Low Power
I am new to 5th wheel game. Anyway I am keeping a 36' RV with dual RV's in South Texas. Last time I was there it was about 100 degree heat and my a/c's were not cooling. It was 90 in the trailer. The...
Forum Discussion
Cummins12V98 wrote:valhalla360 wrote:
Volts x Amps = Watts (or close enough for our purposes).
If you have low volts, it's going to take more amps. If voltage is low, it tends to draw more amps and overheats. If it's a little, it will cause damage over weeks or months. If it's really bad, it could fry your air/con in seconds.
A transformer helps but as someone else pointed out, it's not a cure all by any stetch. In order to boost the voltage, it needs either more amps on the input side or fewer amps on the output side. Since the air/con needs a certain amount of amps, that means it needs to draw more amps from the campground system.
If the power is so bad that compressors aren't kicking over, it's probably too low for a transformer to help.
I guess you did not read this. Right from Hughes web site.
"The Autoformer DOES NOT take power from the park.
It does not affect the park or input voltage, or make electricity.
What it is doing is changing the voltage – amperage relationship, lowering the amperage and raising the voltage. Since appliances run better on higher voltage, lower amperage, less overall power is used from the park, and better service is enjoyed from your RV
An Autoformer running at full output (50amps) will use 1 amp, but will cause appliances to cycle more often and run cooler. This will use less total power from the park."
Unless they've found a way to break the laws of physics, it does exactly what I said.
If it takes 10amps at 120v to run the air/con, if the transformer is to produce that from 100v power source, it needs to draw 12amps at the pedestal (probably slightly more as it's not 100% efficent).
The alternative is if it can only draw 10amps, when you raise the voltage there won't be enough amps to run the air/con.
The marketing mumbo-jumbo takes a tiny bit of truth and mixes it with a huge dose of falsehood. Low voltage at campgrounds is typically associated with hot days when everyone is running thier air/cons and they don't cycle on and off. If there is enough voltage, they run 100% of the time. So any benefits of reduced run times don't exist.
(FYI - As stated earlier, it's not going to bump the voltage up by 20% but it makes the math in my example much simpler to understand)
