Technical Corner - Electrical Engineering Focus

NEC 2020 GFCI Protection Changes

by Dylan Angora, Electrical Engineer, Colliers Engineering & Design

The article of the month will be electrical focused on the new ground-fault circuitinterrupter (GFCI) standards. The new changes to the GFCI standards implemented by the 2020 National Electric Code (NEC) have made it difficult to find solutions for certain equipment due to the lack of GFCI products available in the market.

NEC 2020 210(8)(B) states that all receptacles within Kitchens or areas with a sink and permanent provisions for either food preparation or cooking shall have GFCI protection for personnel. The difficulty that electrical designers are facing is that many types of equipment do not have a standard plug that will plug into a standard 5-20R receptacle. Much of this equipment instead utilizes locking receptacles that do not come with a GFCI protection option. This means that to make the equipment satisfy GFCI standards a GFCI breaker must be added to the panel. Below in Table 1 is a list of sizes of GFCI breakers that are currently being provided by Schneider Electric. However, there is some equipment that uses oddball breakers, for example: consider a piece of equipment that requires a 50A single pole circuit breaker. This is not available with GFCI protection. So, what do you do?

Some may suggest that an equipment protection device (EPD) breaker may work in similar instances due to the integral ground-fault protection. However, this style of breaker was designed to trip at 30mA to protect the equipment and not the personnel using the equipment. A GFCI rated breaker is designed to trip at 6mA to protect both the personnel using the equipment and the equipment itself. At this time, the market is very limited. Until such time that options become available it may be worth considering inline/wall mounted solutions, which are not aesthetically pleasing and are costly but will satisfy the GFCI requirements in the NEC 2020.

Hopefully this article finds you well and can be used as a reference for your project needs. If anyone would like to contribute to the RES magazine and add an article or would like to request information on a specific topic (not limited to Electrical) just email me at Brett.Eliasz@collierseng.com. As always, any comments are appreciated…! Thank you for reading