Breakers tripping when power goes out.

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bcl

Member
Location
Garden Ridge, TX
Occupation
Electrician (Owner/ Operator)
Hey all, I've got a customer who says his power goes out often where there are a lot of new homes being built. Whenever the power goes out, multiple single pole breakers trip. I think it's the AFCI breakers, but he can't really confirm. Set up is main breaker/ service panel exterior, lighting and outlets on the interior sub panel. The interior breakers are the ones tripping. He said once that all the breakers on one side of the panel had tripped when the power came back on, other times it's just a few breakers. He's not the only one in the neighborhood who is having the same problem.

The only work I've done on the house is install a surge protector (Siemens FSPD), it was built in 2016.

I've swapped out a number of spec grade CH AFCI breakers in the same neighborhood that begin nuisance tripping after 3-4 years, but I haven't had a problem with them tripping every time the power goes out and comes on again.

Any suggestions? POCO doesn't take any responsibility, and the problem isn't going away as long as there is new construction going on in the neighborhood. The power goes out a couple times a month.
 
This is a customer service issue with the circuit breaker manufacturer product support team

Contractors that that rely on the internet, typically refuse to make that call, or keep trained persons available
 
ramsy said:
This is a customer service issue with the circuit breaker manufacturer product support team

Contractors that that rely on the internet, typically refuse to make that call, or keep trained persons available
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Hahaha.

This is literally an online forum for contractors to ask one another questions. I'm not relying on the internet for anything. I asked a bunch of electricians like me if they've ever seen this before because I'm curious.

Thanks for your genuinely helpful reply. You are a gem for our industry.
 
With frequent power outages, it most likely is a problem on the poco side. The arcfaults will pick up arcs on the line side. I have personally found this out. Poco had a bad connection on the pole mount transformer, twice. I once had a Church that would lose the lights during services from a temporary outage. Lights were HID, so they had to cool down before they would restrike. Had a meeting with the poco, they claimed they had no issues on their end. So I told them I was putting a voltage recorder on the service. Before I could put it on the next week, the maintenance guy said there was a flurry of Georgia Power trucks running up and down the road in front of the Church. The problem mysteriously disappeared!
 
Sounds similar to all the AFCI/CAFCI tripping I had as my utility rolled through the neighborhood upgrading everyone to the new fancy pants meters. I'd go with hillbilly's notion... threaten a PQMii recording and see if things don't sort themselves out, they're less than a grand on ebay.
 
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hillbilly1 said:
With frequent power outages, it most likely is a problem on the poco side. The arcfaults will pick up arcs on the line side. I have personally found this out. Poco had a bad connection on the pole mount transformer, twice. I once had a Church that would lose the lights during services from a temporary outage. Lights were HID, so they had to cool down before they would restrike. Had a meeting with the poco, they claimed they had no issues on their end. So I told them I was putting a voltage recorder on the service. Before I could put it on the next week, the maintenance guy said there was a flurry of Georgia Power trucks running up and down the road in front of the Church. The problem mysteriously disappeared!
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Good idea with the voltage recorder. I had made that recommendation to the homeowner, but since the POCO has been so unresponsive I didn't think it would matter. Knowing that two of you have had the same experience, it gives me more confidence that the will help remedy the problem.
 
It's not obvious how an arc fault breaker would tell the difference between series arcing on the load side vs. series arcing on the supply side. Waveform would be interrupted in a similar manner either way.
 
jaggedben said:
It's not obvious how an arc fault breaker would tell the difference between series arcing on the load side vs. series arcing on the supply side. Waveform would be interrupted in a similar manner either way.
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My thoughts as well. As far as I can tell from what the customer is saying (I've never been there to observe it) it's only happening on the AFCI breakers.
 
bcl said:
Good idea with the voltage recorder. I had made that recommendation to the homeowner, but since the POCO has been so unresponsive I didn't think it would matter. Knowing that two of you have had the same experience, it gives me more confidence that the will help remedy the problem.
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We always rented them, didn’t use one enough to justify buying it.
 
bcl said:
Hmm. Where do you rent those from? I'm guessing the customer's going to balk at the cost of figuring it out, but there might be only so many freezers-full-of-meat-going-bad he can tolerate.
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We rented from ElectroRent, they ship it to you, and you use it for however many days you agree on, then prepaid shipping it back. There is several companies that rent them.
 
Presumably GFCI's dont trip its just the AFCI?
There should be a code allowance that allows substituting in a GFPE breaker in these situations,

It would be cool to see waveform power recorder log for voltage and current from this service.
I have not used the new Siemens diagnostic breaker AFCI yet but thats probably what I would try.
 
bcl said:
This is literally an online forum for contractors to ask one another questions. I'm not relying on the internet for anything. I asked a bunch of electricians like me if they've ever seen this before because I'm curious.
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Yes it is and your question was legitimate and interesting. Ignore the negativity.
 
jaggedben said:
It's not obvious how an arc fault breaker would tell the difference between series arcing on the load side vs. series arcing on the supply side. Waveform would be interrupted in a similar manner either way.
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But it that were true, every AFCI breaker would trip if there was an arc fault anywhere…

There are videos on-line showing AFCI breakers tripping from people using walkie-talkies and Ham radios nearby. That might be going on in construction sites.
 
Jraef said:
But it that were true, every AFCI breaker would trip if there was an arc fault anywhere…

There are videos on-line showing AFCI breakers tripping from people using walkie-talkies and Ham radios nearby. That might be going on in construction sites.
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I think there could be a lot of variability when it comes to remote arcs. The amount of higher frequency attenuation will vary depending on many factors, such as distance and wiring methods.
But I thought that current version AFCIs were not supposed to react to an arc signature unless current draw on its circuit was above some threshold. In the OP’s scenario, I can’t believe every circuit in the panel had a current flow above threshold…which makes the two-way radio theory more interesting.
 
Jraef said:
But it that were true, every AFCI breaker would trip if there was an arc fault anywhere…
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No, there's no reason that an imperfect device needs to be wrong every time. The point is that the distinguishing the difference is not trivial and one shouldn't be surprised at the imperfection.

FWIW I've experienced multiple situations where momentary power outages caused AFCIs to trip, always some but not all in a panel. Can't rule out other theories, but upstream arcs do seem to cause AFCIs to trip sometimes in my experience.
 
Since its 2025 and not 2015 I would just use the Siemens app with the Siemens breaker, it shows you exactly what going on, has RF etc;
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