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7 days agoThanks for the reply.
You are right, the 101V one would trip the GFCI. I traced it to the backyard outlet. I connected everything else yesterday and left it like that and it was fine today.
I went back to it again this evening, pulled apart the basement outlet and tested them all again. It was giving 122, 0.7 and 0.7, so no weird 101 today. I wired it all back together tonight and it’s not tripping. IDK what happened, but I think the outlet might have gotten wet. I pulled apart each outlet yesterday and put them back together better, but I can’t remember what order I did what. I’m going to leave it like this with a lamp for the next few days on so I’ll know if it trips again.
Thanks for the reply.
Yesterday I was able to determine which outside outlet was causing the GFCI to trip and I connected everything else up on the basement outlet and it didn’t trip. I went back to it again tonight, pulled apart the basement outlet again and did the same tests with the multimeter I did yesterday and I didn’t get the weird 101, just another 0.7.
So I wired it all together again and it’s working, not tripping now.
I now suspect that the outside outlet got wet, since it rained yesterday. Does what I observed make sense if there was water inside the outlet? I pulled both outside outlets apart yesterday in my testing, and put them back together better. But it also rained today, though an outside deck light was plugged into it yesterday so maybe that allowed water in. I’m going to replacing the box cover (looks like this) with a plastic flip cover one this weekend.
FWIW, this GFCI has been tripping on the regular every few months. We has suspected the old refrigerator in the garage was the problem, because if we unplugged it the GFCI wouldn’t trip. Once we simply replaced the extension chord to the fridge with a better one and it stopped tripping. Once we blamed a kid for running a space heater. Often we’d plug the fridge into a different outlet with an extension chord into the house and wait a couple hours before plugging it back into the garage outlet and it would be fine again. I thought maybe something in the basement could start running at the same time, like maybe the water softener and water heater and the fridge all kicked in at the same moment, but yesterday it was tripping with everything unplugged. So I finally got around to checking the whole breaker and finding every outlet on it. This confirmed that the other appliances are not on the same breaker, which I expected. It’s garage lights and 5 garage outlets (3 wall, 2 ceiling for door openers), one outlet in the basement and two outside outlets. (Annoyingly the previous owners or the builders labeled the circuit “garage lights and laundry” but none of it is laundry.) The GFCI was tripping but only killing the 3 garage wall outlets, basement outlet and the two outside outlets.
Anyway, thanks again for the detailed response. Much appreciated!