what's going on my friends dustin with electricianu a little out of breath
as you guys can see i'm in beautiful breckenridge colorado right now
um so i noticed something here when we got here electrician right always looking for
problems i went to get in the hot tub it was like
10 degrees outside i'm like yo i want to get in this hot tub for sure and we turned it on and
we had one of the jets going everything was fine um went to turn the other jet on and everything
shut off the led display everything just boom just dead so i was like we tripped a breaker for sure
so went over there's gfci breakers like there should be there's two of them though there's
a 20 and a 30. now these don't actually look like they're tripped but we just lost
everything on our display over there but square d notorious for this the handle is actually tripped
so you got to turn it all the way off flip it all the way back on this one's fine i'm gonna trip
anyways still got our gfci protection so we're good they said that they just got a brand new um
hot tub so what i'm thinking is they probably have a hot tub that's sized larger than the conductors
and the over current devices the breakers so sure enough like you know who wouldn't
reset the breakers everything was fine as long as we just kept it on
low we had no issues but it was any time that you got both of them on together both of those pump
motors it would trip the breaker so i figured i would just open that and show it to you
talk a little bit about the code and sizing breakers and everything for these motors
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all right so as far as what code has to say about any of this hot tub stuff i thought there was a
few relevant codes to bring up just to talk about the various codes that there are so to start out
we've got 430.6 which talks about ampacity and motor determination and 430.6 is really what we
figure out our conductors and our breakers so with motors one thing that we've talked about
in the past is that motors they don't just call them over current protection there's just there's
two different kinds of protection that we have to do with motors one of them is the short circuit
and ground fault protection so if there is a short circuit or a ground fault we
have one thing that we deal with the other one is the overload protection
so 430.6a1 talks about conductor ampacity and branch circuit ground fault protection
instead of using the current rating on the motor nameplate we actually have to use these tables
430.247 through 430.250. so specifically for us we have a single phase motor it's 230 volt motor
there's two of them and they're 2.5 horsepower so you actually have to go to table 430.248
and look at the flc numbers so you go under the column for 230 volts you look at what the
horsepower of the motor is rated and then you figure out what the current rating of the motor
is rather than relying on what the name plate actually says for the amperage this is just for
the short circuit and the ground fault protection so we have two 2.5 horsepower motors they're 230
volts so uh on the on the table you notice there's only a two horsepower and a three
horsepower motor there is no 2.5 horsepower so you can kind of guesstimate the in-between
values so i'm going with 14.5 amps a 2 horsepower motor would be 12 amps a 3 horsepower would be 17
so i just kind of went in the middle and i'm guessing about 14.5 amps
so a 20 amp breaker on each one of them should be fine but you also have to account for the heating
and i think that the reason that this is tripping unfortunately i don't have a multimeter i can't
check any values i don't have any tools up here with me so i'm just guesstimating that with both
of the motors running and the heat that this 30 amp breaker is actually tripping and that's
probably what's going on there isn't a ground fault there's no short circuit happening it's
just an overload that's happening so it's too much current that's running on the circuit at one time
but i really can't investigate too much more because i don't have the tools available
so some other things to note if you're looking up um disconnecting means or ground fault protection
or anything like that we have to go to 680 so 680 is for pools fountains and similar specifically
680.13 which i think is a violation in this situation it's for maintenance disconnecting means
and it says that the disconnecting means should at least be five feet from the edge of the water
away this is probably about four feet it's pretty close but i'm going to call that a code violation
and the idea there is like if somebody is sitting in water and they can in any way
reach uh you know anything electrical they could get shot so they do say that there's
at least a barrier within that five foot space then that's one of the exceptions to that rule
the other thing is 680.32 talks about ground fault circuit interrupter protection so anything uh you
know receptacles plugs lights anything around this pool equipment all has to be gfci protected which
this is so all in all i really don't know why it's tripping there's a number of things it could be
it could be that the gfci breaker is bad it could be that there's something going on that's causing
that gfci breaker to trip and it's not bad but there's still something there it could
be a combination of the pumps on together it could be the heat and you know introduced to everything
without a multimeter i can't really do much but my worry was you know we're staying in a house out
here they just got this new hot tub and i was like man what if it's you know what if the the breaker
and the conductors are undersized for what's available but the cool thing is even if that were
the case they've got a sub panel out here that's good for 60 amps so they should be able to run
new conductors if that were the case but going off of these nameplate values i don't really know but
again without checking with the heat on and having my multimeter on using my ammeter and then trying
to clamp onto those conductors and actually see what's happening when the motors turn on
there's not really much that i can do so that's all i've got for you my folks i'm
going back snowboarding i'll see you later oh yeah here's a picture of me on the lift when you
don't bring face protection out with you when you're snowboarding this is what you look like
all right crazy people i love you and i'll see you guys on the next one
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