My extremely "helpful" 4 year old loves to go get daddy cokes from the fridge in the garage for me. Well, apparently, three days ago he also turned the fridge temp dial to off and it sat without running for two days until I noticed it. Luckily, the fridge pretty much just holds beer, soda, and waters in the refrigerator part and the freezer was very low on the frozen meats.

However, I turned the fridge back on last night and by this morning, it had tripped a GFCI outlet that is on the same breaker. I reset the GFCI when I left for work, but the wife said it tripped it again. I asked her to reset it again and she said it is continuing to trip the GFCI after a few minutes.

Could it be that all the contents of the fridge are room (garage) temp and it is just having to run tool long and draw too much current? My plan as of now is to get a few bags of ice on the way home and ice down all the drinks. Then once they are cold, put them back in the fridge and reset the GFCI again. Gonna also put some ice in the freezer too so that it'll have some volume of contents already at cold temp.

Any other ideas? This fridge has been running in its current setup for over 8 years with no problems. Gotta love those "helpful" children...

Fridges are known for tripping GFCIs. If you swapped that outlet with the next one on the circuit your problem should go away.

Same here. But our garage fridge is 10 years old to us, and we bought it used for $100. I put a thermometer in the freezer and it was fine. But the fridge was 59 degrees. I figured I got my money's worth and ordered a new one for the house and will move the house fridge to the garage.

Incidentally, my internet provider is on the same GFCI circuit as the fridge in the garage. So as soon as the network would go down, my kids would freak out and run to the garage to reset the GFCI.

Anyways...moving to another circuit might make the GFCI problem go away, but you may be burning extra electricity with a bad compressor in your fridge.

replace the outlet

keep in mind that many builders will have the garage plugs & outdoor plugs on the same circuit and as a licensed irrigator we've found that when the irrigation zone runs near the outdoor plugs sometimes it will cause that breaker to trip.

KellerAg98 said:

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replace the outlet

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I agree with this as the easy first step. GFCIs are notoriously tempermental.