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well, it's not the one outside outlet I was afraid it might be, that one is on a light circuit, and it works when the circuit is blown.
Just unplugged everything on the circuit, don't think that will help though. Our garage isn't on the circuit, I guess the house is too old for that
I'm wondering if the outside outlet on the deck got filled with water in the recent rainstorm. I am not sure exactly how that causes this problem, but I guess it's worth a shot to check
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Sometimes it is best to just replace it if you have a spare handy and see
if the unit itself was/is the problem. They do wear over time.
Or so I was told.
If that does not fix the problem, the search goes on. That bit about recent
rain may be a good clue. Water and electric don't play well together....
Mark Singleton
Bene vivendo est optimum vindictae
The Laws of Physics do not care about your Politics - Me
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06-19-2018, 01:07 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-19-2018, 01:08 PM by jlanciani.)
(06-19-2018, 11:31 AM)EricU Wrote: Last time I had this problem, there was a broken outlet. Not sure what is going on now, it stays on for a couple of minutes and then blows. I am not seeing any issues on the load side. This breaker feeds a couple of outside outlets and the outlets in the bathrooms. I'm not going to be able to use my electric toothbrush soon since it's not getting recharged.
Is there a way to tell if it's the gfci function or an overload? Should I just replace it? Is there an easy way to tell if I have some kind of fault from the load side?
Disconnect the load side wiring from the GFI and re-energize it. If it still trips replace the GFI, if it doesn't trip any longer the problem is downstream. Go down the line one device at a time until you find the source of the fault.
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Plugging in and unplugging a device that draws current immediately, either by capacitor charge or the device is on can, on occasion, trip it.
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06-21-2018, 07:08 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-21-2018, 07:09 AM by EricU.)
there are no loads like that, as far as I know. With everything unplugged, it still trips. It takes about 5 minutes or so, haven't caught it tripping yet to find out the exact amount of time. Got to get to the panel and disconnect it. I thought I read that the outlets would refuse to set if the load side was disconnected, but I'm not sure how that works. I suppose there could be outlets on the circuit that I don't know about, but I haven't found any (unexpected) dead outlets yet.
My toothbrush is safely plugged into another circuit.
I guess it's old enough that it doesn't owe us anything. I wish I knew what the first outlet in line was, I would replace it with a gfci and use a regular breaker. I suppose it wouldn't take that long to figure out, there are only 5 outlets on the circuit.
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I am pretty sure I found it. Looks like a spider took up housekeeping in one of the outside outlets. Took the opportunity to replace the outlet since it was backstabbed, and those seem to cause nothing but trouble. I disconnected everything but the first outlet, and the breaker has been on for over an hour now.
Got to go re-wire that first outlet, had to cut some wires because they used crimped wire nuts.
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It took a lot longer this time, but it tripped again. I might go back to just having the first outlet connected and see how long that lasts.
