GFCI Tripping on Magnum Inverter

Re: GFCI Tripping on Magnum Inverter

nsaspook wrote: »

We agree that's "silly" to bandaid a product to make it work but sometimes it better in the long run to do it if it fixes the problem. The poor quality of some components from China will only make things worse when used in critical functions. The EMI generated by home electrical is nothing, these are the kind of filters I've used on systems at work to stop electrical problems.

One of the things about the Chinese that often gets left out is how good they can be at making existing products better. Yes I know about the Chinese drywall and plastic toys with arsenic. It is amazing to me how good they are when they are not constrained with price.

Re: GFCI Tripping on Magnum Inverter

The attitude in much of Asia has historically been 'let the buyer beware'. Some Chinese companies are past that now but many are not.

İndia is the same way - worked there many years. My old boss (whole family) had one point only - how to make more money regardless of how. İf he was doing something real bad he might warn close family members to be cautious. There were posters about ethics posted all around but they really meant employees should not steal from the company - never mind what the company does - bit of a double standard.

The old attitude in Asia is something most people in North America and Europe would have great trouble understanding.

Re: GFCI Tripping on Magnum Inverter

A GFI has a toriod transformer with hot and neutral (wider prong) wire wrapped in opposite directions so their fields cancel in toroid core. A pick up winding is also wrapped around toriod core and is amplified and rectified to create the signal that trips the breaker.

When hot and neutral carry exact same currents there is no net field in torroid core and therefore no sense winding output. When hot and neutral are not exactly the same, as result of one of the two lines having leakage to ground terminal, then there is output from the sense winding and the GFI trips open.

The spec on GFI's are that they trip with greater then 5 mA AC leakage to ground. There is variation in this leakage sensitivity from GFI to GFI. I have one that I have measured to trip at 100 uA leakage. This may explain why your first inverter did not trip and new one does.

It is common for switching power supplies, like one in your computer, to have two caps to ground prong as part of the EMI filtering. The tolerance on these caps can result in some imbalance on the amount of current that is passed to ground prong by the caps. This could be enough to trip an overly sensitive GFI.

Some generators have neutral and ground tied together. Your charger could also have the EMI caps to ground like the computer power supply.

Your solution may only be to have any offending device not to connect their ground to your inverter ground (three pin to two pin AC adaptor plug).