Why do my new HQI bulbs trip my GFCI (Somewhat urgent)

[daniella3d]

If there was a poor connection with the bulb you would see the bulb shutting down from time to time no? I don't know.

I had this problem with the artemis bulb, and it shut down a few times but I was simply restarting it. I would put back the old bulb as Phoenix are good for more than a year and see if you still have these problems. If the problems are gone then it's clear that it's the artemis bulb. I know some people had to use a bit of sandpaper on the contact to even make the artemis bulb fire.

At least put it back until you return from your trip and you can plug it without GFCI while you are away. I never use this and my MH is plugged directly in the power outlet.

I too have a Coralife Aqualite pro fixture. I had a problem with the artemis bulb about 3 to 4 times shutting down during one year. This never hapened with the Phoenix.

When I leave I put a web cam on my tank so that I can check if the light did fire, if the water level is good, if the fish are alive and if the skimmer is working (hang on tank). This give me a bit of peace of mind. Recently it is my contrôler that bugger, and it went into shut down mode, so nothing was working...no heating, no pump, nothing. Good think I cought it in time because the temperature in the house is about 72F and without pumps my coral would have died. Now I am scared to leave and trust that contrôler.

Originally Posted by cwatkins

At first I thought I had a GFCI going faulty, so I switched the controller (Energy Bar 8) over to the other GFCI, and then the devices on the other one (power bar with Vortech power adapters, and reactor pumps, UV, etc) over to what I thought was the "bad" GFCI.

I wonder, could a poor connection with the bulb be causing this? Maybe they're not the perfect fit like the Pheonix bulbs, and could be arcing or something.

The funny thing is I experienced this issue weeks ago, and then one day one of my new Artemis bulbs died, so I put a pheonix back in while I waited for a replacement to be shipped out. And for that whole week everything was good.

And then this morning I put the newly replaced Artemis back in and all heck breaks out.

I think I'll have to maybe go with running the Pheonix bulbs while I'm away. The unfortunate thing is they're starting to grow cyano, so they're past their prime.

I wonder if I need to buy some reliable bulbs on Boxing day?

It's got to be one of these:

A. Bad socket or connection with the Artemis
B. Artemis runs differently which causes GFCI trip.

Before this whole issue, I've only ever had the GFCI trip once before and I'm sure that was because I dripped some water on the outlet while feeding.

P.S. I've resorted to using a paid monitoring service (30 day free trial though) to monitor my Apex controller web page. If the web page goes down, it calls my cell phone with an alert.