Sorry to beat this dead horse again guys, but, went to a presentation on AFCI's tonight put on by Cutler-Hammer(maybe Eaton-Yale elsewhere.) They had a piece of NMD 90 wired off a 15 Amp AFCI breaker to show how little of an arc was generated on a short circuit fault as comapared to a regular breaker. Being as inquisitive as we are we tried just touching the neutral and ground together to see what happened, the AFCI tripped every time. My question is why? Of course the guy they send out is a salesman and not a technician so we didnt get a very good answer from him, so I was just wondering what you guys thought.

The breaker is a combination AFCI/GFCI breaker. The GFCI portion opened the circuit when you went grounded conductor to ground.

Hummm.......

I think this may help.
I used to think since a gfci does not need a ground wire connected to it to function properly, that the above situation would not apply. Then I read this;
http://www.codecheck.com/gfci_principal.htm



[This message has been edited by WebSparky (edited 03-13-2003).]

Most AFCI breakers do not provide GFCI protection but all AFCI's do have ground fault protection set around 30 - 50 ma. Cutler-Hammer does make a combination AFCI/GFCI. If the neutral comes into contact with equipment ground the GFP or GFCI will open.

Curt