When trying to restore power, a fuse or breaker will sometimes trip out even though the cause of the original outage has been fixed. This is known as _____________.

• A. Ground Trip Block
• B. Cold Load Pickup
• C. Hot Line Tag
• D. non-reclosing

Answer: (B)

Cold load pickup is the phenomenon where, after power is restored following an outage, the sudden re-energization of loads causes a temporary inrush current that can trip fuses or breakers even though the original fault is fixed. When devices like motors, transformers, and heaters wake up from being unpowered, they draw a much higher startup current than their normal running current. That brief surge looks like a fault to protective devices, so the protection trips to prevent damage. Once the surge subsides, the system can settle back to normal if there isn’t a new fault. Other terms describe different situations, such as automatic reclosure or safety tagging, so they don’t explain why a restoration trip happens.