GFI & storms

[Doug]

Alrighty. Took a couple quick pics of them. These are of course horizontal in the box.

I thought they were standard now, but have a hard time making believers.

[westom]

Originally Posted by Doug

I thought they were standard now, but have a hard time making believers.

GFCIs are not used on refrigerators for same reasons you have suffered.

GFCIs can be surge damaged if proper 'whole house' protection is not installed. So newer GFCIs will trip open on power loss. And will not reset if surge damaged. That is a problem for you.

So many have posted myths. For example, any ground fault before that GFCI is completely irrelevant. The only relevant ground fault is after the GFCI. AFGIs and GFCIs do not 'fight' - another myth based in not understanding what these devices do. GFCIs do nothing for surges - for so many obvious reasons.

A GFCI measures an electromagnetic field around both wires. Obviously, this causes no power changed or problems. If those fields are not same, then a GFCI opens. IOW if current after the GFCI finds some other path to earth, then GFCI trips.

This is considered a major human safety problem for refrigerators. Therefore GFCIs are exempted on appliances that cause safety problems when tripped.

[mike31154]

Originally Posted by Doug

Alrighty. Took a couple quick pics of them. These are of course horizontal in the box.

I thought they were standard now, but have a hard time making believers.

Thanks for the photos. Looks like they're Cutler Hammer breakers. I have a Siemens breaker panel and after doing some reading on combination AFI GFI units was unable to find any Siemens devices. Looks like these combo breakers are still few and far between, not that readily available. BC code does require GFI and AFI devices on all new installations as well these days. Bedrooms and any other room that may be used as some sort of sleeping quarters must be AFI protected, bathrooms and circuits to do with water, GFI protected. During my search on the net, it looks like the US NEC (national electric code) is in the process of requiring AFI protection in virtually every room! A little overkill maybe, trying to protect people from p-poor wiring installations? Who knows. Might as well design the main house breaker as an AFI/GFI unit, although that will be tricky with two hot wires. Some congressman or senator must have a brother who's an electrical contractor...

[Doug]

Originally Posted by Lampshade

Well... there's another option too. GFCI's trip based on detecting trickle currents. They operate in 20-40 milliseconds. That is EXTREAMLY fast, 1 cycle is 16ms. A typical distribution circuit breaker operates in 2-20 cycles(depending on magnitude of the fault). and faults far down a line are generally co-ordinated to clear a fuse or a recloser first, which may take 2-3 cycles. This is still longer than the GFCI.

Pretty much, you may have had phase to ground fault in your area, raising the ground potential enough for your GFCI to pick it up. the GFCI will operate before the fault is cleared by your power company's protection.

Thats sounds like a very good explanation. Of course no idea if thats the case or not. If I may add I had several gfi,s wired into my stand for my 90g at this residence and several of the same at my previous residence. Had power blurps or complete failures in both situations and never had a gfi not restart when power came back.

[Lampshade]

Since your power was turned back on within a second or 2, it was most likly an automatic reclose that brought it back, automatic recloses are usually in place to "pop" a tree off a line, and they work. If the tree was close by your house, it may have been able to show up as ground current in your house for only a the 1-2 cycles before the fault was cleared off the power line. Usually doesn't happen since there's usually many houses fed by the same circuit, and odd's of the tree being close to enough to yours is slim.