It's pretty rare for a circuit board to fail on a higher end furnace (Carrier Infinity) as most often the variable speed blower fails. If the furnace in question has a 'fixed speed' blower the circuit board is more likely to fail due to the higher electrical demands of the blower motor. With that said circuit boards while they do fail, can last a long time in most cases. (10 years or more, especially on a higher end furnace as the electrical demands be placed on it are much less than a lower end furnace.)

Without knowing the model of your Carrier furnace, we may uncover something else meaning what you have is not truly a Carrier Infinity system.

GFI or ground fault interuption circuit is typically much more sensitive than a regular non-GFI circuit. They shouldn't trip all that often. It sounds like the GFI portion you have of these circuits are relegated to the electrical panel itself?

If that's the case I believe it's the cheaper option than putting in a resettable GFI circuit that is resettable from the plug outlet and that might be why yours are tripping so frequently. Remember GFI's are much more sensitive. If the GFI portion is at the plug outlet itself, the tripping may deminish. If not there may be a loose connection somewhere when the wiring was done.

Electrical connections must be tight, if not all kinds of odd problems can occur. Brown outs / lightning strikes don't help matters either. Voltage spikes can damage quite a bit.

Is there a possibility that the circuits are overloaded? That will cause the breaker to blow. Maybe time to have another electrician come in and check things out, and make sure. Its not normal for a circuit to blow. My house is older too, and when we bought it, the electric was all in great condition, but, there just wasnt enough of it, and it still had a fuse panel. We spent a lot of dollars on getting more outlets, more lighting installed and a new circuit panel. Only time I have had a breaker blow, in 9 and half years is when I was in the shop working and had too many big saws running at one time. That only happened once. I now shut one down before moving on to another one. Could lightning have hit your AC circuit board? At our last house, we had lightning hit our entire York unit and had to have the whole thing replaced.

Breakers don't protect against high voltage, but rather against excessive current. If they're tripping, your circuits are overloaded.

One question for you though. When large loads are turned on (or turn on automatically), do you ever notice that some lights dim while others brighten?

op we need clarity. are the breakers in your panel tripping or just the gfcis (or

both)? while a GFCI does interrupt the circuit it isnt normally referred to as a circuit breaker.

The OP may also have GFI circuit breakers. When a ground fault is detected it shuts off the whole circuit branch.

A brown out is usually a low voltage condition. So it would be unusual for low voltage to damage the furnace control board. I hope the HVAC company you are using knows what they are doing. If not you may have paid for an expensive unnecessary repair.

Is it possible the OP has DFCI breakers? The Arc Fault units are pretty twitchy, so a DFCI might suffer the same touchiness.

Hi - thank you all for responding!

Austin Air Companie: I have a 24VNA9 Infinity 19VS Variable Speed. This is a genuine Carrier unit. Apparently, according to google anyway, Carrier has had a lot of problems with this board.

I have two service panels: the one original to the house is inside, and a new upgraded panel outside that takes care of the whole house.

mz_161: The GFI breakers that trip randomly happen in either of the service panels. I do not have GFI at the outlets. I'm referring to them as GFI breakers because that's how they are labeled in my service panel (ie, GFI Kitchen, GFU Hall bath, etc).

cat_ky: I'm not a big electricity user. A worst case scenario is a housework day where I'm running the washing machine, the vacuum in the summertime. I have not noticed any correlation to power consumption and my breakers tripping. No lightning the day of the brownout. However, all the lights in my house are LED because my contractor told me the house was "low-voltage wired". He didn't elaborate on what that meant. But I would expect my upgraded service panel should be able to handle normal power consumption, no?

DavidR: Yes, lights do dim when I run certain appliances, but the circuits seem to trip when there's nothing particular going on, ie, when I'm not using the vacuum or running the printer.

I do have a number of odd problems beyond the breakers tripping frequently, such as my LED hall light that glows when switched off - this is not a temporary thing - it's just either 'on' and lit, or 'off' and glowing. I mentioned this to my contractor and he told me it was normal for an old house. In general, all the LED lights seem to be twitchy - I've got one that flickers on random occasions, one that flashes disco-style constantly and one that just doesn't work at all anymore.

North Texan: Chances are you are right. My remodel was completed in Sept of 2016. Looks like Texas started requiring DFCI in 2018. Could this explain everything?

Disco-style flashing of an LED (continuous pulsing) may be indicative of overheating.

Sounds like your LEDs are run off a transformer, hence 'low-voltage wired'.

No, a light that glows isnt normal for an old house. I have lived in many old houses during my 79 yrs, and never seen a light that glows. I think I wouldnt trust what your contractor says, and I might just call a different electrician too. Look for one with a very good reputation. A house fire is not a pretty thing, and electricity done correctly and working correctly is a very important thing.

My question was whether some lights dimmed while others got brighter when large loads turned on. You answered the first part (dimmer), but not the second part (brighter), which is much more important to know. Lights that brighten when large 120 volt loads come on usually indicate an open or loosely connected neutral. That's a hazard and can damage your appliances..

LED lights will glow slightly with a very small amount of current. A switch with a lighted toggle will in fact pass a little current. You may have such a switch for your hall light, and not even know it, because the switch might not glow when off with an LED retrofit bulb in the light.

Your other LED problems could be wiring, but are just as likely to be the lights themselves. The light that flickers randomly might be getting ready to fail. The one that pulses like a disco light is probably already there. Same with the one that won't turn on. Recycle 'em. LED retrofit replacements are cheap these days. (And worth what you pay for them.)

Holly, You gave incomplete information in your initial post which lead me to believe it was the furnace circuit board that was having the trouble. A carrier infinity system has different levels and different configuration of those levels.

You posted back with only the model number of the outdoor unit, which is a variable speed infinity condenser with variable speed compressor. So with this type of unit you have circuit boards in the outdoor condenser to control the AC / DC inverter of the condensing unit and on the furnace you would also have a circuit board that controls the AC/DC inverter of the variable speed blower / or ECM motor.

It's very rare for the furnace circuit board to fail on either a full variable speed motor or ECM type motor. Nearly always the motor itself fails.

The circuit board for the outdoor unit has 2 heavy loads tied to it, number 1 the compressor, number 2 the condenser fan. The inverter for your outside condenser will generate heat ---a lot of heat. The hotter it is outside, the dirtier it gets the hotter it gets until something fails. In an inverter condenser this is most often the board.

I can only assume at this point that it was the circuit board in the outdoor condenser that failed. Which if this is the case would make perfect sense.

Other things (besides heat) that can effect electrical components: Loose connections.

Electricity will take the path of least resistance. A loose connection is often the tightest when the unit is off. When the unit runs, current flows. There is heat in current. Given a loose connection the heat during operation is hotter than when the apparatus is off this gives expansion and contraction of that loose connection which leads to erratic operation. The expansion occurs while the unit runs, the current flow drops due to the electrical path being disrupted which will give you the feeling of 'brown out' activity. When in fact, it's merely poor wiring.

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LED Lighting:

Some of this kind of lighting is very finicky in how it needs to be installed. Putting on dimmer switches can cause flickering and possibly even the glow you talk about.

Certain LED manufacture's make lighting in which there are no changeable light bulbs. When the light fails you have to replace the entire fixture. Part of the reason for these types of fixtures is that LED bulbs can last a really long time. But manufacture's often stretch the truth in these circumstances as in they will tell you it will last 18 years when more often than not it's 5 or less years. It's still a long time compared to the older incandescent bulbs and a bit longer than the newer flourescent bulbs.

An LED bulb doesn't require 120v to operate, where as the older incandescent needed 120v same as flourescent bulb. You have to understand this because the LED bulb itself often isn't what fails. It's the mechanism they use inside the bulb housing they use to drop the voltage from 120v to whatever the voltage requirements are for the LED bulb being used.

This is why you have certain LED configurations that will run low volt lighting off a transformer to operate an LED lighting system. You can have mood lighting / every color of the rainbow / different colors for different rooms and so on. However, these kinds of lighting systems are very complex in how they operate and the joke:

How many people does it take to change a light bulb? Is taken to new heights.

These things are often sold to the home owner under the guise of being a smart home.

also regarding dimmers, not all LED bulbs can be used with a dimmer. Make sure your bulbs are labeled as being Dimmer Compatible

Just thinking out loud. IF your re-wire job was done with undersized wiring, the result would be lower voltages at load devices and higher current than if larger (properly) sized.

During a brown out this would acerbate the situation. During the startup of large inductive loads, the transient "starting current" could become problematic for control circuitry.

Presumably your home rewire was permitted and according to code so unlikely I helped... that said, when the new electrician arrives you may want to ask about wire SIZE!

Best of luck.

After re-reading the posts and responses from the OP, I think that it's going to be impossible for us to do remote diagnosis on this one ("Not internettable," as Sophie often says). You need a good, experienced electrician, and by that I do NOT mean one who tells you that circuit breakers "trip when the voltage gets too high."

Thank you everyone - I am grateful for all your responses! I will call a diffferent electrician to help me figure out if I have one big problem or just a bunch of little ones. Its so helpful to know that these are things that I just don't have to learn to live with until something expensive (or really bad) happens.