Let me tell you my story I had a heater doing the same thing and in the process of diagnosis just like you I kept putting it in the water and watching the GFI Outlet keep popping until the one time I put it in there and it literally blew the heater apart shattering the tank. Be careful
This question goes over my head a bit unfortunately. Im Experimenting with a multimeter instead of my finger now. I can say my brother (an electrician) did the heavy lifting on this one.
Thank god your a Ford tech and not a gm otherwise you might not be with us anymore.
It may be the heater, I had one do the same thing, then it exploded in my sump, had a heck of a messSo during a power outage. I was running my heater and return pump on off a generator. When I go to plug everything back in this morning it was running fine. Came back a hour later power was off in the aquarium room. Thought it was a breaker in the box but turned out to be the gfci. I tried it three times whenever I plug in the inkbird it trips the gfci. Heres where it I get confused. I tried running it off a different circuit. Still trips the same gfci. Even though it on a different circuit. Is my heater to blame? Its a titanium 800w finnex. Im refreshing my basic understanding of a gfci right now. But thought I might get a quick answer on here.
Attached is a picture of why my power went out...
I'm uncertain why it says point of sale here. I typed "point of sale in the water" its almost like this site automatically assuming point of sale is an acronym for point of sale and spelling it out.
"Piece's of ships"_ is a known swear and these usages of terms get edited by the auto editor, routinely. My phone spell checker also autocorrects my typing and blows the CGFI on my pacemaker 4-5x's /day.
The way a gfci works is it measures the loop, both sides, both hot and neutral. When a difference is detected between the 2 sides the gfci trips. You can rule out a problem with the hot side because that would trip the breaker. Couple of possibilities I can think of here.
Yes when the old skimmer pump was plugged in there was 120ish stray volts. After that was unplugged there was 8 stray volts. After I plugged the heater back in it went down to hundredths of a volt. So the heater is acting as a grounding prob as someone mentioned earlier witch explains alot. Still don't like the 8 stray volts. If I have a little cut on my finger and put my hand in the tank I can feel a tingle like licking a 9v battery. So I'll be looking into where that lesser voltage is coming from now.
Yeah the little cuts burning is a thing, my Koralia did that, best to find the faulty equipment and throw it out before it gets worse. I don’t like grounding probes because they can mask issues. Although they could enable a GFCI to trip if there is a fault, rather than your body enabling the GFCI to trip. I still cringe a little bit when I put my hand in the tank after having two stray current issues
I wish there was a decent way to test equipment for this. The best I've figured out is to use a multimeter positive end in the water and ground to an outlet ground. Then I go about plugging things in one by one.... gotta love used equipment.
A ground probe paired with gfci protection is the one and only way to go. Then the probe won’t ‘mask’ things, and you won’t have to think twice about putting your hands in tank. Safer for you, safer for livestock
If you are reading AC there is no positive. There is a hot, neutral and ground. Neutral should be close to ground potential. Ground is added as a safety precaution. You can alway use the + sign for positive next time. The way a GFIC works is the current on the hot side should match the current on the neutral side. If they don't the current must have found another path so it trips. It sounds like you have a metal type heater and the exposed metal case is grounded. That is the same as having a ground probe in the tank.
