Filters with High Ground Leakage

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Cow

Senior Member
Location
Eastern Oregon
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Electrician
Just want to start this by saying I'm still pretty green with drives and filters and such. Installed some filters today that I was told to install on the load side of the drive. Powered drive up and it showed a phase-ground fault. Stickers on the front of these MTE filters read "high ground leakage currents." Megged this filter and the other 7 not yet wired at 500vdc phase-ground and only got 1.86 megs on all of them. Bypassed the filter and the drive took right off again.

Called MTE tech support and they said they don't make load side filters, these are meant to be installed on the line side. Whoops, somebody must of given me bad info. But that's easy enough to fix.

It makes you wonder, the NEC is so worried about personnel safety in regards to ground leakage currents and GFI requirements etc. But these things leak so much a drive faults out? And they're legal? I don't get it.:confused: Filters must have some kind of UL listing loophole...
 
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Cow said:
It makes you wonder, the NEC is so worried about personnel safety in regards to ground leakage currents and GFI requirements etc. But these things leak so much a drive faults out? And they're legal? I don't get it.:confused: Filters must have some kind of UL listing loophole...
Click to expand...

Somebody give this man(cow) an answer, please. I'm wondering about this, too, on a number of different levels.
 
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Leakage current may not be a part of the UL standard.

Other than GFCI and GFPE, for single phase circuits 240V max, the NEC says almost nothing about leakage current. In fact, for 480Y/277 systems it allows the GF device to be set up to 1200A max.
 
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