Building wiring fault dimly lit in all outlets

[xa]

On my SurgeArrest surge protector, the building wiring fault light will be dimly to semi-strongly lit on every single outlet in my house, but ONLY when the heat pump is on. An electrical high pitched ringing noise also accompanies when the red light is on. I checked all outlets to my knowledge with a tester, but there’s so many that I may have missed one or two. I also replaced this surge protector with the exact same one in case my old was faulty. I can “make” the building wiring fault light come on at full brightness if I plug an outlet tester into the surge protector itself (is that normal?)

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as calling an electrician or HVAC technician to find the issue and fix it because that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past few months. I think I’ve had 5 different people from various backgrounds come in to try to resolve the issue and none of them have been able to come close. They checked the breaker panel, outlets with a better tester, tried switching off breaker switches to conclude it happened only when the heat pump was on, and replaced the inverter and compressor in my heat pump. 

I know that this isn’t a forum for general electrical problems, so I suppose my main question would be: what are the reasons that this light is only partially lit, also occurring on another one of the same model. I would think that if say ground is missing or there’s reverse polarity, it would be full brightness and not “flickering”. This leaves only an overloaded neutral (or maybe loose ground?) as the remaining cause but I’m not certain if my assumption is correct.

Thank you for reading 

[Teken]

Based on the information you have provided the root cause is the heat pump. Meaning there is more than 2-5 VAC seen on the neutral return. 

Anyone with a True RMS DMM (Digital Multi Meter) could verify this. 👍

As it relates to other possibilities not related to your heat pump which many people miss is poor Earth grounding at the service entrance (meter base). 

Ideally the resistance of Earth ground should be zero ohms. But that will never happen because of the different ground / soil conditions and environmental factors.

So the NEC / CEC in North America shoots for <25 Ohms . . . ☝️

You’ll need a Meggar / Insulation Tester to identify and measure the resistance on the grounding system in your home.

From a home owners point some of the easiest things to do is insure all grounding from the Service Entrance (Meter), Service Panel (Breaker), and all lights & plugs are tightly grounded. ☝️

If this isn’t your home (built new) and was second hand and it’s really old. It’s imperative to inspect every outlet for a (Boot Leg Ground) !!

People use boot leg grounding to fool a GFCI tester so it can pass a basic inspection! 👎

Next is to install a few more ground rods in parallel with the existing grounding system in the home.

Why?!?

Because less than 1% of the people will hire and spend finances on a person to measure the ground resistance! Thus a cheap and effective way to insure the ground resistance is less is to add more grounding rods.

If for example the ground resistance was above the 25 Ohms. It doesn’t matter after you install 1-2-3 extra rods into the ground. Because just one rod will cut the resistance down from 1/4 - 1/2 of the previous ground resistance! 👍

Another simple test if you have very dry conditions and the ground is NOT very conductive is to water the ground where the meter base is and where the ground rod would be.

If there was / is a high resistance condition present once you wet that area the ground resistance will decrease immediately and to a very low resistance level.

This simple test can isolate and identify quickly if it’s a high earth ground condition and costs you almost nothing but time. 

Give it a shot and let me know what you see and observe. 👍