[mike31154]

I looked up the specs on the EB8 energy bar & had a quick read. You probably know all this, but for the benefit of any further troubleshooting..... I see that it has a built in circuit breaker, 2 mechanical relay switched outlets rated to 10 amps maximum each & 6 solid state switched outlets rated to 5 amps maximum each. Each 250 watt Halide should draw about 2 amps & I would recommend using the mechanically switched outlets for those. I suspect they draw somewhat more than 2 amps when starting up to get the voltage needed to strike an arc in the lamp. You need to be careful not to overload the power bar. It does warn that maximum current for the whole bar is 15 amps & the built in breaker should trip if you exceed that, but even circuit breakers can mess up. It's easy to get carried away plugging stuff into something that conveniently switches so many components for you. If you were to use each individual outlet to its max allowable, you'd very quickly exceed 15 amps, in fact simply using 10 amps on each of the relay switched outlets already has you 5 amps over. Again, you likely already know all this & the breaker is there to help prevent overload, as is your feeder circuit breaker in the electrical panel.

Any one of the outlets on the power bar could fail individually since each is controlled by a separate component, either a solid state or mechanical relay. Then there's the controller software..... Normal power bars are straight electrical connections, so fewer components to fail. With the convenience of controllability, comes complexity & additional failure modes. It's a bit difficult to trust the current monitoring feature of a controller that shows a 75 amp spike and there is nothing burnt out. That's likely why the last electrician wasn't much help. Not all electricians are knowledgeable in electronics theory, many are great installers & know the electrical code to wire houses very well, but they don't need a lot of solid state/electronics theory to do that. Obviously there are industrial qualified electricians out there that deal with control circuitry, robotics etc., but that's generally not the guy that mostly does residential wiring. Different levels of training.

Is the GFI you're using one of the portable plug in types?