Has anyone added a 30a breaker to the 50a GFI spa panel?

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This is an old thread, but hopefully an expert will see and answer...

I am looking to do something similar. I have a 50a breaker in the main panel that I can't change. I have a 50a spa panel, and I'm building a 30a control panel.

I plan on adding a din rail to the spa panel, with a 30a double pole breaker for the 2 hot lines. Should I also add a 15 or 20a for the neutral? The neutral will only be carrying current from pumps and housekeeping power.

Or, do I need to add the 15a breaker in the control panel to one of the hot wires after the power to the heating elements splits off?

The second option seems more standard, but the control panel is going to be crowded and I'd like to move as much as possible to the spa panel.

Many thanks
 
This is an old thread, but hopefully an expert will see and answer...

I am looking to do something similar. I have a 50a breaker in the main panel that I can't change. I have a 50a spa panel, and I'm building a 30a control panel.

I plan on adding a din rail to the spa panel, with a 30a double pole breaker for the 2 hot lines. Should I also add a 15 or 20a for the neutral? The neutral will only be carrying current from pumps and housekeeping power.

Or, do I need to add the 15a breaker in the control panel to one of the hot wires after the power to the heating elements splits off?

The second option seems more standard, but the control panel is going to be crowded and I'd like to move as much as possible to the spa panel.

Many thanks


You do not want a breaker on the neutral, a 15 amp single pole breaker in the spa panel is the way to go, a lot of spa panels have room for 1.
 
Must have been suffering from a beer or two, a breaker on the neutral is not a good idea.

I found some reasonably priced DIN rail 2 pole breakers, and there is plenty of room in the spa panel. So, power-in from 50A wall circuit goes into 50A gfci breaker, output of that goes to input of 30A DIN mount breaker. This goes to a receptacle for the control panel power cord.

I'll use a small breaker in the control panel to locally step down to a 15A (or even 6A is enough) circuit I guess. If I put the 15A breaker in the spa panel, I'll have to carry 5 wires from the spa panel to the control panel (2 30A rated hots, 1 15A rated hot, common, ground), which is weird...

This all seem alright?
 
I'm bumping this only because I made the incorrect assumption (while standing in Home Depot) that the extra breaker position in the Midwest 50a spa box was a post GFCI. Duh, I should have looked it up ahead of time or took the time to grab a screwdriver in the store to have a look.

There were a lot of questions regarding why you'd want to do this and I'm sure everyone has their own reason. Here's mine. I installed a 50a breaker in the main panel and ran 6/4 romex over to the spa panel. From there it goes to a separate 50a outlet. The plan is to construct a brewing panel that will use every bit of the 50a, but I want to do some testing on simple 30a control boxes without having to run 6/4 SOOW cable at a whopping $4 a foot.

Now I'm just considering making a modular 240v subpanel on the end of a 6/4 cable with a 30a and 20a breaker in there along with a 50a, 30a, and 20a (all 240v) outlets in the cover. This contraption would give me access to all load requirements for testing and general use and they'd all be GFCI protected.

The [D] homeline 100a lug box is only $20 and another $25 or so for all the breakers. The bonus is that although I permanently installed my spa panel, this breakout box would be fully portable and come with me when I move. Any problems with that?
 
I ended up putting a 30a din rail breaker in the spa panel. It is tight, but works.

You can take the little breaker guts out of the spa panel and put it into something bigger, I thought about doing that. That will give you more room to add some din rail breakers, which are really easy to use and look snappy
 
Reviving this thread in the hope that someone will see and point me in the right direction. I'm looking for a 240V, 30A din rail break and had two questions.

1) Can something like this work for what is being discussed here?

2) For wiring, is this connected inline, between the 50amp GFCI breaker on the spa panel and the outlet to go to the control panel? I imagine it will only be for the two hot lines and not the ground/neutral, is this correct?

Again, yes I know this is an old thread, but find it applicable for my question.
 
Yes it will work, the spa panel is going provide the GFCI protection. The 30 amp breaker will protect the control panel. This what I have, just a different mount
 
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