Tripping Breakers

Breakers do wear out. FWIW whenever we ran the coffee maker, dish washer and the clothes iron simultaneously it would trip the breaker. Replacing the breaker with one of the same value was the solution.

Sounds like the KW500 has a short and fairly large fuses?
Sometimes you can see or smell what is fried by popping the cover off (after ac power disconnected and caps are discharged!) and giving everything a good look see. Other thing, if it is tripping a GFCI breaker you might just be looking for a slight short to ground, sometimes you can get resistance to ground back up to snuff by just blowing clean with an instrument air bottle (radio shack) and wiping away obvious dust.

Hi,

Does the problem occur repeatedly after you reset the breaker? Does the fuse in the amp blow? Often, any device which uses a torroidal transformer in the power supply will have a current inrush that momentarily exceeds the rating of the breaker (I'm assuming the KW500 uses one, though I can't confirm this). Usually, most circuit breakers can handle the momentary current inrush, but as circuit breakers age, they become more finnicky (I wish I knew why). I recently had to replace a 20A breaker in my kitchen circuit, since every time the heating element on the espresso machine cycled, it would blow the breaker. I'd say if the fuse isn't blowing on the amp, or if after resetting the circuit breaker the amp works, then the culprit is most likely the circuit breaker itself. If the fuse is blowing, I'd say there's an issue with the amp, and it must be sent for service. Good luck.

-Richard

I had a similar problem some years ago and it was, in fact, the breaker that had failed. It's cheap and easy to replace the breaker so that's certainly something you can isolate as a potential cause of problem.