AFCI Nuisance Tripping or Appliance Safety Concern

Hi,

My house has AFCI breakers on all bedroom and living area circuits. I purchased a humidifer last year which we ran on one of those circuits (downstairs bedroom). I started to notice the breaker tripping on that particular circuit (which had never happend up until that point). Would go reset it, and run it again, only to find that a week later it would again trip.

Put the unit away for the summer and just recently brought it back out. I am running it now on an entirely separate AFCI circuit (upstairs bedroom) and this morning that breaker tripped. Up until this point have never had any problems with either of these AFCI circuits. They only thing that has changed is the presence of that humidifier.

Questions:

1) I understand that AFCI's are succeptible to nuisance tripping with certain appliances...could this possibly be the problem?

or

2) Is the AFCI tripping because of an electrical problem with this particular humidifier and should we discontinue using the unit?

or

3) AFCI's do nuisance trip, the humidifier (being practically new) is probably fine, just live with it? Appears to only happen when the unit runs out of water and goes to standby mode. When the unit goes to standby if it reaches desired humidity, but still has water in it, this problem does not occur.

I understand it is difficult for anyone to answer these questions directly knowing so little about my particular sitution. I am more interested in what your experiences are and other background you might have with AFCI breakers.

BTW, the humidifier seems to be the only problem that I have had on these two circuits. Have not experiened any other issues.

Thank you for any insight that you might have.

Dex

Dex418;

Greetings and welcome to the Forum !

I thinik your #3 is probably as close as you can get.

The GFI type you have may be a little sensitive, and, the insulation in the Humidifier (for that particular model) might be a little thin, and causing some electrical leakage to the frame.

I really don't think you got that major of a problem, save for the inconvienience of resetting the breaker.

Don't happen to have a circuit that isn't GFI, or, you could put a standard Breaker in one of the slots, just for that circuit !

Best I can offer other then saying to replace the unit with a better model, or, is it apossibility that the unit is getting the circuit(s) so close to an overload, that somethig else you turn on occsionally, it tripping it?

Hard to say.

Have a good Day !
S.W.

Post edited by: SWHouston, at: 2008/10/24 04:08