Quote:
Originally Posted by m1noel
I don't know why, but this was an issue with Aria's, but never with Palazzo's that I have heard of. Ours would trip the GFI whenever the power source switched from shore to inverter, inverter to generator, generator to inverter. Sometimes it would just trip while driving down the road. Between my dealer (who over a month checked every wire in the coach) we tried at least a dozen different GFI's. They all did the same thing until they switched the inverter to pure sine wave. It has now been 3 1/2 years without a tripped GFI. I do not understand why, I just report the news.
Mike
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I spent the day yesterday chasing the wiring on the GFCI circuit. I read a thread where KohTangFred explains how it is wired and the problem he found in a duplex junction under the bottom drawer below the cook top. It wasn't my issue but it gave me a good opportunity to have a good look around.
I got out my Digital Multi Meter (DMM) and looked at what happens at the GFCI when I switch over from shore to battery and what I saw was that the voltage at the receptacle went from 121VAC to 102VAC on battery. That explains why a tripped GFCI will not reset: The voltage is too low to lock the enabling solenoid in the GFCI.
Interestingly, the firefly panel indicated an output of 120VAC on the inverter while I was reading 102.3 on the GFCI receptacle. Go figure... A weird software algorithm? On shore power, at idle and in pass-through, the firefly panel showed an inverter output of 103VAC, just like what I measured while on battery.
My conclusion is that my DMM sees incoming power just like the GFCI circuit sees it. Because the inverter is a modified square wave inverter, components meant to work on a pure sine wave don't behave as expected.
Low voltage is responsible for what I perceived as being a problem with my GFCI device. Not a problem at all.