[darlenescanlan]

electrical keeps blowing my gfi plugs when ever it is plugged in. please help.

[AmpDraw]

An oven, refrigerator or any other large home appliance plugged into a GFI circuit will cause the GFI to blow, this is normal. What happens when you plug it into a normal non GFI protected outlet? If it trips the breaker then there is a problem.

[denman]

In your post you said "plugs", was this an error and it should have been plug?
Is the stove wired to a GFI or is it blowing GFI's on other circuits in the house?

A stove should not trip a GFI designed for this use, it depends on your house wiring.

Most GFI's monitor 2 things
1. The current difference between neutral and line (leakage)
2. The ground to neutral isolation upstream of the GFI

Since most stoves are hooked up using 3 wire you need a GFI which does not monitor the ground/neutral connection. This does not apply if you have the newer type of setup using 4 wire which is becoming part of the electrical code in many areas. On standard GFI's upstream ground and neutral must be separate and the GFI checks this. On a 3 wire stove hookup neutral is tied to ground in the stove so a special GFI is required. On 4 wire you have a separate ground and neutral, the same as a 120 volt setup so when the stove is installed the ground strap in the unit has to be removed.

GFI's are not recommended for high inductive loads (motors) since they will nuisance trip. This applies to some fridges but not a stove.

[AmpDraw]

Here's where my thoughts were coming from denman...

I can't find anything on the model listed, if it is an electric oven then it shouldn't even be tied into the GFI outlets in the kitchen it should be on its own dedicated circuit. If that circuit is GFI protected it would be a GFI breaker at the panel, can't say I've ever seen a 240VAC GFI plug. The OP specifically says "plugs", I take that to mean the GFI plugs on the wall the sink is on. That took me to guess this is a gas range we're dealing with.

If its a gas oven then it could be drawing enough current to trip a weak GFI which is a common problem with GFI outlets and breakers, not to mention what else is also plugged into the GFI circuit when its tripping, could already be at its threshold before the igniter even starts up. It doesn't need to be nor should it be on a GFI circuit. I've never heard of any local building codes that require the oven to be on a GFI circuit, but I suppose anything is possible, California often has even stranger laws.

If its a convection oven, gas or electric, it will have a motor in it.

Back to , plug it into a normal outlet and see if the breaker trips, if it still happens then clearly there is a short somewhere in the oven that needs to be located and fixed. If its been working and this just started happening when nothing else has changed I'd start by unplugging everything else controlled in this GFI circuit (don't forget to unplug the garbage disposal as well) and run the oven to see if the problem still happens.

If it does still happen you could either have a weak GFI breaker in the outlet with the little "push to test" button on it (most likely cause), or a short in the oven somewhere.

If it doesn't still happen then one of the other things you unplugged could actually be causing this and you only thought it was the oven doing it because the oven was most likely what you were directly using when its happened. Or again it could still be just a weak GFI outlet and putting other loads on this circuit is taking it out.

[denman]

derlenscanlan

You said electrical in your post so I jumped to the conclusion that you meant an electric stove. I did some more checking and it now looks like this is actually a gas unit. Please disregard my earlier post. Much of it is not applicable.

Try it on a non GFI circuit as AmpDraw suggests.
I can see having a bad/weak GFI as this is fairly common
When you say it is blowing your GFI plugs, are all these plugs on one GFI OR have you tried it on separate GFI's?

I disagree that GFI will not run motors, I have run many power tools outside on GFI's and only get the occasional trip even with an old drill I have that needs new brushes. Yours is tripping constantly.

[AmpDraw]

Just an FYI for who ever, GFI outlets are considerably more expensive than a standard outlet. More often than not you'll find they will tie several normal outlets on the sink wall in the kitchen (or bathroom) into a single GFI outlet somewhere. I've even had to go hunting for the GFI outlet and found them many times all the way out in the garage hidden behind piles of junk but tripped and causing power loss in the kitchen to what at first looks to be just normal outlets. This is why I say make sure you don;t limit your thinking into only assuming its the range and not possibly something else, maybe even as far away as the garage or bathroom.

Many owners manuals of large appliances will also often specifically tell you not to use a GFI circuit for them.

Will they work, sure, I often see heavy amp load devices like washing machines plugged into GFI outlets, but its normal to expect to have to reset the thing from time to time, as well as expect the life of the expensive GFI outlet to be greatly reduced as well.