I wired a hot tub to a 240 GFCI breaker. It only seems to work with the bare wire ground disconnected. If I connect the ground (which is connected to the same bar as the neutral (of course) the breaker trips instantly. Essentially I have seen this happen before and just did not connect the ground wire. Instead I just left the ground disconnected and everything seemed to work fine. I'm just concerned about doing it right. The bare ground is connected to the neutral bar at the hot tub as is the white neutral wire. Again, the white neutral is connected to the neutral bar at the box as is the white neutral wire. Any advice? Thanks Ray

Hello everyone, I'm new to the forum so allow me to give some history on the home I purchased a little over a year ago. I live in central PA. The house was built in 1926 and had knob and tube wiring. One of the previous owners had all of that replaced with 20 amp NM-B class wiring. There is a detached garage that has a 12-3 (Red/black/white/ground) running to it in PVC conduit from the 100 amp sub panel. Running next to this wire, in the same piece of conduit is a 12-3 that is was originally used for a 3 way switch to control over-driveway flood lights. Over the course of my first winter/spring in the house, I noticed that the garage breaker tended to trip after heavy rain falls. I figured there was a short in the garage somewhere. After breaking down all of the wiring legs inside the garage I found that the driveway flood light fixture was causing the short. I upgraded the light fixture with a new one that had shields for the light bulbs and internal gaskets to make it as water tight as possible. I had trouble with the three-way switches causing breaker trips so I replaced the 3-way switch inside the garage with a heavy duty 20 amp light switch to run the overhead flood lights. Since I now had an extra light switch in my kitchen that was already run to the garage, I decided to install carriage lights and use the switch location in the kitchen (swapping the original 3 way switch with a single pole switch). I wired everything up and it worked fine for the past 3 weeks. Thursday night, we received about 2-3 inches of rain. When I woke up Friday morning, I noticed that the carriage lights were on. I usually turned the light off at night. I checked the switch, sure enough, it's in the off position, but the light is on. I flipped the switch to the on position, light didn't change. I switched it back to the off position, light is still on. Since I had to get to work, I didn't have time to fuss with it so to be safe, I turned the breaker for that circuit off. I came home from work and with the circuit still off, I removed the switch in the kitchen and tested the continuity of the switch with the switch in the on position (positive audio signal for continuity) and then in the "off" position, my multimeter read "Open Loop" so the switch is good. With the two switch legs unattached, I re-energized the circuit. I wanted to test the voltage across the hot and "dead" leg. I then measured 120 volts across the hot to ground (duh) but when I tested the dead leg (the wire that sends the power from the switch to the fixtures, it also shows 120 volts! It was then that I noticed that the lights were on even with the switch removed. I then shut the breaker off and went to the main junction box inside the garage and disconnected the dead leg from the fixture. Essentially now the switch leg is unattached at each end of its run. I turn the breaker back on, the light is off but I measured the voltage across the hot to ground (120 volts) and the dead leg to ground, 120 volts! Now, I noticed while going back and forth that it appears that the original conduit has cracked where it meets the outside protection (where the wire comes out of the house before they go into the conduit and under ground) and had about an inch of the 2 inch pipe exposed to open air which could let water in. So my question, could water entering the conduit be amplifying phantom voltage affects (since there are 2 power wires running alongside the switch legs) causing it provide voltage to the leg that is supposed to be dead if the switch is removed? I've already resigned myself that I will have to rip up the conduit and replace it to make sure its water tight and replace the wiring to make sure they're not compromised but I'd like to just get an idea of whats going on.