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

[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'...

[Pescador]

I'm using this alarm Tony but it looks like it's been discontinued.
http://shop.talkaboutsleep.com/?acti...arm&page=90100

[spreerider]

GFCI Breaker has to be able to trip on overcurrent but a duplex recepticle one will not, i thought we were talking about a breaker in the pannel one IMO they are way higher quality.

Also depending on what is downstream of the GFCI can affect it possibly in another room depending on how the house is wired, I did some work on a house that had the GFCI in the bathroom tripping all the time, it turned out it was a motion security light that the homeowner had installed and taken power from the bathroom as it was the closest source, evertime the light turned on it tripped the GFCI.

GFCI have a coil around both hot and neutral connections and a voltage will be generated in the coil if hot and neutral are not equal, this means that somewhere there is a fault some current must be leaking through ground and not neutral, they dont actually measure current through the ground.