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I have a circuit protected by a GFC breaker and I change a regular receptacle with a GFCI receptacle and now same time I have a trip breaker, is ok or not to do this???
Details:

Main GFC breaker is for a sunhouse and the GFCI receptacle is daisy chained to a shed 100ft faraway; on the sed I have 2 fluorescent lights and 2 receptacle on the load side to GFCI.

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  • If the install was correct, you put the feed or hot wires on the line side and the additional circuits on the load side of the outlet this should work. If you push the test button on the outlet both will usually trip. The hot wire on the brass colored screw neutral on the silver colored screw and the ground on the green colored screw are also important.
    – Ed Beal
    Commented Aug 31, 2016 at 13:03

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Daisy chaining GFCI devices can be problematic, even if they appear to be wired correctly. The downstream GFCI (receptacle) may perform an internal self-test when energized, which the upstream GFCI (breaker) detects as a fault.

I have experienced this myself. In my barn I had a circuit with two GFCI receptacles daisy-chained. The first (upstream) GFCI would trip about 1 or 2 seconds after the circuit was energized.

With GFCI devices designed for residential installation, there is no need to daisy chain them, as they all are set to trip at around 6mA of leakage current. Daisy chaining GFCIs does not increase protection.

In industrial and commercial installations, GFCI devices may be daisy chained, but the upstream GFCI devices usually are set to a higher trip point while the downstream GFCI devices protecting point-of-use receptacles is set to the standard 6mA. This provides some protection for the upstream circuitry, but prevents nuisance tripping of the upstream GFCI when several connected loads have otherwise insignificant leakage currents that might add up to more than 6mA.

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You can daisy-chain GFCIs if you really want to. They will still protect just fine.

But you have more annoyance dealing with trips... because all the GFCI's will trip, and you will have to do more walking to find and reset them all.

The only way it's dangerous is: If you have put double protection on circuit A, and no protection at all on circuit B, then you are wasting resources; you could protect circuit B and you haven't. Circuit B can still kill you.

If you put the GFCI outlet on the already-protected GFCI circuit hoping only the nearer one will trip, and save you the walk down to the service panel... well, you just wasted your money. GFCI's do not work that way.

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