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A homeowner on Fort Myers Beach called us this July, a little frustrated. Her pool equipment had “come back” after Ian, as she put it. The pad went underwater during the surge, and once everything dried out and FPL restored power, the pump started right up. It ran fine for months.
Then the rainy season settled in, and the pool breaker started tripping. Not every day. Mostly after a few wet days in a row, or on those thick mornings where the air feels like a warm towel.
When we opened up the pump’s wiring box and the timer, there it was. A thin, whitish crust on the terminals and the back of the enclosure. Salt, left behind by the surge. On a dry winter day, it’s harmless. But salt pulls moisture out of humid air, and once it’s damp, it conducts electricity. Just a little. Just enough for the GFCI to notice.
Her equipment hadn’t come back. It had just been waiting for August.
We tell that story because it shows something we’ve learned from a lot of Fort Myers pool calls: when the breaker trips tells us almost as much as the fact that it trips. So let’s go through the patterns.
Your pool pump is on a GFCI-protected circuit. So, in most setups, are the lights and a few other pieces of pool equipment. NEC Article 680, the part of the electrical code that covers pools, requires that protection.
A GFCI watches for current leaking out of the circuit, meaning electricity heading somewhere it shouldn’t, like through water or through a person. When it sees even a tiny leak, it shuts the circuit off. Rain doesn’t cause that leak by itself. It gives an existing weak spot the moisture it needs to show up.
So the real question is which weak spot. That’s where the timing comes in.
Lee County gets a lot of lightning. You already know that if you’ve lived through a July here.
A nearby strike doesn’t have to hit your house to cause trouble. The surge can come in through the power lines or the ground, and pool equipment is especially exposed. It sits outside, it’s tied into a big bonded mass of water and metal, and newer pads are full of electronics: variable-speed pump drives, automation controllers, salt system boards.
What we find after these storms:
The telltale sign is timing. The tripping starts right after one specific storm and keeps happening, rain or not.
That’s a different fix from a moisture problem, which is why we test the protection device and the electronics separately instead of assuming. Surge protection at the panel, and sometimes at the pad itself, is worth talking about once we know what got hit.
This is the pattern we see most in inland neighborhoods, and it catches people off guard. The breaker is fine through spring. The first few storms in June, fine. Then sometime in July or August, after weeks of rain, it starts tripping. Sometimes even on dry days.
What’s changed is the ground.
Much of Fort Myers sits on sandy soil over a shallow water table, and during the rainy season that water table rises. The conduit running from your house to the pool pad sits right in that wet ground. The code treats the inside of underground conduit as a wet location. NEC 300.5(B) says so directly, which means the wire inside has to be rated for it.
Plenty of older pool circuits don’t hold up to that. We find:
On a dry winter day, all of that tests fine. Two months into the wet season, with the conduit partly full of groundwater, it doesn’t.
We saw exactly this at a home in Crown Colony. The pad itself was dry and tidy. The problem was a splice somebody had made underground, halfway between the house and the pad, probably during an equipment swap. By August, it was sitting in water.
Some pads are fine through ordinary afternoon storms and only trip after the really heavy rain events. Think tropical systems, or those storms that stall over the river for an hour.
That usually means standing water is actually reaching the equipment. Along the lower-lying streets near the Caloosahatchee, like around Deep Lagoon, heavy rain combined with a high tide can leave pads sitting in water that just doesn’t drain for a while. Pump motors and the wiring boxes attached to them aren’t built to sit in water.
It’s also where the Ian lesson comes back in. If your pad flooded in 2022, whether with surge water, river water, or anything else, the equipment deserves a closer look than “it turned on.” NEMA, the association that represents electrical equipment makers, publishes guidance on water-damaged electrical equipment. For most things that were actually submerged, including GFCI breakers, motors, and controls, it recommends replacement, not drying and reusing. Saltwater makes that recommendation stronger, not weaker.
This one’s specific enough that it gets its own section. Homeowners tell us, “It never tripped until we put in the new pump.” They assume the new pump is defective. Usually it isn’t.
Here’s what often happened. Older 240-volt pool pumps weren’t required to have GFCI protection. The current code requires it. So when a new pump goes in and the circuit is brought up to code, a GFCI gets added for the first time.
That GFCI then catches leakage that had been there for years. Old wiring, a tired underground run, corrosion in a box. The problem was always there. Now something’s finally watching for it.
We walk through that code change in more detail in our Fort Myers pool electrical code updates guide. The short version: the new GFCI is doing its job. Don’t blame it, and please don’t remove it.
Don’t reset a GFCI over and over and hope. Every reset puts power right back onto whatever path the leak is taking.
Don’t touch or reset equipment that’s standing in water. Wait until the pad drains. If the pad flooded, leave it off and call us before turning anything on.
Don’t replace the GFCI breaker with a standard one. It stops the tripping. It also removes the protection between an electrical fault and the people in your pool.
Don’t assume the pool company is the right call for this. Pool techs are great with pumps, filters, and chemistry. A ground fault in underground wiring is an electrician’s problem.
And if anyone ever feels a tingle in the water, on a ladder, or on the deck, get everyone out and keep them out. Then call. That’s not a wait-and-see situation.
On a rain-related tripping call in Fort Myers, we start with the pattern. When did it start? After which storm? Only during the wet season? Since new equipment went in? Your answers narrow things down quickly.
Then we test. We check the GFCI device itself and the electronics on the pad. We test the insulation on the motor and the underground circuit with a meter designed for that, which can find weak spots you’d never see. We open up the boxes and look for salt residue, corrosion, and water lines. We also look at the pad’s elevation and where the water goes in a heavy storm.
The fix depends on what we find. It might mean replacing a flood-exposed timer or GFCI, cleaning out corroded terminals, or rerunning an underground circuit with wet-rated wire and no buried splices. Sometimes it means raising equipment above where the water actually gets. Our Fort Myers pool circuit installation guide covers how we plan for flood elevation when a pad needs to be redone.
Electrical repairs on pool circuits go through a Lee County permit, or the City of Fort Myers if you’re inside city limits, with an inspection at the end.
One honest caveat. Some older pads have more than one problem. We might fix an underground splice in August and then find a tired pump motor that only shows itself the following summer. We’ll tell you what we tested, what we found, and what we’d keep an eye on.
If your pool breaker trips after rain, the pattern is worth paying attention to, and it’s worth fixing before the next wet season makes it worse.
Coharbor Electric is licensed and insured. We handle pool electrical diagnostics, GFCI and ground-fault troubleshooting, flood-damaged equipment replacement, and underground circuit repairs throughout Fort Myers and Lee County, from Fort Myers Beach to the riverfront around Deep Lagoon to inland communities like Crown Colony.
Give us a call, tell us when the tripping happens, and we’ll find out why instead of just flipping the breaker back on.
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