power adapter tripping gfi

S

Sean Lehman

Freshman
May 1, 2013
3
0
0
I was using a power adapter that consists of two edison lines feeding into a 50 amp twist. It goes into a rac pac giving me two separate circuits. I was connecting the edison ends to two separate gfi circuits and it tripped everytime with no load on it. I powered both x and y phase of rac pac off a single line and both worked, but when split, it tripped.
any thoughts?

Thanks
 
Re: power adapter tripping gfi

Sean Lehman said:
I was using a power adapter that consists of two edison lines feeding into a 50 amp twist. It goes into a rac pac giving me two separate circuits. I was connecting the edison ends to two separate gfi circuits and it tripped everytime with no load on it. I powered both x and y phase of rac pac off a single line and both worked, but when split, it tripped.
any thoughts?

Thanks
Click to expand...

The GFCI sees this as a leaky device and trips. No GFCI will operate with this cheater cord.
 
Re: power adapter tripping gfi

Sean Lehman said:
I was using a power adapter that consists of two edison lines feeding into a 50 amp twist. It goes into a rac pac giving me two separate circuits. I was connecting the edison ends to two separate gfi circuits and it tripped everytime with no load on it. I powered both x and y phase of rac pac off a single line and both worked, but when split, it tripped.
any thoughts?

Thanks
Click to expand...

The longer answer lies in how a GFCI works - it measures how much current goes out the hot wire, and how much comes back through the neutral wire. If those two numbers aren't the same +/- 5 milliamps, the GFCI knows current is leaking out, and it breaks the circuit. With how you were using things, only the phase imbalance would go back on each neutral - most of the current (assuming reasonably balanced loads) would actually "return" through the opposite hot wire.

The method you have been employing is unsafe. One of the ways this is dangerous is that if you plug one cord in, voltage is potentially present at the male plug of your other power cord if any device's switch is in an on position.

Your situation is a common problem - trying to make due with whatever power is available. Unfortunately, there aren't any safe and legal magic bullets. For shows where you need to run from Edison power, your best bet is to build a "poor man's distro" - basically a method of tying several power strips or devices' grounds together to eliminate noise issues, but leaving the hots and neutrals discreet so as to not violate any code or safety issues. A simple way to implement this is to mount several rack mount power strips in a rack and scrape the paint off the rails and back sides of the rack ears. These rack mount power strips are then grounded together through the rack rails, but power is still seprate - one plug in powers one power strip.
 
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