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Don Y[_3_]

On 12/2/2015 1:31 PM, wrote:

In the past, there were 3 times as many bulbs in place without a problem!

wow

so maybe your breakers aged... (I'm serious, they do age)

5 breakers located "in a row" in the electrical panel.
One has never been wired to anything (that's the breaker that I
used to replace the one in question). The other three are
reliably servicing kitchen counter outlets and bathrooms.
All see regular loads. None have ever tripped (for overload
*or* ground fault)

or you changed extension cords to a heavier guage?

Same extension cords that have been used in the past.
If this one wasn't actually used on *this* tree LAST
year, then it was used on one of the OTHER trees.

or there is other load in another outlet on the same breaker

Nope. Only 5 (duplex) outlets. Four of them along the back
of the house, the fifth around the side.

I would as a test change to a non GFI breaker to eliminate that possibility.

Moving to a non-GFCI *circuit* yields reliable operation.
What I haven't tried is swapping the GFCI breaker with a
nonGFCI breaker. That requires a bit of rewiring and
leaving that other branch circuit idle while testing.

[I'm comfortable working with electricity -- but in the panel,
there's nothing between you and "sudden death" : I'm not
going to flip the main breaker just to make these sorts
of breaker changes]

I didn't see the naswer to the 2 out of 3 question, what if you use 2 strings instead of 3?

Should I then move to 1 out of 3? And, from that, 24 out of 25 bulbs?
Then 23 out of 25? etc.

The fact that this is just a MODEST load suggests the problem has to
be noticeable. If I was pulling 2200W, I could imagine some merit
to downsizing the load to 2000W -- or even 1000W! But, at 675W,
my microwave oven draws that! My *hairdryer* draws more than that!