GFCI Outlet

[kylecanada]

If I am building a fish room with a few dedicated outlets, should they all be GFI protected or should 1 one of them be standard for any equipment like return pumps? Thank you for the help.

[Compguy]

I would think you would want them to be GFCI in case anything happens they will trip, but maybe someone with more experience can help out.... There may be a reason not to have all of them GFCI, I'm not to sure, hopefully someone with a little more experience will jump in.

[cotter4601]

Some people like to have an outlet or 2 not on GFCI so they don't trip accidentially and turn on a main piece of equipment. I would rather have them on all oulets just to be safe. If a GFCI starting tripping on it's own then it's time to replace the outlet.

[buck50bmg]

Anything around or in water needs to be GFCI protected. Now the dedicated outlets your talking about...is it one circuit? (on one breaker?) If so I would use multiple GFCI outlets for the sole reason of not pulling you hair out. If you use say 4 GFCI outlets, you could put the return pump on one, lights on another and aux pumps on another. So say the aux pump trips the GFCI, well if it was one outlet then everything would go down and troubleshooting would be harder, now if its on its own outlet then you know what the offending equipment is.

[kylecanada]

Ok thank you. I plan to use (3) 20 amp dedicated circuits. So if one trips, the others will be fine. Does this sound right?

[buck50bmg]

So you will have 3 20a runs to your panel each on its own breaker?

[Compguy]

Thats what I just finished doing was wiring from my box, I now have three 20 breakers in the box just for all of my equipment, then I can run outlets off of each breaker, its those darn Halides that take up alot

[kylecanada]

Yes, that is correct

[Macimage]

Yes, that is what we did. My husband added 3 new 20 amp breakers to the box and ran them to the fish room. We added 25 or so new outlets. Sounds good.

Joyce

[kylecanada]

25 outlets wow. I have some work to do. I guess it is better to have too many than not enough.