"brown out" trips GFCI??

[Sabina]

I came home from work yesterday, walked into the man cave, and was shocked and disturbed to find a dark, quiet room instead of the usual hum and blue glow. After much swearing the problem was traced to a tripped gfci.
My setup has a dedicated 20 amp circuit with a gfci outlet at the first box. The downstream boxes are all wired in. The circuit breaker was not tripped. The circuit has been running problem-free since the Summer.
After much questioning of the wife it seems there was a flickering of power in the house that afternoon. Could this have tripped the gfci? Any suggestions how to proceed? I want my equipment to come back on after brown-out/black-out....

I’ve had that happen many times. Easy yet still safe answer is to limit what is on the GFCI. I keep a most of my equipment on a GFCI BUT things with large power supplies like lights are on a 15amp circuit with a grounding probe. Both GFCI and ground probe should be used. Anything that could get wet should be on GFCI.


Aquarium electrical safety and cable management


Not that is should matter but my background is in electrical control system and drives. We are a UL shop designing systems up to 10,000hp.

 

[Brian_68]

Two schools of thought on GFCI, some say everything should be on one, others say a ground probe is all that is needed. The one thing you need to account for is they will fail and trip most likely over time, and if you are not home that can be catastrophic depending on what you place on it, so you should plan accordingly with redundency, or critical equipment not on a GFCI etc.