AFCI breakers trip after brief outage

Status
Not open for further replies.
D

Dan1410

New User
Location
Vero Beach, FL
Occupation
Electrical Contractor
We recently wired residences in a subdivsion. Over the weekend, 5 or 6 houses near each other experienced multiple AFCI breakers tripping simultaneously after a power "flicker". Sounds like a power quality issue to me. Has anyone had this or similar experience or can anyone reference some articles or literature that I can pass on to my customers?
 
Does anyone in that vicinity have a HAM radio setup? Drive around and look for the antenna. It's a known issue with some brands. Power fails, HAM operator has to go silent for a while and keys up when the power comes back on...

ARRL Helps Manufacturer to Resolve Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter RFI Problems

The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
www.arrl.org www.arrl.org
 
Jraef said:
Does anyone in that vicinity have a HAM radio setup? Drive around and look for the antenna. It's a known issue with some brands. Power fails, HAM operator has to go silent for a while and keys up when the power comes back on...

ARRL Helps Manufacturer to Resolve Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter RFI Problems

The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
www.arrl.org www.arrl.org
Click to expand...


How does that explain the power outage?
 
An arc on the POCO side might create a high frequency voltage waveform, and if there are loads on the AFCI breakers (or even just a significant capacitance) that would cause a high frequency current to flow through the AFCI breakers and possibly trip them.
Were the customers with the tripping problem on the same distribution transformer?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top