5 year old house. Whole Home Generator for last 4 years and have experienced multiple short term (minutes) and long term (2-3 days) power failures. Within the last 2 weeks, we have had one outage that lasted 4 hours and one that lasted 5 minutes. Both times, a breaker would trip for a specific room. No big deal but that room has a refrigerator in it. Never has happened before (4 years and many outages). Appears to only trip when auto transfer switches to Generator. Does not trip when it switches back to regular power. No other breakers in the house are being tripped.

Only items on the breaker are fridge, router, Sonos, and a printer.

Any guidance would be appreciated!

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Posted by LSUDad

Still on the move

Member since May 2004

62742 posts

Posted on 5/1/26 at 3:11 am to captainahab

Is it an arc fault Breaker?
If not, breakers over time will get weak, an start tripping. Change out the breaker, see if that cures the problem.

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Posted by ApisMellifera

SWLA

Member since Apr 2023

787 posts

Posted on 5/1/26 at 4:44 am to captainahab

quote:
Change out the breaker, see if that cures the problem.

Do this or you could swap out the breaker with a matching one to see if the issue travels to the new circuit.

If it does, replace the breaker. If it doesn't there's another issue.

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Posted by captainahab

Highway Trio8

Member since Dec 2014

1676 posts

Posted on 5/1/26 at 7:28 am to LSUDad

Not an arc fault and not on a gfci circuit. Will replace the breaker. Many thanks for the quick responses!

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Posted by LSUDad

Still on the move

Member since May 2004

62742 posts

Posted on 5/1/26 at 8:09 am to captainahab

Is it a 15 or 20 amp breaker?

An important note to remember is that circuit breakers can only handle about 80% of their overall amperage. That means a 15-amp circuit breaker can handle around 12-amps and a 20-amp circuit breaker can handle about 16 amps.

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Posted by halleburton

Member since Dec 2009

1615 posts

Posted on 5/1/26 at 11:02 am to captainahab

If your generator has a load shedding module, it may be overloaded and thats the breaker that gets dropped. Not saying this is the culprit, but certainly plausible.

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Posted by captainahab

Highway Trio8

Member since Dec 2014

1676 posts

Posted on 5/1/26 at 3:48 pm to LSUDad

quote:
Is it a 15 or 20 amp breaker?

20 amp. Also the fridge is only 4 years old and it has never tripped a breaker. As mentioned, it has never tripped until recently and it only tripped when the generator kicked on.

Halliburton - from my understanding, the "smart load manager" is programmed to load shed the high draw items like HVAC, oven, electric drier, etc. You can flip the breaker while under Generator power and it works perfectly - even when the generator switches back to utility power.

Sure sounds like the breaker based on what others have suggested.

Thanks again for the replies folks!

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Posted by captainahab

Highway Trio8

Member since Dec 2014

1676 posts

Posted on 5/12/26 at 6:50 am to captainahab

Wanted to give you guys an update.

The breaker is Arc - i didnt look close enough. In the old days, the older Arc's (that I was used to) had a yellow button. The newer GE's that are in there now have a black reset so at first glance from afar, I thought it was non-arc.

Electrician buddy of mine said Arc's can be more sensitive to generators kicking on. He said to try a non-arc. Swapped it out and we have had some bounces in power since yesterday and it never tripped.

You guys were right and it was a simple as a breaker going bad.

Thanks for the help!

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