I installed 4 Lithonia LED recessed lights on my living room 15 amp circuit. Everything was working great yesterday when doing final testing. I left the breaker off overnight as I was planning to do final closing of junction boxes and drywall patching today.
Last night at 2am the fire alarm connected to my inactive ADT home security panel starts chirping. I go to the ADT motherboard in our coat closet and start disconnecting the low voltage wires attached to the motherboard trying to get the thing to shut up. It ended up being a stupid battery problem on the fire alarm unit itself…but I realized the wires going to the ADT motherboard are hot as a red and black touched and gave a spark, so I leave them disconnected and wire nut them all off. It was 2am and I didn't think much of it.
Today for final install of the LEDs I stupidly forego one last test (because I did it yesterday and everything worked great) and push them all up into the drywall using the spring clamps. When I go to turn on the breaker it immediately trips upon multiple attempts.
I have tried the following which have not fixed the problem of the breaker immediately tripping:
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turned off and back on all breakers for the house…Nope!
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unplugged all appliances and turned off all light switches on that circuit and retried breaker…Nope!
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reset GFCI on a different circuit that may be in between breaker and the tripped circuit…Nope!
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unplugged and wire nutted off all low voltage wires going into the ADT motherboard…Nope!
These are some potential variables that may or may not be relevant:
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The 4 LEDs are connected to a Lutron Maestro low voltage dimmer switch. It is not a traditional on/off knob but a flat low profile click if that makes sense. To be considered 'off' do I need to disconnect the wires going into it? Anything else about the switch that might affect my attempt to reset a short circuit? The wires are all intact and no burning or discoloration.
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There is a motion detector and a door contact in the room with the LEDs that are wired back to the ADT motherboard in a different part of the house. I assumed since I disconnected all those wires from the motherboard this would eliminate this from being a factor?
Any tips or things I can do to narrow this down is much appreciated!!!
Best Answer
Shared Circuit
Assuming this isn't just some crazy coincidence, I'd bet on:
So what is going on? Anything is possible. But since the breaker is tripping immediately, the likely scenarios are:
If you can't find the problem in one of those two places then you have to disconnect each light or receptacle on the circuit until you find the problem. There is a small but non-zero possibility that somewhere in the circuit something else (e.g., a bad backstab connection) went bad coincidentally with the new work.