Submerged Shore Power Connector

[Dick Simonis]

OK, so we're still at BCS sitting outside the paint booth and it's raining.  Went out an saw the shore power cord...mine to theirs... completely submerged in a water puddle.  Now I'm not an electrical engineer but, intuitively, this seems undesirable.

I opened up the propane access door and hung the connectors up and water was running out of them.

How on earth did I escape a problem or are the 50A prongs so far apart the submersion is not an issue??

[Joel Ashley]

Submersion of connectors, not cord, is an issue.  You got lucky perhaps because the standing water doesn't contact earth directly, I dunno.  Last fall during a gully washer here at home, firecrackers went off big time when the 30 amp connection between my extension cord and daughter's trailer cord got overwhelmed in water.  Even though it was on concrete, the slight puddle it was in was running off a few inches onto bare ground.  It burned up the connectors before tripping my RV breaker in the garage.

Joel

[Steve Huber Co-Admin]

Water itself is not a conductor. The conduction is due the amount of hardness (minerals) in the water.
Steve

[Dick Simonis]

Steve, you are correct on that and there are a lot of minerals in a water puddle on asphalt...wish I had my test kit with me it would be interesting.  On the other hand, the spacing of the contacts would certainly help

Just for giggles, I would think there should be ~5000 ppm or tds in these puddles...based on a certain amount of experience.  So ~8,000 millisiemens...wouldn't that give ~0.08 Amps per Volt of leakage??  or did I lose a decimal somewhere??

Still you would think it's an ungood situation.  The connectors were covered by at least 1/2" of standing water.

[Steve Huber Co-Admin]

Dick,
Real rusty (no pun intended) but I think that gives about 1.5k ohms of resistance.
Steve

[Edward Buker]

Dick,

You got lucky. I'm sure you had current leakage but it was not enough to trip anything. If you had a ground fault breaker at the post I'm sure stray current would have tripped it. Your moving the cables around sounds like a Frankenstein kind of experiment...

Later Ed

[Dick Simonis]

I don't know about a "Frankenstein" sort of experiment but getting it out of the water seemed like a good idea at the time.  No breaker tripped and I doubt BCD has GFI's on the 50 A extension cords.  The SurgeGuard didn't detect anything...not sure if it would.  I'll talk with Shawn this morning and suggest that he open up both plugs, (theirs and mine) to check for burned terminals since the spacing on the lugs is very close and they are not watertight.