Question for Electrician

[Brewhedd]

Originally Posted by elrand

the 50 amp panels are wired to use 2 hot legs where as the 30 only has 1 hot leg. Just putting a breaker in and changing your shore power cord wont work.

Yep, two hot 120 legs are divided into 2 runs for different loads in the RV. Only reason to try this would be for a second AC unit where you could run the second added leg, through its own breaker, exclusively to the AC unit. Sounds like a major upgrade and expensive.

[Tonylmiller]

This discussion is pretty interesting. Since we got our 262BHXL, we have not tripped a breaker, but we have only taken one trip. And the air conditioner was on the entire time, along with the microwave. I don't think we ran any hair dryers, though. They take a lot of power.

It would be pretty neat if the system could automatically (and temporarily) cut the air off when demand was too high. I think if the breaker was fairly slow to act, this could be done with an ammeter and a relay. It might require some electronics to control it well. Such as, when amps are over 29, cut the power to the A/C thermostat. Monitor amp load and turn the A/C back on when the load is under 10 amps for at least 1 minute. Interesting...

[Crockett]

they had a system called load share. used to switch automatically. pretty problematic. i think its been done since that as well...