Compressor blowing spike fuses or melting spikes

[EricH]

Originally Posted by de_

We are running our compressor hard (ie pretty well continously during a 2 minute game). We blew 2 - 20 amp fuses in the spike, melted a connection terminal off a spike pcb and I believe killed a spike outright over the weekend.

The compressor is rated at ~10 amps. I could not find its rated duty cycle but I would hope it is good for 2 minutes. We will change to a breaker but we are concerned it is apparently drawing so much more current than its rated 10 amps. We do realize starting currents with a 100psi back pressure may be significant. We did increase the supply wire size to 12g to reduce voltage loss.

Anyone know of
1) compressor infant mortality failures ?
2) any material benefit to add a cooling fan (its got one built in side I believe)
3) what its duty cycle rating is ?
4) what could its startup current be when it restarts at 100psi (as opposed to starting with no back pressure) ?

Have you replaced the Spike's fuse (yellow) with a 20A breaker (black box marked with "20A")? If not, that may be the problem. Startup current is, I believe, 25A, which would blow a Spike fuse pretty quickly. NOTE: Only do this on the compressor Spike, where is is explicitly permitted.