Help! SPA Panel trips when plugged in

[Bear419]

I have a simple eaton spa panel with a 240 50A GFCI breaker. As soon as I plug it in or flip the main breaker it trips. I followed one of P-J's spa panel diagrams and have it wired like this:

I did check for shorts with my multi-meter, and there were no faults between the neutral and ground and the hots. I did notice a slight buzzing when I touched the two hots on the output end of the breaker. Is that normal.

 

[Chrisl77]

Can you take a pic of your wiring inside the gfci panel? I am thinking you have the ground and neutral wire tied together after the gfci? If you do that is probably why it is tripping.

 

[Bear419]

Here is a pic. The green wire is actually the neutral coming from a 3 wire range outlet. I run a wire from the neutral bus to the ground bus, and also have the neutral wire from the breaker join the neutral bus. The breaker trips even when I don't have anything wired to the breaker outputs.

 

[thargrav]

I see the black wire from the ground to neutral. Although this is OK because you only have 3 wires coming in and electricity is color blind this wire should be white, green or have no insulation to prevent confusion later.

Also, the spliced green & black wire is dangerous - the connection may be good now but if that splice were to open up you will have a floating ground & have a voltage on everything metal that could shock you.

The white wire running from one of the breaker out terminals to the neutral bus is probably what's tripping your breaker.

 

[Bear419]

The white wire running from one of the breaker out terminals to the neutral bus is probably what's tripping your breaker.

Thanks. I will take care to clean up the wiring.

As for the white wire going to the neutral bus. This is the wire that came pre-installed on the breaker.

According to this P-J diagram I thought it needed to be attached to the neutral bus. Is this not the case?

 

[Bear419]

With the breaker unwired and in the off position to took an ohm reading of the two hot outputs and got a resistance reading less than infinte. That doesn't make sense to me. Is this a sign of a bad breaker?

 

[Bear419]

It was a bad breaker. I left the wiring as is and swapped out breakers and it works as intended. From my meter readings there seems like there was an internal short in the breaker.