Question Circuit breaker trips turning on PSU switch

[melvin86]

Hello guys,

I built my pc with the following specs:

AMD RYZ 9 3900X,
Corsair RMi 1000W,
ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO (WI-FI)
2X GIGABYTE AORUS NVMe Gen4 SSD 1TB
HDD Seagate BarraCuda 2TB
4X G.SKILL 16GB KIT DDR4 3600MHz CL16 Trident RGB Neo for Ryzen 3000
MSI GeForce RTX 2070 TRI FROZR 8G

Everything is fine and running smoothly the only problem is that time to time, not always, when I turn on the switch of my PSU, the circuit breaker trips on my leaving room only (where my pc is), then i turn off the switch of the PSU, I turn on the breaker and when I turn on the PSU again everything works good. The capacity of the circuit breaker is 16A.

I know maybe the PSU is too high for these specs and maybe a 750W could be enough, anyway I don't think that it should consume 16A, neither at startup, when all the capacitors consumes more.

What do you guys think of this problem? Did you happen to face the same issue?

Thank you very much

 

[faalin]

Thats an odd amp for a circuit breaker should be a 15A or 20A, anyway. Try leaving the switch on the back of the computer on and just turn off the computer. More then likely when you are turning the switch off on the PSU the caps are draining and when you turn the PSU there is a 1000W surge to replenish power back to them and it trips the breaker. if your worried about surges then get a surge protector or a decent battery backup unit.

You also need to take into account when the breaker trips what else gets turned off with it and try to figure out how many amps that room is already using , then when your computer turns on its just to much for the circuit.

 

[melvin86]

Yes that was my point as well, when the capacitors are empty they suck a lot of current and this is causing the breakers to trip...should I think to downgrade the amp to 750W? Or do you think surge protector or a decent battery backup unit may help to avoid the breaker to trip?

 

[faalin]

Just dont turn the switch off on the back of the PSU, then the caps wont drain.

Most people only turn the switch off for fear of power surges that might damage the computer. If you're worried about this you can use a surge protector or a good battery backup unit that has surge protection in it.

 

[melvin86]

Thank you @faalin, yes I may adopt this workaround for the moment. I was curious maybe to find a way to understand the real root cause of this problem, but I know that is difficult and there are a lot of variables involved...

 

[jonnyguru]

Yes that was my point as well, when the capacitors are empty they suck a lot of current and this is causing the breakers to trip...should I think to downgrade the amp to 750W? Or do you think surge protector or a decent battery backup unit may help to avoid the breaker to trip?

As I said in your LTT post, the caps have to re-energize after being drained from being off for so long.

And your logic is correct: A smaller PSU typically has a smaller "bulk cap" because it doesn't have to keep the PC up in the event of a power failure for as long of a period of time, assuming the PC is at full load.

But the best advice is to just stop turning the PSU off. Like I said before: It's not how ATX was designed to function.