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CabinetmakerII's avatar
Oct 21, 2014

Loss of Shore Power

Last night everything worked just fine, Moved 150 miles south today, and discovered we had no shore power into the coach. A quick check of the power source revealed there was power from the pedestal to the coach. Disconnected the shore power and powered up the on-board generator. All systems were go with the 5.5KW gen-set. Attempted to by-pass the transfer switch. Issues continue... Any advice would be appreciated. I'm running out of patients trying to get things fixed.

13 Replies

  • Same thing happened to me this summer, I by passed the transfer switch and tried again , still no shore power, every time I plugged in the power cord it would trip the breaker on the pedestal. After a couple of hours of tracing wires looking for a problem, I found out that the #6 or #8 ground wire was on my neutral bar on my breaker panel in the coach. I removed the ground wire from the neutral bar and everything worked fine. Put the ground back on the neutral bar and pop goes the breaker on the pedestal, so removed the ground wire again , everything worked fine. So for 3 days we camped with power, and no more problems.
    Just so happened that the next morning, my wife saw an electrician working on another pedestal across the road from us, I went and talked to him, he was the electrical contractor who's company did the work in the park ( BTW this was an older government park just upgraded this summer) and the electrician told me they have been having all kinds of problems with newer class A motor homes tripping breakers. He said that the type of breakers the government requested are to light to handle the load when these units plug in, and he mentioned the grounded neutral bar.

    When I got back home, I reversed everything I had at the park, everything back to normal, plugged back into my house, no problems at all. I was happy, after just purchasing a brand new motor home and only 3 months old , I was worried that I had bought a unit with major problems, and it would be in for repairs before I had a chance to really enjoy it for one season.

    Hope some of my story helps
  • What is problem with bypassing transfer switch?

    Remove cover on transfer switch.....swap shore power and gen input leads to transfer switch.

    Switch is allowing power from gen to main panel..swap the leads and you have shore power.

    Then get another transfer switch OR completely do away with auto transfer and install 'manual' transfer.
    After 2 of them failed----I did.
  • Are you sure that you have the proper power from the shore connection? It would not be the first time that an outlet was miss-wired.

    If you are sure about the outet...then I'd check at the transfer switch. If that is what you did, and you don't have voltage crossing that switch, it could be that it has just failed. It has to happen at some point, and today may have been your day.

    Is there any sort of voltage protector in the system...that may have been fried or something?

    If you don't plan to use the genset, you might be able to bypass the transfer switch, until you get a new one.

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