RobWNY wrote:
Here's something to ponder. If you take your RV and book a site, any site with electricity. Aren't you paying to use the amount of electricity the pedestal provides? I'm reading in this thread that they expect you to use something less than the rated allowance so they can feed all of the sites within that loop or fed area. Seems to me that if I'm paying for 30A or 50A service, I should be allowed to use all of it for the length of my stay. Not 23A or 43A or whatever so everyone within the loop is happy. If this is the case, then they should market these sites as "this is a 30A site but you can only use 23A continuously and 30A momentarily". Campgrounds should have their sites wired so everyone can use all the power a site provides. My house has 150A service. If I turn on everything I have, I'm nowhere near popping my Main breaker. I'm popping individual breakers way before the Main would ever come into play. Shouldn't there be more than enough power to handle 30A of power use on a 30A site or 50A of power use on a 50A site? It seems that these campgrounds can't handle it so they add restrictions instead of upgrading things. That's a whole other topic but they aren't going broke. Especially these days where camping is so popular that these campground owners are making money like they're printing it themselves. Yes they have a lot of overhead but I've never seen a poor campground owner. Most of these campground owners can afford to upgrade things some to accommodate today's camping crowd.
Why should the park notify you of well established design criteria? This is not a new issue that came up in the last few years. You are confusing a 30amp service with the ability to pull a continuous 30amps.
I'm betting if your house has 150amp service, if you add up the rating on each of the circuit breakers it adds up to more than 150amps. So if you took each circuit to it's max, the main would pop. It's OK to do that because it's expensive to put in oversize electrical service...very expensive and it's very rare for people to use enough amperage to pop the main. They also do it upstream with circuits feeding multiple houses not being rated for the total of each service.
Of course, you proved the point, in your house, you have 150amp service but you say that you never use anything close to it. That's what the RV park is doing. 30amp rigs almost never run anything close to 30amp draw continuous, so as long as people don't abuse the system, it works fine.
50 amp rigs in general use more power and often have load shedding systems that game the system. They allow the owner to define the maximum amperage and the system turns circuits on or off to keep it at the peak. One or two 50amp rigs on a system in good shape, it might do OK (hence they were going to let the OP be an exception and they only would have been cut off if they started popping the upstream breaker taking out other RV's power) but if you get 40-50% as 50 amp rigs, you start having predictable problems.
Another thing not mentioned so far is many pedestals have a 15-20amp outlet in addition to the 30amp and it's common for 50 amp units to use adapters to run both legs. The intent of that plug is to run some lights or other light duty load but now you have guys maxing those out also. You can tell them not to do it but it becomes a enforcement headache. Either the owner comes off as a jerk or the owner gets blamed for the upsteam breaker constantly popping...easier just to say no 50amp rigs on 30amp sites.
