dbaxter21073 Posted December 10, 2007 Share Posted December 10, 2007 It snowed here in Colorado over the weekend and during my checkout on Sunday realized that I had two controllers - a 16 channel and an 8 channel that blew the GFI. I did some debugging and unplugged both the units and reset the GFI. Plugged in the 16 - the GFI did not blow. I plugged the 8 in and the GFI blew immediately. I unplugged both units and reset the GFI. I plugged in 8 channel controller and again it blew the GFI. I did not have any show running nor did I have the Hardware manager on. I inspected the controller and all looked well. I checked the ground connection and all looked good. I hooked the unit to a non-gfi circuit and fired up the display and it worked like a champ. I will say that I strive to keep the circuits off the ground but it is hard when the snow buries everything and was thinking that was the case and pulled the unit off and would look when the snow melted in the next couple of days and continue my troubleshoooting - no big thing. But then I was thinking, when I plugged the 8 channel controller in, the 16 channel was not plugged in and the unit was not part of the network. I am thinking of the reasons the 8 controller would have blown the GFI immediately when plugged in when there should not have been power going to the individual channels and no matter what the snow was covering, the issue would have been that the 8 channel unit was blowing the GFI, not the load on the individual channels. Not sure if this makes sense but there are a lot of people out there who have a great sense of the GFI concept and might be able to explain why this might happen or point me in a direction to review. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LightORamaDan Posted December 12, 2007 Share Posted December 12, 2007 It sounds like something is wet inside the controller or even inside the power plug in the controller that is causing a leak. If this was working okay then something has caused a current leakage.Does the same GFIC work when you plug other things into it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dbaxter21073 Posted December 12, 2007 Author Share Posted December 12, 2007 I have the 16 channel controller plugged in to the same GFIC without problem, I tried switching GFIC circuits and the same situation happened. The unit was completely dry on the inside (it is raised off the bottom of the box with spacers by about 4 inches) and I had wiped the plug down - can not say it was 100% dry but then neither was the 16 channel unit. These are GFICs that are dedicated to the show so there is no other house load on the circuits.More Snow is expected on Friday but I will probably get an opportunity tomorrow to have the snow off the yard to test again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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