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I recently bought my first house and have been investigating the GFCI fix to branch circuits that (due to installation date) do not have equipment grounding conductor installed. My receptacle boxes are teeny tiny and don't fit modern GFCI receptacles. I started looking into GFCI breakers to make my life a lot easier, but when I looked in my panel, I saw something unexpected. It appears that I have (running to several bedrooms) a pair of 15-amp branch circuits that share a neutral, and have the hot conductors on separate phases. They are currently plugged into a dual-pole AFCI breaker:

dual pole afci breaker

Like I said, I was hoping to add GFCI protection to each of these circuits at the panel box. However, I haven't been able to find a 2-pole, dual function (AFCI/GFCI) breaker from Siemens. Does anyone know if these exist? If they don't, is there a particular reason why not?

Any suggestions what to do here to keep AFCI protection and add GFCI protection to this weird circuit?

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3 Answers 3

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As ThreePhaseEel already answered, you can't find AFCI/GFCI double breakers. I expect that will change over time, but you can't install what you can't find. You have two solutions:

  • Bigger Boxes

Most of the time it is not that hard to replace a small box with a larger box. I prefer metal boxes, and one reason is that it is easier to mount them in odd settings because you drill extra holes if needed.

In my own house I have found that sometimes even replacing an old ungrounded duplex receptacle with a modern good quality grounded duplex receptacle needs a bigger box than the original. GFCI/receptacles, of course, need even more space. So this is not uncommon at all.

  • Retrofit Ground

You can run a ground wire separate from the other wires/cable. If you have individual wires in conduit then it is easy - just add a green or bare ground wire to the same conduit. (And if the conduit is metal, that is the ground.) But assuming you have old cables without ground, you can run that ground wire pretty much any way you need to in order to get to either the breaker panel ground bar or to a ground wire in another box (e.g., a circuit that was added later that included a ground wire.)

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They don't

Unfortunately, nobody that I know of makes two-pole dual function (AF/GF) breakers (which is odd, because AFCIs of your vintage contain all the stuff needed for GF protection, just calibrated to a 30-100mA trip current instead of the 5mA of a Class A personnel protection GFCI). Your best bet is to find a place you can cut into each circuit's homerun and add a deadfront GFCI there, although you may have to replace part of the homerun with a /2/2 (dual circuit) NM cable to do this.

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  • Dang, that would have made my life a lot easier! Assuming I've given up on being able to avoid replacing a couple j-boxes for receptacles, is there some reason you might prefer deadfront GFCIs? Would a viable solution still be to install regular GFCI receptacles at the first receptacle on each branch circuit?
    – nViz
    Commented Apr 9 at 16:07
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Consider extension boxes

They make extension boxes which stack on top of your existing small box and make room for a GFCI.

One popular model is the Legrand Wiremold surface conduit starter box. It's for what it says, but if you never add any surface conduit to it, it becomes a tasteful extension box. Made in 1” or 2” heights.

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