Electrical issues

Since we've been at the Mesa lot, we had a couple of issues with the electricity from the shore power - causing us to lose power delivery to the box. Carl called the administration office to determine whether we own those issues or whether the park has responsibility for its maintenance -- and found out that it was our responsibility.

Carl opened up the box and took a look, determined how to get to the breakers, reseated the 50A breaker, and thought that might resolve the problem. But, in just a couple of hours, we again heard a noise that we had come to associate with losing 50A power, and checked, and it had again tripped.

We had a working 30A outlet, and have the "dog-bone" that allows us to connect in to that, so we could have shore power, albeit with the ability to run fewer appliances at a time. But with cooler, rainy weather moving in, we thought we might want to have the full 50A working for the next few days. So, Carl opened up the box again and took out the 50A breaker so we could get a replacement at the hardware / big-box store.

Re-seating the breaker did not effect a permanent fix... so Carl took the breaker out...

...ugh, *that* doesn't look good...

One leg of the breaker had been arcing and failing, possibly for a while.

We took the faulty breaker to Lowe's so we could compare to the replacement items available to us to ensure that the physical size/configuration was the same. The breaker that we had was a GE, and when we first found the breakers at Lowe's, we didn't find a GE, and the one we found was "similar", but not an exact match in the shape. But we looked a little further ways down the aisle and found a GE one that was an exact match in shape and size.

Box with breaker removed

Carl, preparing the materials he would need to do the task -- involving removing every box out of his tool storage tray under the rig -- because regardless of the order in which the boxes are placed into the storage, the one he needs is always the furthest one in!

First step: cleaning the oxidation off of the bus bar inside the electric utility box.

We think that's clean enough now.

Wiring in the new breaker.

New breaker in place

Box closed back up and ready for use.

 

We have a couple of pieces of equipment that we use for testing the power at the box (we use whenever we're moving to a new site to make sure that the electric is good before we park and hook everything up). We also have at least one of the boxes hooked up all the time to continue checking the power. We have a Hughes Autoformer that will do some power correction for low power, and we have two EMS (Electrical Management System) boxes that will detect errors from the power. We had been using the EMS to check power at the pole when we arrived, but we'd just connect the Autoformer, thinking that it would work to protect us from spikes or low voltage -- but we realized that it wasn't doing as complete a job as the EMS would do. So, this was a good learning activity for us - we will use both the Autoformer and one of the EMS units when we're plugged in to shore power.

By the way - there is no need for us to have two EMS units, but, we both had one before we married, and we decided to carry both with us. One stays in the Jee-rage so if we're selecting a campsite by driving around in the Jeep, we can pull it out and check the power before we bring the rig to the site. The other one stays with Gracie. And.. if we ever have an issue that takes one of them out of service, we have a backup. Power problems from campground pedestals is, unfortunately, pretty common (especially at Thousand Trails campgrounds), so it is good to have protection. How odd, though, that our first/only problem that could have caused a problem to the rig itself was the power pedestal that we own ourselves!