Stray Voltage?
My RV has a stray voltage problem, and I'm wondering if anyone has any good ideas on how to find or fix the problem. My daughter complained to my wife that she thought she was getting shocked when ...
Forum Discussion
NJRVer wrote:
I have posted this before, but this is an issue that caused a hot skin on our TT.
We had our TT in for warranty service in the winter time. Of course everything was drained down.
At some point in what they were doing, somebody at the dealer powered up the HW heater and it was empty.
This instantly cooked the element. When we took it out for the first trip after service and powered everything up the breaker did not trip and my wife got zapped entering the camper.
After going through each breaker one by one I figured out it was the HW heater.
We stayed, but just used our HW on gas only.
When we got home we took it to a local RV servicer and he pulled the element from the HW heater and showed me.
He put in the new element and no problems since.
While it's true that a cooked HW heater element can short internally and create a ground fault current, if you have a proper low-impedance EGC ground in place it should be impossible for it to cause a hot-skin voltage on the RV. It should simply trip a circuit breaker if there's a dead short, or sometimes just keep heating the water and making steam in the HW tank. Accidental dry firing a HW heater is common in homes as well, and it will destroy the electric heating element in minutes.
Mike Sokol
