I've wired my Ikea cooktop into a 30 amp breaker and the specs call for a 40 amp breaker. It turns on and heats up but not to full temp. Is that because of the 30 amp breaker.
Odds are pretty good that your wiring is heating up as well, 30 amp circuit likely has 10 gauge wire, 40 requires 8 gauge (larger if a long ways, as the wire runs, from the panel). Changing the breaker won't buy you anything, the resistance of the breaker will be 0 whether 30 or 40 amp and I believe you are encountering excessive voltage drop.
I think you are in the market for an electrician. :yes:
A breaker is not a regulator and will simply pop when it hits its limit. A heating element is also not a regulator. 30 amps should be sufficient to run at least 3 burners at full load. Now you may run into trouble when you put the forth one on.
Underamping an appliance is not necessarily dangerous (provided you have installed the proper gauge wiring to support the given breaker.) The cook top will simply pull amps until it hits the breaker's limit at which point it will pop. In other words it will do exactly what it is designed to do... protect the wiring from excessive amperage.
That breaker however and its associated wiring will be pushed to its extremes and that is not what you want to do in the electrical business on a regular basis, so if the device calls for a 40 amp breaker then you really need to put one in. If you change the breaker however you MUST change the wiring to match the breaker you upgrade to. It DOES get dangerous when people change the breaker without increasing the wire gauge to match that new breaker.
Using the same logic that the appliance should be connected to a 40A circuit because the 30A breaker could stick,
We should also assume we can never install more breakers then add up to more than what the main breaker is because the main could stick. Right now, all of my breakers add up to something like 360A but I only have a 100A main.
Of course, my panel doesn't say Federal Pacific, it says Square D QO so I probably have little to worry about. But as far as I'm concerned this is no different, if not worse than plugging a stove that calls for 40A into a 30A circuit.
If he has a FPE panel, then the panel is the problem not the stove and the panel should be replaced immediately.
I lived in a fairly pricey apartment complex for 7 years and every apartment had an FPE panel. Maintenance guy didn't care neither did management even after 2 fires a week apart.
OPS, how do you know the burner does not get up to full temperature? That would seem to be pretty hard to know, unless you had long term experience with that particular cooktop.
As to the breaker, previous posts have pointed out that the breaker itself is only there to protect the wiring leading to your cooktop. So as long as you have 30A or higher rated wire, there is no problem using a 30A breaker, so long as you can live with the occasional trip of the breaker if you put all four burners on at once (probably a very rare occasion). You can also use a 30A breaker on 40A rated wire, as was pointed out by a previous post.
So maybe you can review the bidding, and tell us what size and type of wire you have.
I would upgrade the breaker and wire gauge. Why? Because I usually use 2 burners and the oven when I cook on the weekend. Rather have a kitchen I can cook in, rather than ashes where I used to live.
Wire fires are deadly.
Since its a 30 amp breaker on a 10 gauge wire instead of a 40 amp on a 8 gauge. Worse thing that happens is the OP has nuisance breaker trips. No fire hazard.
Just another question about this.
What type of breaker box is this?
It does matter because some breaker boxes are prone to fire hazards.
Also known as defective.
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