This restaurant that I do electrical maintenance for has become quite an obstacle course. It was built less than two years ago and I would have hoped that everything would be fairly easy. Not so much.

They have an outdoor bar area where they have multiple POS terminals (cash registers). When the place was built, they put in a really nice centralized UPS setup with a separate panel to feed dedicated circuits to each of these terminals (there are 24 of them). They all have (gasp) isolated ground receptacles.

The problem is that the ones outside are on standard IG receptacles with in-use covers. UPS or not, these receptacles obviously have to be GFI protected. For this reason, I've told them that they can't use the standard IG receptacles that were installed outside. Frankly, I don't know how this setup passed inspection anyway, but that's another subject.

I'd like to offer them a solution in order to legalize these outdoor receptacles. My thought was to just replace them with GFI receptacles and be done with it, but their rocket scientist IT manager at corporate has mandated that all POS terminals must be on IG receptacles. I've never seen an IG/GFI receptacle. When I was at the supply house today, I asked the counter guy about them and he looked at me as if I had three eyes.

Is there even such a thing? I suppose that I could change out the four breakers to GFI ones, but the panel is a bolt-in Cutler Hammer one. I can only imagine how much those breakers would cost. Any ideas?


---Ed---

"But the guy at Home Depot said it would work."