Open ground on GFI?


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Old 10-13-03, 12:29 PM
J
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Open ground on GFI?

I have a bathroom that we just remodeled and part of that was replacing the switches and GFI outlet to change their colors. This is the switchbox in the bathroom that has 2 single pole switches (light and exhaust fan) and a GFI. No other outlets or switches are in the bathroom so the GFI isn?t connected to anything else. Anyway, I rewired everything exactly the way it was since I assumed that all was OK. After testing the new GFI (15A 125V) it says that it has open ground. One thing I did notice when rewiring, was that on the old GFI, the white wire was not attached to the terminal labeled white. So like I said, I rewired everything back to the way it was and that included placing the white wire back to the new GFI also not on the labeled white terminal. Since everything seemed/seems to work OK, I thought that maybe this was done originally for a specific reason. Could this be the reason for open ground? I would have thought that all that would cause would be reverse polarity? Any ideas on any of this? Thanks.
 
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Old 10-13-03, 12:34 PM
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Does this circuit have a ground wire (usually a bare wire, but sometimes a green wire)?

How many wires did you connect to the GFCI outlet?

The black wire (hot) and the white wire (return) should both go to the appropriate terminals on the line side of the GFCI outlet.
 
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Old 10-13-03, 01:32 PM
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Connections

I have 3 wires attached to the GFI. The black is actually attached to the line terminal that is marked white and the white is on the other line terminal and there is a ground that I attached to the ground terminal. Again, the reason I attached the black wire to the white labeled terminal is because that is how it was and it has been like this since we bought the house 3 yrs. ago. I attached them back to their same spots since I figured that this must be OK since we have been using this for 3 yrs. without incident. Although, I never did test the GFI prior to replacing it to see if it, too, had open ground. Like I said before, switching the white, black wires I would think would cause reverse polarity and not open ground?? But then again, what do I know?!
 
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Old 10-13-03, 02:22 PM
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Do you have an outlet tester?

A plug in 3 prong outlet tester will tell you if you have the hot and netural reversed.

With a two wire plug in tester (individual tips to plug in, you can also tell if you have the hot and neutral reversed, and if you have a good ground.

If you have a two wire tester, I would test the wires with the outlet removed to figure out which is the hot and which is the neutral.

It does sound like you have the hot and nbeutral reversed.

ossible another clue. Which wires go through the switches? The white wire or the black wire?
 
 

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