Electrical upgrades

stew47 wrote:


Yep certainly good advice. I could break out my ampprobe and get a good idea of the draws. It's also been agravating with breakers tripping because I'm using 2 space heaters to supplement heat and I can use my water heater on gas because the switch is bad. When I get home I'll see where best to run extension cord in. That'll help greatly.

Wattages are normally on a label somewhere on an appliance or sometimes embossed in the plastic body. If you are running space heaters at the same time, you probably don't have a hope in heck of running anything more than one appliance of not much more than 100-200 watts - if you're feeling lucky and have fingers crosses.

Managing power draw in a 30 amp RV is all part of the RV-ing experience and it's a good idea to have all occupants attend the seminar. We've never tripped a 30 amp breaker. We run 2KW of permanently mounted heaters all the time (never need the furnace now) but I made a demand controller that automatically shuts them off when needed so we can have 30 amps for everything else.

Installing an ammeter is a good idea but is not necessarily easy or cheap. I installed an LED amp display near the entry door but if you were to buy an EMS (highly recommended anyway), you can get a remote readout display. I find it's rare that we go much above 15 amps.

A 20 amp inlet can really be anywhere outside and all you need is a long enough ext. cord. Code requires 30 & 50 amp connections to be at the left rear on all RVs but not an issue for a 20 amp one.