Joshua Peterson with Peterson Electric in Denver, Colorado helping out a customer. This was a weird one. The compliant was the breaker kept popping and it was based on the bathroom outlet being used and GFCI breaker in the panel. This is a smaller apartment and they stuck the panel next to the fridge in the kitchen. The breaker kept popped. When I first came out, I saw 2 outlets cracked on two different circuits. I assumed the outlet that was cracked was the cause, but I went ahead and tested and everything was working. Before I left, I also looked at their hair dryer and saw some bubbling on the prongs, so if you ever see any melting, it is going to show up on the connection point. I told her to replace her hair dryer and I changed the outlet. I took off an 10 days later, I get another recall on the same breaker is popping again. I went in there and plugged in the new hair dryer and it popped again. Basically, when your GFCI breaker, back in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, you would take these out. This is a FPE, “fire pacfic” is what we call it. We put in a normal breaker and take out the GFCI breaker and put a GFCI in the bathroom. On time, this will either break on an overload or on a GFCI side starting to wear out. What we also found out is that her 2 bathrooms are tied on a same 15amp circuit. Even back in the 70s, they had a 20amp circuit for that. They also tied the bedroom, hallway lights and laundry room lights to that same circuit of the hair dryer. The problem is there is no way to change this. There is an apartment up and down and no way to run new wires. They have to be aware that they can only run the hair dryer and bathroom lights and nothing else. Turn off the hair dryer and then everything else is fine. That is because the hair dryer alone is drawing 12 amps.
