I recently burned out the electric starter of my snowblower. Replaced it with a $60 eBay knockoff instead of a $150 original manufacturers part. The old starter the previous owner had broken off the grounding pin but I wasn’t too concerned since the outlet is on a GFCI and you’re not touching any metal when pressing the start button.
The new starter has the grounding pin intact. I plugged it in and pressed start and it instantly tripped the GFCI. Reset it and it immediately tripped again. Just for fun I plugged it into a different GFCI (this one is only 10 years old instead of 30 years old like the previous one) and it didn’t trip it.
Do I have a defective starter or is it possible the old GFCI is somehow defective?
Most likely the older electrical circuit is weak. Not sure about newer gfi hardware, but the older stuff such as you described was notorious for being iffy, sometimes right out of the box. You should replace it.
GFCIs don’t care about the ground pin. They only measure current through the hot and neutral wires. If they don’t match, the GFCI trips.
Older GFCIs (certain brands more than others) are known to nuisance trip when used with a decent sized motor starting up. You need to look at the entire circuit to see if anything else is wrong, but it’s reasonably likely that replacing your old GFCI with a newer model will fix the problem.
Right. So since the ground pin is disconnected, even if your knock-off starter motor has a short to the chassis in it, the GFCI won’t be able to detect it unless there’s another path to ground.
GFCI will trip if there is “ANY” alternate path.
But in this post the missing ground prong is a moot thing because the new one has an intact ground prong.
And if you have a arc fault breaker in your system that could be causing the trip?
yeah, our kitchen GFCI - we can plug in a 1200W kettle no problem, but the thing trips as often as not when using an old hand-held mixer with the meshed beaters. Something about electric motors.