installing 30 amp outlet

[kateh]

We just bought a travel trailer (2008 cherokee) and had an electrician come to install a 30 amp outlet to plug it into. ($500) Immediately when plugging in it trips. We had a second electrician come and he turned off all the breakers on the trailer and turned them on one by one. He says that 3 breakers cause it to trip immediately, the microwave, the battery charger, and I think he said the a/c. He says he will need to follow each wire separately to find and fix the problem and not doing this is a fire hazard. Sigh.

[Oldme]

Good information here:

http://www.myrv.us/electric/

[Ron3rd]

Like everyone else said, first make sure it's wired for 120v and not 240v. With 90% of electricians, if you pulled the 30a RV receptacle out of your pocket, showed it to him, then put it back in you pocket and asked him what it was, most would say "220v dryer plug" as they look almost identical. The 30a RV receptacle is wired the same as your receptacles in your house; one 120v hot wire, one neutral, and one ground. Not difficult, but the electrician must be aware.

[vermilye]

Here are my suggestions for finding & repairing a GFCI fault: GFCI Problems

[CA_Traveler]

I've ofter recommended plugging into a 20A GFCI to make sure there are no ground faults. Testing and isolation will likely take some time. It will probably be tempting to replace the CB. But keep in mind that the ground is a safety ground and is not suppose to be carrying any current as that is the job for the neutral.

If you don't fix the rig then what is the risk? Let's say you plug into one of all to many pedestals with a open ground - bingo your rig frame now has 120V which can be quite dangerous.

While we can step you through some testing your posts suggest that you should hire the electrician that said he would have to test each circuit as he appears to understand the problem.

[wa8yxm]

Glad I ask the GFCI question.

Some things that sometimes upset a GFCI

1: The patio outlet (Should be on the RV's GFCI) sometimes fills with water and trips up-line GFCI's (This normally includes the one in the RV's bathroom but hey someone may have wired it differently)

Heaters, both the fridge and the water heater, Sometimes the insulation on the element cracks and a partial short happens.

Converters.. SOME will trip a GFCI if the batteries are full up, Some if they are run down, Some seem to do it all the time, some never .

So give us the list of breakers that trip the thing and we can help you farther.

[time2roll]

GFI, that changes everything. Nothing wrong with having 30 amp GFI. You just need to fix or replace the items leaking voltage to ground.

First thing is to open the RV electric panel and verify the grounds/ground bus is separate from the neutrals/neutral bus.

[Learjet]

DITTO ^^^ should not have GFI breaker for a RV 30 amp outlet

[Bobbo]

kateh wrote:
It is a GFCI circuit breaker.

This is your problem, right here. There are 3 circuits with current to ground leakage that cause the GFI circuit breaker to trip. Replace the GFI circuit breaker with a non-GFI breaker and that will stop. However, you still should track down why those 3 circuits are tripping the GFI of the circuit breaker.

I would be surprised if your electrical code required a GFI on a 30 amp outlet.

[RJsfishin]

Wow, 3 separate breakers, all cause the house to trip !
Let the genuine elec techs figure that out. I doubt anyone could be so unlucky to have 3 separate items in their RV, all have a short at the same time,.....unless, 240 volts got to it recently !!!

[kateh]

Thanks,
I will try to get an adapter and outlet tester today. It is the 30a house breaker that trips. It is a GFCI circuit breaker. The second electrician turned off all the breakers on the trailer reset the house breaker then turned them on and off one by one. He said there are 3 separate breakers on the trailer that cause the house breaker to trip. When I use an adapter with an extension cord to plug the trailer in to the bedroom outlet, which I did so I could run the water pump to winterize the water system before it gets really cold next week, nothing tripped and I was able to get that job done. My other problem is that I left it plugged into that outlet for 36 hours and it did not charge the battery. So I've had the battery hooked up to my dad's charger and will check that today.
Thanks for all your help.

[wa8yxm]

Question: Under the code 15/20 amp outlets installed OUT DOORS or in areas where water may be present need to be GFCI protected.

now there are two ways to do that,, many just use GFCI outlets (you know where those are I suspect there is one in your RV's bathroom most likely)

But you can also get a GFCI circuit breaker.. one place I park about half the 30 amp outlets are GFCI breakered.

DID the installing electrician put in a GFCI breaker?

HOW to tell a GFCI breaker from a non- GFCI breaker

It has a TEST button, it's GFCI.

[DrewE]

If you have or can borrow a 30A male to 15A female adapter, try running some (fairly high power) household devices from the 30A socket. If the breaker is weak or the socket bad, they would also cause the breaker to pop.

Also check the new outlet with a voltmeter. There should be ca. 120V between the hot and the neutral, the hot and the ground, and 0V between neutral and ground.

As naturist suggested, it is possible for circuit breakers to be bad or worn (though new ones shouldn't be worn) and not hold anywhere near their rated current. It's not the first thing to verify, but it's not out of the question entirely either.

Oh—on the off chance that you have a Federal Pacific electric panel in the house, please get that replaced. These panels and breakers are fire hazards, having a number of design flaws—the worst of which is an inordinately high failure rate for breakers where the breakers won't trip properly on overloads. ("inordinately high" as in double-digit percentages in several tests and studies.) If you do have a short in the RV and the 20A breaker wasn't operating properly, that is a very definite and obvious fire hazard.

[naturist]

kateh wrote:
Thanks everybody. I should have mentioned that I specifically made sure he was installing a 30amp/ 120volt and not 220 volt before he started and it is a single slot. It is a dedicated circuit. I'm not sure how many amps the house has. It is a very small 1950s era house. The breaker in the garage trips as soon as it is plugged in. I also read that too many ground faults in the system can make it trip but the second electrician said that it still should not trip and could be a fire hazard. Could it just be that there are a lot of trailers out there that are fire hazards and no one knows because all the campground plugins are not grounded?

We'll do our best to help you figure this out.

A small 1950 era house that still has all original wiring and service might have 80 or 100 amp service. These days, the minimum they are putting in anywhere, including rewire jobs, is 200 amp. In any case, 30 amp should be no problem.

Nobody's suggested this, probably because it is unlikely, but if it is the breaker in the house that keeps blowing, could it be that the breaker itself is bad?

I'm not going to buy the notion that there are a lot of fire-hazard RVs out there. If there were, there would have been a lot of fires.

Since it is a dedicated circuit, the problem has got to be somewhere between the breaker and the RV.

[Bobbo]

From your post in another thread, I take it that when you plug into the 30 amp outlet, it trips immediately, but when you plug into a 20 amp outlet with an adaptor it does not trip?

That would point to one or the other of two things.

1. the 30 amp outlet has a problem
2. the RV wiring has a problem, but the adaptor is miswired masking the problem.