Radion tripping GFCI

[BeanAnimal]

A little love for this subject?

 

[Tradewinds]

Alex,

While I do not intend to stir the pot here and as much as I like this product, I find the GFCI situation, answers and solution to be somewhat frustrating.

This issue here is not with "certain" GFCIs behaving poorly. The "issue" is with the design of the switch mode power supply.

The reason the GFCIs are tripping is either poor filtering that is allowing spikes to back-feed the GFCI (causing nuisance tripping) or (too much) leakage to ground through the filtering network (could be tested by simply isolating the ground). In either case, the SMPS needs to be reworked with a better filtering topology. Given a decent SMPS design, one should be able to stack several Radion supplies on a single GFCI without it tripping.

I would expect the Radion SMPS to be GFCI friendly seeing that most areas of the country has adopted building codes that require GFCI protection on the circuits that would be used to power a typical aquarium. Furthermore, any sane person would be using GFCI protection on ANY piece of equipment on or near their aquarium anyway.

While it is nice that you are willing to trade out customer SMPS units for linear units, I would expect that the resulting efficiency loss has to be significant, making the solution rather unattractive.

Is there a new design in the works?

Seems like a very logical question to me. Hopefully you will get a response from EcoTech.

 

[BeanAnimal]

Alex?

 

[TigeBell]

Alex?

You might want to call the. Probably will get your answer quicker.

 

[Midnightt]

Mine are tripping the GFCI randomly too. I just installed the circuit and it tripped it when I started everything up. Reset it and was fine for about two weeks. Then last night bang. Reset it and was fine for a few hours then it tripped again. I've reset it several times and about 20 min later it trips it. So I went to a standard breaker to see what happens. That has been going for about 1 hour at the moment.

I also used one of those single outlet GFCI plugs and used it and the second I plugged the radion in it tripped. However, just saw that it is a 15amp on a 20 amp circuit. Although I'm not 100% sure it matters as the lights don't pull 20amps...

I have to agree with Tradewinds. Knowing that the standard household circuit has a GFCI somewhere in it as part of code why would these not be compliant with most/all GFCI breakers and outlets?