Lost my pair of flame angels to a GFCI trip :(

[Delphinus]

Most of the times I've had a GFCI trip, I've been able to find the cause. This is just one of the few for which I'm not able to find a cause. I've had about 4 or 5 like this in as many years. I'll go with current overload as a likely culprit as because it happened just after the lights turned on. The only thing is that it should not be anywhere near the 15A limit.

Moreso my lesson learned though here is that I would prefer an alarm of some sort for the future. Indeed - the GFCI tripping tells us "something" but that is not the real root of the problem - the problem is that "stuff happens", and when it happens when you're in a position where you can only assume that things are OK - then it would be nice to be notified somehow.

Cube tank with the ritteri and its inhabitants appear to be OK today. Other than now being a fishless tank, the 20g appears OK too. Snails, abalone, etc. - everything but the fish - weathered the flatline just fine.

Doesn't compare to a total tank loss but I'm just sad today anyhow..

[spreerider]

The ballast for your lights will draw a large startup current about 10X normal for a few seconds as the bulbs strike an arc and charge the coils and caps. if you are already running higher than normal this quick draw can be enough to trip the breaker,
its like when i run my chopsaw it draws 14A when running but 28 when it first starts up and trips the breaker if its already been heated at all.

[Delphinus]

I realize there's a surge but I'm not sure what the peak draw is during the surge. The lights on this particular circuit are one 250W DE and then 4x24W t5's over the 20. Not knowing the surge values, my general strategy has been just to generally try not to overload the breaker, ie., try to keep it no more than half, ie., 7 or 8 amps. I should reassess all the items on it, but at least at time of writing this, I don't think I'm overloading the circuit. If it is a dodgy GFCI, I'll be retiring the hardware soon enough anyhow though, restringing wires, etc., so hopefully it will be a moot point in time.

[mark]

didn't think a GFI would trip on a overcurrent, just ground faults.

Another thing I've never checked for is what type of device they're rate for (inductive, resistive etc)

[Delphinus]

Should mention I've had a GFCI kick off because I touched a reflector and there was a static discharge.. and since the reflector was grounded, the GFCI kicked. Don't know what kind of voltage/amperage you'd see from a static cling zap, but it was enough that day. So it makes me think it's not that hard to make these things do their thing.

On a side note, I've been looking for power failure alarms. Found a couple..
http://www.cshincorporated.com/produ...products_id=87
This one is pretty neat.. I see it come up in a bunch of places so I wonder if I could find it locally like at Rona/HD/etc.:
http://www.improvementscatalog.com/p...L&code=MP8WFGL

[mark]

GFI will trip down ~5mA so doesn't take much.

Imagine if you wanted to spend the bucks could find a aquarium control that would send a text to your cel-phone if the power went out.

[Delphinus]

Yeah, I was thinking I should look into something like that for the big project. The battery backup pumps seem like a good idea too of course, but the real kicker here is that I didn't know there was a problem until I came home at 10pm and the worst of it was that it had been flatlined all freakin' day long.

Time to start savin'...

[Zoaelite]

Sorry about your angels Tony, did the zoo's make it though okay? (Well on the good side I guess you wont have any more anemone go "missing" )
Levi