On Sunday afternoon I had a small planer and shop-vac running in the garage and tripped a 20A breaker a couple times. The overhead LED bulb is on the same circuit, and I noticed that night it's really dim and flickering. Would the breaker tripping cause damage to the bulb? Everything I Google just returns issues about the LED's being the problem.

It's also kinda irritating that I can't run both the shop-vac and a light-duty planer on the same circuit.

Honestly, I doubt the breaker opening directly affected the LED.

Far fetched, but the only explanation I can come up with is that when the breaker opened, the coils of the motors in the shop vac and planer act like an inductor, and inject any residual energy back into the circuit with the LED. Since the LED is now the only load on the circuit, it's a very brief high current and affects the electronics in kind.

Seems reasonable enough to me, but I was an Accounting / Finance major.

Now to figure out how to keep the thing from tripping. Seems like I shouldn't be having this problem anyway. It's on a tandem 20A breaker versus a standard single breaker. Any chance that is involved?

Not sure what you mean by tandem breaker. If there are two in a row, it is still designed for 20A. It sounds to me like you've got too much load for a 20A breaker.

Yeah it's probably just me drawing too much on the circuit, which is annoying.

It's this breaker:


versus a single like this:

Breaker #1 can feed two separate 120V circuits, up to 20A, or one single 240V circuit up to 20A. It doesn't affect the ability of the breaker to feed your loads since they're on the same circuit.

Thanks!

Scriffer, you have discovered an ugly truth that LED bulbs are more delicate in certain modes than incandescent. They are electronic devices at their heart. You'll need to replace that bulb, but chances are it will fail again.

If there is a way to power condition the socket for surges, that would be what I try first to see if that protects the bulb adequately. Industrial motors put quite a bit of surge type load on a circuit when starting up and are quite noisy too with plenty of spikes. You could possibly do something with the motors to smooth their startup demand, but that is not usually easy. I'll look at a couple of options when I get a chance, or you can also do some searching online--perhaps one of those two options is achievable.

Power conditioning seems like overkill for a garage bulb. It's back to functioning for now, but like you said it's likely only a matter of time until it goes for good. I did try rolling the power on slowly for the two tools, but once the planer got under load, the breaker popped. I may have just been too aggressive on the material though.

I'll probably just stock up on a few incandescent bulbs and rotate those out as necessary.

Scriffer said:

---

Power conditioning seems like overkill for a garage bulb. It's back to functioning for now, but like you said it's likely only a matter of time until it goes for good. I did try rolling the power on slowly for the two tools, but once the planer got under load, the breaker popped. I may have just been too aggressive on the material though.

I'll probably just stock up on a few incandescent bulbs and rotate those out as necessary.

---

How much peak and average current does your planer draw? Maybe we can look it up from the make/model. Tripping a breaker indicates you are overloading the circuit. You might need a separate beefier circuit for your power tools, and then you will likely solve your light bulb problem.

In my garage, the electrical outlets feed not only the garage, but all of the perimeter lighting and various indoor and outdoor plugs around the house. It is a ridiculous design, but builders don't really care, they just provide basic functionality. When the GFCI trips on the garage circuit, it takes out my NAS in the office, and I have to remind The Rib to push the red button on the wall in the garage after a big storm so she can play some of her tunes on the SONOS. It doesn't make sense to her and therefore she forgets every time.

DeWalt 734 planer
Says 15A on the specs, I assume that's peak.

Ridgid 12 gal Shop Vac
10A motor on that one


I've run the shop vac with a table saw and with a miter saw separately without problems, but like you said, I'm not exactly sure what all is on this circuit. Flipping them both on at once would certainly pop the breaker, but it'll be a hard sell for the wife to agree to paying for another circuit to the garage.