see the ground fault and react the same way to it, snapping off at the same time.

When you go to reset the receptacle, it will be dead. You will need to go down to the basement to reset the GFCI breaker, and then, the GFCI outlet will have a chance of being reset.

The contractor did it to correct a code violation

Bathrooms can use all sorts of outlets, but they must be GFCI protected. A GFCI breaker is a perfectly fine way to do that. However, any outlet protected by an upline device must have a sticker that says "GFCI Protected".

The home inspector came in and saw no GFCI device and no sticker, so wrote it up as a Code violation. The seller or Realtor, in a rush to get the house sold, called in a contractor and said "Fix this!"

The mortal of the story is Put stickers on your GFCI receps.

A lot of moro^Htals believe that all GFCI devices are receptacles, and when someone says GFCI they mean receptacle. So in their rush to fix it, the message got passed to the contractor "No GFCI in the bathroom, 2 receps" which the contractor took to mean "no GFCI receptacles". The contractor may not have been a qualified electrician who would have known better. Or maybe the markup was just better on 2 GFCI receps than 2 stickers.

Regardless, they have played a "Yo dawg" joke on you.

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