I have an older home that has an unfinished basement, as well as a dirt floor crawl space under a newer addition. Both areas have the old porcelain lamp sockets for their light sources. Now I have recently rewired all receptacles in these areas to be GFCI outlets, or protected by a GFCI. My question is whether or not the lighting circuits also need to be protected. I could see with ease, breaking a bulb in the crawl space, and getting your thumb (or some other body part) up in the socket while lying on the damp ground... could be shocking. Does anyone produce a "non-receptacle" type GFCI device I can wire inline, or would you just wire a GFCI outlet upstream from the light sockets??

Hi, we live on the third floor of an old building in a remote part of China, nobody here really knows anything about not burning wires and of course everything is 220V current. I have the following problem, I'm rather confused. Thanks for helping. Friday we lost power so I went down stairs to the first floor where our meter and breaker is and it had flipped and the wire entering the breaker was charred and the breaker hot and a little melted. It wasn’t melted so bad so I flipped it back on and it worked as long as we only used the small heaters on low. I figure it would probably have eventually caught on fire so I thought we should do something about it. The meter says we have 40 amps and the old breaker said it was 63 amps with 4500 watts?. We live on the third floor and all the wires in our flat used to come down to one aluminum wire just outside our door running down to the breaker and meter. Here’s what we tried to do today after talking with a million people and having an local electrician come who is great at doing wiring around the house but not so good at knowing how to get the most juice out of the meter and running the proper kinds of wires from our apartment down to the box. I went and got a copper wire which I was told has a 5000-7000 watt capacity and then after much discussion a breaker store decided I should get a 32 amp breaker at 6000 watts so the wire would never catch on fire. I did all that and had the electrician guy run the new wire and put in the new breaker thinking we were home free. We’re trying to run 3 electric heaters at night, it’s getting down to about 40 or 50 inside if we don’t. Two of them are 1500 Watts each and the third is 2000 watts (this while they are all running on high). We’ve also got an oven, refrig., etc. which are all on the same circuit when in use and everything else like lights, computer, TV, etc. (don’t know how much all this pulls). Now the breaker is flipping all the time. I can’t even run the two small heaters at 3000 watts and the small normal things without flipping the thing. I figured we would have no problems but now we’re back to freezing again. So, my question for you is…HELP! 1) What do we do now? 2) What size breaker/breakers should we have and what suggestions would you have for wires going down to the meter? 3) What size wire should we have? Thanks so much.