Sparky (Steve) has raised an interesting topic from another BB on the different approach taken to ground-fault protection in the U.S. and Europe.
For those of you who haven't read the other posts in this section, a very common scheme both in the U.K. & Continental Europe is to have a single GFI which feeds the main panel and thus provides ground-fault protection for the whole house.
The main GFI is most often a 100mA or 30mA type, although older ones could be up to 500mA, so they don't offer the close protection of the typical U.S. GFI on an individual circuit.
Per the original query, I've tried searching for statistics on accident rates related to this, but it seems to be quite difficult to locate anything.
The Irish Electro-Tech Council has data available for electrical fatalities analyzed in many different ways --
www.etci.ie/activities/accident.html -- but no information on whether GFI protected circuitry was concerned or not.
Comments?
