Nice. The cooler is not plugged into a receptacle with the test/reset button, but I do have a keggerator on the same circuit in the garage. When the cooler loses power, so does the keggerator. When I press the reset button, they both come back on but only for a few minutes... This circuit is on a 15amp breaker (main switchboard)....
Have you tried unplugging the kegerator to see if the beverage cooler will run by itself? That would be an important test. If it won't run by itself on the circuit, there may be an issue with the cooler or gfci receptacle.
Running two refrigeration units on one circuit could very well be the problem. The new cooler is rated at about 10amps and that's the value that would be used to size a circuit for it. However, the current draw can be double or triple that during compressor startup. That inrush current along with the kegerator drawing its fully rated current can certainly tax that circuit. However, AFAIK, a GFCI
receptacle does not provide overcurrent protection, so I'm not clear on why an assumed overcurrent situation would be tripping the GFCI receptacle's ground fault circuit. After a little reading, it appears that GFCI receptacles have been known to trip when high current motors, like a compressor, initially start up because there is an initial inrush of current that charges the magnetic field and the GFCI circuit sees this as a current imbalance and trips.
Curious, could the breaker just be swapped out for a 20A or does a whole new circuit need to be wired?...
That depends on the wire gauge it was wired with (the whole circuit needs to be checked back to the main board). 20A circuits need 12 gauge wire, while 15A circuits are OK with 14 gauge.
I agree.
If it's already wired with 12AWG wire, the circuit breaker can be upgraded to a 20A. However, that will likely not solve the GFCI tripping problem downstream. If you upgrade the circuit breaker to 20A, the GFCI could then be upgraded to 20A if it is not one already. The design of the 20A GFCI receptacle may be more robust than a 15A GFCI receptacle and less susceptable to nuisance trips. A GFCI receptacle has the ability to protect downstream receptacles and that would be how the normal receptacle being used for the cooler is wired.
BTW, a 15A receptacle has two vertical slots while a 20A receptacle has one vertical slot and a T slot.
FWIW, I just had two TRUE beverage coolers stop running because of an internal failure in a GFCI receptacle. The receptacle will not reset and will need to be replaced. No harm to the coolers but four kegs of beer and my entire yeast repository rose to the mid 80s before anyone noticed.