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I fought the GFCI


Steven

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I've been having trouble with the GFCI tripping, so today I decided to fix the problem. Here's how I won:

1. The very nice metal, grounded, flood light fixture has a rubber sleeve that fits around the lamp to keep the water out. However, it leaked. This would not be that bad except that the base had no place to let the water escape.

I drilled some holes and applied some silicone grease around the sleeve.

2. The lighted metal (wire flame) Christmas gift boxes are designed to sit directly on the lawn. They collected leaves and stuff until there was a leakage path to ground.

I used some wire ties to fasten metal rods to the corners, thus elevating the wire frames an inch above the ground.

3. I had 4 controllers plugged into 1 GFCI outlet. (Obviously, mostly LEDs.) The leakage was too much.

I got a couple of long extension cords and put them on different outlets, one all the way to the back yard and onto the hot tub circuit.

The display seems to be running fine now. We'll see how it goes tonight.

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Nice!

I had a flood fixture on our flagpole that used to trip the GFCI every time it rained. I tried to drill a hole in it, but couldn't get it done-- it had a ceramic fixture and a VERY thick base. The light was pointed straight up (to light the flag) so the water would collect...

I finally fixed it by switching to a low-voltage sealed Malibu spot...

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