Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanN
So if you could please answer the question, and if someone could explain why the wire melted, but neither the GFCI outlet nor the circuit breaker tripped. This is a complete mystery to me to how, when, and why this happened as there were not symptoms of a fire in the box.
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First you have to understand what a GFCI breaker does: it trips and breaks the circuit when the current thru the hot wire differs from the current thru the neutral wire (this indicates that the circuit is grounding thru a person....not good!). The GFCI outlet is NOT a circuit breaker! so it should not trip if the 16 gage wire melted. It should not trip if the load on the circuit exceeds 15 amps. It should not trip if the 20 amp breaker trips.
The problem is that someone used too small of wire, as ebarker said, "16 gauge wire should not be in this mess." The breaker is rated at 20 amps, so you should have no wire in the circuit smaller than 12 gage.