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Circuit breaker that fits in a spot for a standard light switch?

Home Improvement Asked by MacGuffin on July 22, 2021

I have a few projects in mind where it would be handy to have a dedicated circuit breaker accessible outside of the main breaker box. I don’t want to go through the expense of buying a separate breaker box for a single circuit. I just want a circuit breaker that fits in a standard single gang electrical box and can be covered by a standard cover plate. The plate could be a standard light switch plate, a decorator plate, or duplex outlet plate. I’ve seen these before in a friend’s apartment while at university where the studio apartment had a breaker by the door instead of a light switch. He said that if he overloaded the circuit he would flip the "light switch" off then on it would reset the outlets in the room.

I realize I could likely get a panel mount circuit breaker, a blank metal plate, then cut a hole in the plate to fit the breaker. If I needed only one of these then I’d just do that. I might want several of these and so I’d prefer to buy the proper part to make less work, have it not look like a hack job, and not raise too many questions if there is a city inspector coming to review my work.

Maybe all I need is the proper name for this part so I can search for it online or ask for it at a hardware store. In my experience the people at hardware stores are great at finding common items but if it’s something even slightly out of the ordinary then I need to give them a precise name for it for them to find it for me in their vast inventory.

Again, I’m looking for a circuit breaker that looks, fits, and generally works like a standard light switch. I’d want it to be 15 or 20 amps, single pole rated for 120VAC and/or 12VDC. If there are other varieties available then that would be great too, such as double pole, 30 amp, and/or GFCI.

I know that there are switch and fuse holder combinations out there, I can see one on my furnace. That’s not acceptable as that would be ugly, and cumbersome as I’d have to replace the fuse if there was an overload as opposed to just flipping a switch.

After reading some comments so far and doing more research I found that perhaps this is called a fusible switch, isolating switch, or disconnect switch. These appear to operate as I want but none I can find are made to fit in a standard wall box. Is there a name for the form factor for something that fits in a single gang electrical wall box? There’s "panel mount" where I can cut or drill a hole in a blank cover plate but a cover plate isn’t made to be load bearing, I’m afraid the plate will bend or rip and the breaker will fall out.

One Answer

Yes there are circuit breaker switches commonly used on low voltage equipment in the US you mentioned 12v. (Low voltage means different things to different people)

These switches are normally bat handle but the one I just popped up on line is rated for 240vac 50vdc 15amp (W31-x2m1g-15) is a 15 amp. These are commonly used in industrial equipment and on boats.

Amp ratings 1-10 then they jump 15,20 from what I use (I use a lot of 1’s 3’s and 5’s for equipment branch circuit protection.

I believe telemanique & Siemens make a breaker that mounts similar to a switch and has terminals looking more like what you want but they stick out much further. And the switch handle is different from a common switch, I will look for the part# this afternoon when I go to the building that has these. But there are breaker type switches that can be placed downstream from your existing overcurrent protection and have a local reset not taking out the entire circuit if properly sized.

Answered by Ed Beal on July 22, 2021

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