Electrician recommendation?

[DEAGLER]

Bought a Richmond home. (Regretful decision). Anyway, I have GFI’s that keep tripping so I called warranty to have an electrician come out. He said wires look fine so replaced all GFI’s to be on safe side. Welp what do you know they’re still tripping again! It’s pulling tooth and hair to get a warranty rep out so I’ll just put money out to get a guy who knows what he’s doing.

[BPTactical]

Side Show Bob

[izzy]

I've used this guy for a couple of jobs, he did a really work. He's in your neck of the woods too.

https://www.yannielectric.com/

[OldFogey]

Bought a Richmond home. (Regretful decision). Anyway, I have GFI’s that keep tripping so I called warranty to have an electrician come out. He said wires look fine so replaced all GFI’s to be on safe side. Welp what do you know they’re still tripping again! It’s pulling tooth and hair to get a warranty rep out so I’ll just put money out to get a guy who knows what he’s doing.

Are the gfi receptacles run off of a gfi breaker? That combo will trip the outlets.

[BushMasterBoy]

My house was grounded to the foundation. I live on top of a huge hill. House across the street was grounded to the rebar in the foundation. Now it is just a hole in the surface of the earth. Lightning hit that house and literally destroyed the basement foundation.
I bought this house brand new. GFCI outlets used to disconnect all the time. I replaced them. I also put a ground rod 8 feet deep into the soil with a short wire I scrounged from a gas pump ground job. 2 days after the ground rod installation, lighting struck the power feed to the house. Blew every breaker in the service box. I only lost a wireless router, which was under warranty.. If I hadn't properly grounded the electrical system, the brand new house would have been destroyed.

Moral of the story: Ground the electrical wiring to a ground rod driven 8 feet into the ground. (Near the service box.)

[PSS]

My house was grounded to the foundation. I live on top of a huge hill. House across the street was grounded to the rebar in the foundation. Now it is just a hole in the surface of the earth. Lightning hit that house and literally destroyed the basement foundation.
I bought this house brand new. GFCI outlets used to disconnect all the time. I replaced them. I also put a ground rod 8 feet deep into the soil with a short wire I scrounged from a gas pump ground job. 2 days after the ground rod installation, lighting struck the power feed to the house. Blew every breaker in the service box. I only lost a wireless router, which was under warranty.. If I hadn't properly grounded the electrical system, the brand new house would have been destroyed.

Moral of the story: Ground the electrical wiring to a ground rod driven 8 feet into the ground. (Near the service box.)

That anecdotal evidence is probably the result of an improperly installed CEE (UFER) ground. If they just applied the bare minimum required by code then it is understandable. But IF the concrete installer ties all the rebar in the foundation properly and better yet also the rebar in the pad and you bond your grounding electrode system to it then it is extremely unlikely that a lightening strike will destroy a foundation. If it still does under optimum conditions then nothing is going to help you especially not a ground rod. A ground rod is totally inadequate for lightning protection. The bigger the dissipation area the less damage done. A ground rod added to a properly installed ufer ground does very little is not required by the NEC.

Found an article online that gives a little history to this method of grounding.
https://www.ecmag.com/section/codes-...at-ufer-ground

Herbert G. Ufer was a vice president and engineer at Underwriters Laboratories who assisted the U.S. military with ground-resistance problems at installations in Arizona. Ufer’s findings in the 1940s proved the effectiveness of concrete-­encased grounding electrodes. The military required low-resistance (5 ohms or less) ground connections for lightning protection systems installed at its ammunition and pyrotechnic storage sites at the Navajo Ordnance Depot in Flagstaff and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Ufer developed the initial design for a concrete-encased grounding electrode that consisted of ½-inch, 20-foot-long reinforcing bars placed within and near the bottom of 2-foot-deep concrete footings for the ammunition storage buildings. Test readings over a 20-year period revealed steady resistance values of 2 to 5 ohms, which satisfied the specifications of the U.S. government at that time. This work eventually resulted in what we know today as the concrete-encased electrode in the NEC. More details about Ufer’s research are provided in his October 1964 IEEE paper CP-978, “Investigation and Testing of Footing-Type Grounding Electrodes for Electrical Installations.”

[gnihcraes]

These guys just did a great job on my new garage. In your part of town too.

http://www.blackbearelectric.net/

[funkymonkey1111]

I've used MZ Electric and they've done good work. Best endorsement i can give is that I will call them again for my next project

http://mzelectric.com/

[BushMasterBoy]

And I have a hole as big as a house you can come look at. The situation of location here is so bad that the power company came and pulled up the poles and redesigned the wiring arrangement. They made sure the ground wire was at the top of the pole. Otherwise the the power was off at every storm. Watching them reset the breakers during the lightning strikes was amusing. 30 seconds later it would strike again. Then their truck was stuck in the mud. So they brought in a bigger service truck with a winch.

The science of grounding to rebar is that it rusts. The rust can and will form itself into a semiconductor. Sometimes it will conduct, and sometimes it won't. That is why a copper coated ground rod is essential. In 1964 semiconductor theory was still fairly new. The Air Force was flying planes with vacuum tubes in their avionics...

[PSS]

Again I don't doubt the account. It is not something that happens enough that I would discontinue using the rebar for grounding. I've rewired houses hit by lighting with ground rod systems and seen all kinds of unusual damage. One was completely destroyed. All conductive material in the house had holes ranging from pinholes to quarter sized holes. The plumbing system was copper so the house was water damaged on top of everything else. Direct and serious lightning strikes are catastrophic in nature and incredibly difficult to mitigate the damage.

I know this is off topic so will just say this. I've been doing msha ground continuity tests since 2006 and I have never seen a ground rod outperform a CEE. It's is very common to find that ground rods have a high resistance value and very unusual for a CEE to not have an excellent value and is always a connection issue. Rebar oxidizes very different in concrete and produces a black oxide that doesn't inhibit conductivity like serious corrosion in open air would. If all the rebar is used it greatly increases effectiveness. If you run copper wire into the concrete and strap it to the rebar or just run 20 feet of it in the concrete then issues can arise. Copper close to steel in concrete is likely to create galvanic action corrosion.

Soil conditions need to be taken into consideration and grounding should be engineered accordingly and inspected regularly to better protect against lightning issues. Lightning is unpredictable and it is impossible to completely protect against major lightning strikes. There are other methods of grounding that provide additional and better protection. Ground rings and ground pads (which can utilize ground rods) are great but in certain soil conditions are inferior to ufer grounds. CEE's effectiveness goes down when electricians and concrete contractors don't do their jobs properly. An ineffectual ground is the result of any anomalies that happen with the understanding that the energy of a serious strike is not going to be managed to a homeowners satisfaction with a #6 copper wire running to a ground rod or a #4 copper wire to a CEE. It's so unlikely that the CEE will cause that problem to be of any concern to me. Obviously this was one of those times.

Since this doesn't have anything to do with the OP I'm going to shut up.