GFI & storms

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by Doug

In all my years of using GFI ,s on my tanks, never had this problem before. Apparently we are in the middle of monsoon season here. During one of the storms today, lightning I guess, created a brief power down. Computer, aquarium,etc. It was only like a sec.

Power back but I noticed my sump, return and skimmer not restarting. MP 20,s running, as they are on another GFI/arc fault circuit. I find the GFI tripped on the above mentioned circuit. Reset it and everythings fine.

However, of course that scenario is no good if no body around to reset. So I ask. What the &&&^%$. Does this mean I have a problem with that wall GFI I installed, as opposed to the GFI/arc fault in the breaker panel?

I was thinking about this and let me see if I have this right. you have a arc fault breaker in the power pannel then you put a GFI plugin which you plug your stuff into. right?

If this is the case it will keep randomly tripping, as the arc fault and the gfi with kinda get confused and argue with each other. this was a common problem when they introduced arc fault to places that also had a requirment for GFI. take a dinning room for eg, commonly they were run on the same circut as kitchens and because there were gfi instaled on that circut by the sink when they installed the arc breaker in the pannel it would cause nusence tripping. so now they have to run a seperat arc fault circut for the dinning room.

I did some more reading there is a combo GFIC/AFIC breaker made by cuttler hammer, but they are expensive, and a waist of money for most aplications.

Steve