What Does A GFI Do Anyway? - Home Electricity

I don't know how many times someone that I was working for, asked me, this simple question. What does a GFI do? Why do we need them? And how come they cost so much money? I can't answer everyone's questions, but I can tell you what a GFI does and how important they are in your home.

A GFI is actually an extremely sensitive electrical plug that is designed to stop the flow of electricity at the smallest sign that something could be wrong in your kitchen and bathroom. It wasn't that long ago, that people were getting electrocuted, from hair dryers falling into their bathtubs.

Someone would have an electric hairdryer sitting on the edge of the bathtub or maybe the edge of a countertop near the bathtub and the moment that the hairdryer fell into the water and you were actually in the bathtub, there's a good chance that you weren't going to be happy.

It wasn't long before someone invented a ground fault interrupter. Commonly known as a GFI. These sensitive electrical outlets would shorten the amount of time that it would take to turn the electrical breaker off, during an emergency. Every GFI has its own sensitive electrical breaker and it, so that you could reset it, at the electrical outlet.

There's really not a lot you can say about a GFI, but there is one thing that constantly keeps showing up in my mind, over and over again. These sensitive electrical outlets have probably saved thousands of lives and will probably save many more in the future.

I would like to thank whoever invented the GFI for their wonderful contribution to man's safety.