Art C.
Member
- Location
- United States
- Occupation
- Engineer
Contractor buried 250' of UF going to three new lamp posts when they repaved the driveway. Each post has a lamp and a convenience receptacle, on different line conductors but sharing a neutral. Because of the shared neutral, the lights and receptacles must share the same GFCI, but we wired them to different switches downstream from the GFCI (customer wants to be able to switch Christmas lights and such).
The lights work fine. The receptacle side trips the GFCI immediately upon being energized, even without a load attached. Is it really possible that there is enough capacitive coupling between the conductors in that long run to fool the GFCI into thinking there is a ground fault? And if that is the case, why isn't the conductor with the lights doing the same thing?
Would appreciate any advice, including further tests to run. Never seen anything like this before, even with long-ish runs of UF. Moving GFCI protection out to the pole locations isn't an option because the poles don't have standard size openings.
The lights work fine. The receptacle side trips the GFCI immediately upon being energized, even without a load attached. Is it really possible that there is enough capacitive coupling between the conductors in that long run to fool the GFCI into thinking there is a ground fault? And if that is the case, why isn't the conductor with the lights doing the same thing?
Would appreciate any advice, including further tests to run. Never seen anything like this before, even with long-ish runs of UF. Moving GFCI protection out to the pole locations isn't an option because the poles don't have standard size openings.