Will a double pole gfci or afci or combo work on a duplex receptacle that's split to feed two separate appliances??

[JohnDS]

So if you had a duplex receptacle with the hot tab snipped and fed it with a 3wire circuit, will a double pole:
1) Gfci work
2) Afci work
3) gfci/Afci combo work
4) Is this permissable by code?

Just wondering since the hots would be serving two separate appliances as opposed to one appliance.

Thank you.

 

[LarryFine]

Yes to all. #4 required a common handle, which 1 through 3 provide.

When I wire a duplex this way, I use a flat-blade driver to separate the metal parts farther, just to be sure.

 

[JohnDS]

Thank you. That clears things up.
So when Arc faults first started being introduced, why were people panicking, saying you can't share a neutral running 3wire circuits anymore, and they began running 12/4 or 14/4 instead?

It was a while ago. Maybe because they were still running single pole gfci and Afci breakers which would not work, correct?

 

[winnie]

Exactly. A GFCI device needs to measure _all_ of the circuit conductors for a circuit, meaning that you need a two pole GFCI monitoring both hots and the neutral for the circuit you describe. If you try to do it with a pair of single pole GFCI devices, then one of them will trip because of an apparent (not real) ground fault.

Early AFCI devices incorporated residual current functionality (similar to GFCI) and had the same problem.

Now you can buy AFCI devices which don't have residual current function, and you can also buy two pole AFCI devices that function with multiwire circuits.

 

[ptonsparky]

Thank you. That clears things up.
So when Arc faults first started being introduced, why were people panicking, saying you can't share a neutral running 3wire circuits anymore, and they began running 12/4 or 14/4 instead?

It was a while ago. Maybe because they were still running single pole gfci and Afci breakers which would not work, correct?

Correct.

 

[480sparky]

Thank you. That clears things up.
So when Arc faults first started being introduced, why were people panicking, saying you can't share a neutral running 3wire circuits anymore, and they began running 12/4 or 14/4 instead?

It was a while ago. Maybe because they were still running single pole gfci and Afci breakers which would not work, correct?

People are saying you can't share a neutral with a 3-wire cable because they're used to installing two single AFCI or GFCI breakers, which won't work. But a 2-pole breaker will.