Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Info on GFCI - - -blown?

Hardly any - hand held sander.

MIC

Electric motors, ballast in fluorescent lights, starters in LED lights and things of that sort aren't known to play well with GFCI protection. Just the nature of the beast

I did a kitchen remodel and finished out a room in my shop a couple years ago. One gfci was DOA. I replaced another 2 within a year. I suspect QC is not strong

Casually mentioned earlier but if at all possible, do NOT plug refrigerators or freezers into a GFI circuit. The plugs fail and you can lose a lot of food (money) and have quite a mess on your hands.

Do you have a clamp meter (if you don't, get one).... Put your clamp meter around the cord for the tool. Slowly, engage the tool, watch the amps... if the GFCI fails before the requisite 15 (or 20) amps, it's the GFCI. If the GFCI fails while the meter says 23 amps, well then it's the tool, not the GFCI. Also, experiment with the tool with varying degrees of firing it up... read the meter... will give you an idea if it's the actual outlet, or the circuit.

My clamp meter will only measure amperage when clamped around the hot wire, not saying yours won't work around all 3 wires but if it does I'll buy one!

Sorry, you're right... meant the hot wire for the tool, not the cord... normally, when I'm troubleshooting a circuit, the whole [bleep] is open.

Make sure you get a GFCI and not an AFCI.

Arch Fault Interruptors do not like power tools.

Do you have ants?

Right...what's that got to do with anything

I had the same thing happen a while back.

Did a deep dive failure analysis because I like to know. Tore it down carefully piece by piece.

Ants had gotten inside and created a conductor with their bodies....

Several of them were still frozen in time.

Others were just remnants.

If you don't have a clamp meter, try it with other tools to see if it blows.

Just a few days ago I had an outside GFI go bad. It was powering a stock tank heater through a short extension cord. After some experimenting, I found that the female end in the extension cord had shorted and fried the GFI. What gave me a hint was a crackling noise inside the cord. Generally that's not something you like to hear.

Pretty obvious the OPs GFCI gave up the ghost and died when it tripped, it happens, things wear out.

But why'd it trip to start with?

A properly functioning tool, a good GFCI and a good extension cord can be a bad mix.

Understanding how a GFCI works can help.

If an electric motor is working properly, all electricity that the motor uses will flow from hot to neutral. A GFCI monitors the amount of current flowing from hot to neutral. If there is any imbalance, it trips the circuit. The GFCI senses a mismatch as small as 4 or 5 milliamps, and it can react as quickly as one-thirtieth of a second.

A good but long extension cord can create a delay in the neutrals return time and cause a good GFCI to trip, it's just doing it's job.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a long extension cord, a long run in a homes wiring distribution can cause the same effect making one circuit in the home different from the others.

I recently had to remedy this problem at a friends home.
He has a small bar/kitchen with a frig on his dock. The entire circuit was GFCI protected as it should be on a dock.
The run to the dock was long, a 100 feet or so, he'd ran 10 gauge wire knowing there would be voltage drop in that long of a run.

The frig occasionally would fail when his GFCI would trip so he had recently replaced the small frig with a larger one, he often froze fish in it.

The problem got worse, it was intermittent, he didn't understand it.
His new frig smelled like rotten fish when I got there.

I took the frig off the GFCI and it was a fix.

But why was it intermittent, some times it worked and other times not?

Ambient temprature can play a roll, if it's hot weather a motor can pull more amps on a circuit when it is running, if it's really cold it can pull extra amps on startup. Ever notice fluorescent lights flickering when turned on when it's cold, it takes longer to ignite the gas in the tubes.

All these things and more will raise havoc with GFCI's.

Nothing necessarily has to be wrong with anything, it's just the nature of the beast...life isn't always fair.

Accurate

Electric motors have their peak current draw at startup. This is generally well known.

In it's simplist terms, a motor behaves like a short for that split second before the commutator gets spinning to produce the back EMF and show a load.

Why is that outlet GFCI protected in the first place?

If it is not required by code, schit can it and replace it with a regular outlet.

Good info here . Thanks

They are required by code in damp and wet locations.
A GFCI reacts at 4 to 5 milliamps because at around 10 milliamps, human muscles "freeze" from electrical overload, meaning that you're unable to let go of an object that's causing a shock; just two seconds at that level of current can cause death

Well - thanks to all of you - for certain I have learned a lot of interesting detail about these GFCI units. This one gave out internally and bad short to the ground lead. This represents one of those seemingly global "safety requirements" that can be a pain when a "must install"a component is so prone to poor manufacture and easy failure.

$17 bucks plus tax this AM. Hope the new/different model (Leviton) performs better.

Thanks again.

No joke being shocked. I had an aluminium Skilsaw stuck on my hand. A coworker pulled the plug .

used to be an inspector. Learned all kinds of things.

Some years back, maybe 5 or so. Electricians were telling me that in a box of 10 that at least 1 would be bad from the start....

But trouble shoot it as noted. Pull the receptacle. See if breaker resets.. Go back down the line as needed..

Had one outlet that stumped me for many years. As a 'no-where near electrician' I resigned myself to the fact that it just didn't work and never would[after replacing it to no avail].
It's in our kitchen and with a stone backsplash there was really no way to pull the wire[cut drywall to see if anything there].
But I finally 'figured' it out after 15 or so years.
There is a GFCI outlet around the corner from it that was tripped but still works, it's above the counter but under dark cabinets and I never noticed or gave any thoughts to it as it always worked.
The electrician put the re-settable outlet second in line by mistake I guess?