dns718
Member
- Location
- Venice, FL, USA
Update
Update
It has been a few months now and I wanted to update members who provided thoughts on this mystery above (greatly appreciated!).
We had a licensed electrician come out and (a) swap out virtually all of the "dual function" (AFCI/GFCI/Overload) breakers; and, (b) reposition the whole-house surge protector at the top / where current enters the panel (from near the end/bottom of the main panel). The pool company sent a tech to ohm out the motor and controller to ensure no overt anomalies were happening with the pool pump. They suspected the main pool breaker at 60A was seeing too much steady-state current draw at ~50A and changed it to 70A (leaving all pool equipment breakers at the panel on the opposite side of the house as is). The electrician did not measure too much current, about 25A when he was present (for steady-state operation of heat pump and pool pump combined).
The original issue of spontaneous, random main circuit breaker trips of the dual-function breakers on the main panel when the pool heat pump plus pool water pump turn on in the mornings did not disappear. I think it might have become a little less frequent, but that might be an optimistic view. Breaker #27 was most often the one tripping, so in desperation (having been taught how to change these, and noting that the particular circuit did not really need AFCI or GFCI), I went to home depot and got one of the simpler, Schneider HOM overload-only breakers with the same rating and changed it out. Rock solid, this has never tripped since. (As a reminder, the tripping has always been ground fault related for any of the breakers.)
However, once in awhile we have seen other breakers still tripping - not frequent, maybe once or twice a week. (We have also had lightning storm related surges that have caused few breaker trips too, but that must be a different issue though still speaks to the hair trigger behavior of these newer breakers that frankly don't seem ready for prime time... a real problem and worry for us if say, we are out of the house on vacation travel or whatever and circuits start turning off in the house!)
So, we have been noting the circuits remaining at issue (all 15A) and I plan to similarly change these out for regular (old-fashioned) breakers, backing in GFCI at the outlets if needed to compensate for removing at the breaker. This as recommended by the pool electrician, who cannot do it for me as this is technically not current code, but he was sympathetic.
Only other thing we can think of was to try pulling bigger wire (currently 60A rated) but go to the next level (even though it should never draw more than 60A) to try to smooth out anomalous ground fluctuations/start-up transients. A more recent idea here is instead, to put the heat pump on a new home run circuit apart from the pool pump. Given the costs and the uncertainty as to whether this would be a sufficient fix in the end, is driving us to simply go with the tried and true old-fashioned breakers for the ones that still trip (~3-5).
So that's where we are. No smoking gun found yet and everyone seems mystified by this behavior, but we're likely going to do the simple breaker changes. I'll update folks when this happens to let you know if this works.
Update
It has been a few months now and I wanted to update members who provided thoughts on this mystery above (greatly appreciated!).
We had a licensed electrician come out and (a) swap out virtually all of the "dual function" (AFCI/GFCI/Overload) breakers; and, (b) reposition the whole-house surge protector at the top / where current enters the panel (from near the end/bottom of the main panel). The pool company sent a tech to ohm out the motor and controller to ensure no overt anomalies were happening with the pool pump. They suspected the main pool breaker at 60A was seeing too much steady-state current draw at ~50A and changed it to 70A (leaving all pool equipment breakers at the panel on the opposite side of the house as is). The electrician did not measure too much current, about 25A when he was present (for steady-state operation of heat pump and pool pump combined).
The original issue of spontaneous, random main circuit breaker trips of the dual-function breakers on the main panel when the pool heat pump plus pool water pump turn on in the mornings did not disappear. I think it might have become a little less frequent, but that might be an optimistic view. Breaker #27 was most often the one tripping, so in desperation (having been taught how to change these, and noting that the particular circuit did not really need AFCI or GFCI), I went to home depot and got one of the simpler, Schneider HOM overload-only breakers with the same rating and changed it out. Rock solid, this has never tripped since. (As a reminder, the tripping has always been ground fault related for any of the breakers.)
However, once in awhile we have seen other breakers still tripping - not frequent, maybe once or twice a week. (We have also had lightning storm related surges that have caused few breaker trips too, but that must be a different issue though still speaks to the hair trigger behavior of these newer breakers that frankly don't seem ready for prime time... a real problem and worry for us if say, we are out of the house on vacation travel or whatever and circuits start turning off in the house!)
So, we have been noting the circuits remaining at issue (all 15A) and I plan to similarly change these out for regular (old-fashioned) breakers, backing in GFCI at the outlets if needed to compensate for removing at the breaker. This as recommended by the pool electrician, who cannot do it for me as this is technically not current code, but he was sympathetic.
Only other thing we can think of was to try pulling bigger wire (currently 60A rated) but go to the next level (even though it should never draw more than 60A) to try to smooth out anomalous ground fluctuations/start-up transients. A more recent idea here is instead, to put the heat pump on a new home run circuit apart from the pool pump. Given the costs and the uncertainty as to whether this would be a sufficient fix in the end, is driving us to simply go with the tried and true old-fashioned breakers for the ones that still trip (~3-5).
So that's where we are. No smoking gun found yet and everyone seems mystified by this behavior, but we're likely going to do the simple breaker changes. I'll update folks when this happens to let you know if this works.
