Heated door mat

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mnbiker

mnbiker

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st.paul mn
The company I work for wanted to try a heated door mat for a employee entrance, we got one from Heattrack, I ran a dedicated 110volt/20 amp GFCI protected circuit for the mat. when we plug in the mat it trips the gfci. the mat also has a equipment ground fault buit in ( trip point 27 ma +or- 5 ma). I called the company and they said to get rid of my gfci and thier built in one is good enough. I dont agree with this, as the recepticle is accesible to the public. what do you think
Thanks Icky
 
Unless you are feeding a receptacle outlet, I know of no NEC requirement for your GFCI.
Floor heating/snow melting and similar devices are commonly protected by GF protection with higher values than our personnel GFCIs.
As much as the idea scares me, if you are going to have the mat, I feel you must rely on it's factory protection as opposed to your GFCI.
 
Yes its feeding a recepticle, the mat comes with a 4 foot cord that is designed to plug into a standard 110/15 amp recepticle. whats worse is that there is a metal handrail along this walkway.
 
Interesting situation. 210.8 would require the receptacle for "outdoor" installations and Exception #1 to that allows you to omit the GFCI protection IF the receptacle is not readily accessible.
One solution might be to eliminate the GFCI and install a cover with lock to make the receptacle "not readily accessible"
 
mnbiker said:
The company I work for wanted to try a heated door mat for a employee entrance, we got one from Heattrack, I ran a dedicated 110volt/20 amp GFCI protected circuit for the mat. when we plug in the mat it trips the gfci. the mat also has a equipment ground fault buit in ( trip point 27 ma +or- 5 ma). I called the company and they said to get rid of my gfci and thier built in one is good enough. I dont agree with this, as the recepticle is accesible to the public. what do you think
Thanks Icky
Click to expand...

One would think that they will get an awful lot of the mats returned. How many outdoor receps are out there anymore without GFCI? I would never remove one.
 
yes, the recepitcle is outdoors, they put a 4 foot cord on it and instrutions say not to use an extension cord. the recep is located along the employee entrance door. Looks like we will be returning the mat, i am not comfortable with this.
 
It is possible you have a bad mat, or a cheap or bad GFCI outlet.

Have you tried plugging in the matt at another outlet? Just as a test - maybe try a standard indoor outlet, and another GFCI outlet.

It does seem like the cheap GFCI outlets are more prone to tripping - especially when things are first plugged in, or turned on or off.
 
Sounds to me like they need to redesign their product to not be cord and plug connected or design it to be less suspect to developing leakage current, otherwise they will have a product that is hard to sell because it is hard to comply with codes where it is installed.
 
I have replaced a new 20 amp gfci with another new 20 amp gfci, brought the mat inside to try on a non- gfi circuit, works fine on non-gfi, website says to call them if it trips gfci, so i did, thats when they told me to omit my gfci and said they have these all over including the White House, and was told that the stray current "was the nature of the beast". so i told them in my situation I need to have a gfci proteced circuit to conform to code, thats when he hung up on me. I am not impressed. Thanks Icky
 
I would be curious to know what the current values are when it is plugged into a regular circuit (make a test cord with each phase exposed) and if their "GFCI" is even working as a GFCI.
 
rich000 said:
I would be curious to know what the current values are when it is plugged into a regular circuit (make a test cord with each phase exposed) and if their "GFCI" is even working as a GFCI.
Click to expand...

Their "GFCI" is probably a 30mA equipment protection GFCI.

The GFCI receptacle is 4-6mA for people protection, and is required to be this value for the receptacle that could easily have something else plugged into it.
 
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