Breaker, breaker

[Lawrence Tarnoff]

120 service keeps dropping. Bedroom breakers do not appear to have tripped, but when I reset them I get power for 10 minutes or so. I was running both AC and toaster oven. Turned off bedroom AC and it still tripped. Turned off other AC and toaster and power remains on. Getting warm in here. Any ideas?

[Lawrence Tarnoff]

Surge protector reports low voltage on L1 — 104 volts. L2 is at 116. I reported this to campground office and we’ll see what they can do.

[Joel Ashley]

Happens often, Lawrence, especially at older parks in mid-summer with a full customer load.  Everyone’s on the grid at once, the midday heats on, the AC’s are all cranked, and the voltage drop across all lines is more than your onboard protection will allow.  Don’t keep taxing it.  Leg 2’s voltage might be enough for the one AC, but not if it’s inconsistent. 

There may be nothing short of a complete park grid revamp to fix their issue, or quit renting out so many sites this time of year… yeah, like they’d ever consider that!  Try to use only devices that are on leg 2, but then watch it’s voltage carefully. 

Many of us carry testers that plug into the park post outlets and analyze their quality before we hook up.

Joel

[David T. Richelderfer]

This is a great example of why a good surge protector should be your next purchase.  One leg of incoming power at 104 volts would not let the surge protector allow power into your coach.

An autoformer would likely fix the power to acceptable voltage but many RV Parks don't allow them.

[Doug Till]

A couple of weeks ago, we were experiencing low voltage and our surge and voltage protector was shutting off the power to our coach and sometimes tripping the 20 amp circuit breaker. Watching the voltages, at times the voltage would drop down to 105 on one of our legs when the outside temperatures were above 110 degrees. Bill McGimpsey told me about this Autotransformer that he used for years:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MXL9YJV?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_dt_b_product_details. I unplugged the surge and voltage protector that I was using and plugged in the Autotransformer.

We immediately purchased this from Amazon and it arrived in a week. Since plugging it in, we have not seen our voltages drop below 113 volts. The sales literature states the transformer will boost when the volt drops below 113. We have seen several times the lights come on indicating the autotransformer kicked on and boosted the voltage.

[Lawrence Tarnoff]

It was the park. Switched to the 30 amp and all is well. Just running one AC at a time.