Electricity

When we stay at a campground, we generally plug in to "shore power". The power options are usually either 30A or 50A (though the campground that we visited in British Columbia also had a few 15A sites).

Our power cord is a 50A, but we have a "dog bone" that allows us to plug in to 30A if that is all that is available.

50A is definitely desireable - we can run anything we want on 50A without causing issues to the breaker on the power pole.

Now... you would think that 30A would provide the ability to run approximately 3/5 (60%) of what 50A can run, wouldn't you? I don't understand it, but 50A hookups give 50A to each of two "legs" in the bus, while 30A gives just 30A to be shared between the two circuits. So, 50A provides 100A usable, while 30A provides only 30A -- so 30% of what we can run on 50A.

These are the gauges that allow us to see how much power we are drawing - you can see that there are two legs - at the time I took the picture, leg 1 was drawing a little over 10A and leg 2 about 2-3A.

On 50A, we can run all three of our rooftop air conditioners, plus the convection oven, plus the electric water heater - as far as I know, we would be able to run every electrical appliance without problem. On 30A, we can run one rooftop air conditioner, and, if nothing else is running, we can run the convection oven (I try to remember to turn off the electric water heater if we're going to be using the oven). Each of these (a/c, oven, water heater) takes about 10A... but when they turn on, they momentarily take more, and there are other things (lights, computers, charging phones, refrigerator, heating blanket) that may be using electricity too. Momentary or sustained use of more than 30A can trip the breaker at the power pole - and tripping the breaker on the power pole sometimes is the straw that breaks the circuit breaker and we have to call campground maintenance out to replace it (not because we have tripped it so many times, but because the combination of other RVers tripping it with our final tripping cause it to break). Some campgrounds will not allow 50A RVs to plug in at 30A sites (the one at Lake Park in Lewisville is one of these) because they feel that it ultimately causes issues on their 30A hookups.

At the campground here in Soledad Canyon, the campsites are "buddied" up to each other on the utilities side.

Right now, we have no neighbor sharing our power pole/utilities.

In the electric box, there is a 50A hookup (that's what we are plugged into), a 30A, and 2 additional 20A.

Note that there are circuit breakers for each of the plugs - we always ensure that the circuit breaker is off before we plug in our power cord. Note that there are two circuit breakers for the 50A.

This is a pair of RVs across from us who are sharing the utilities area. They are both plugged in to the power (I think the one on the right is using the 30A because the one on the left came by to consider parking in the site next to us and chose not to park there - I'm thinking because they wanted 50A and we had already claimed it) and the water at the pole. There are two separate sewer hookups - close to the rear of each RV. Note: whoever gets there first gets to choose which of the two receptacles they want to use. If the RV next to them leaves, they could switch to the other if it is what they would prefer to have. Right now the campground is empty enough that folks can pretty much get the type of hookup they prefer.

This is also near us - in this case, this power pole has 2 30A hookups (if you look back up at the signage on our power pole, you'll see that the site numbers are black on white... the 30/30A poles have yellow on black signage).

When we were looking for a site, I looked at a couple of sites that had this electric configuration - I don't know if you can see it clearly, but their 50A power cord is plugged in (down at the ground - yellow end to the cord) into another cord that then has two cords going into the power box. I didn't open their box to take a picture, but I believe that the two cords are then plugged in to *both* of the 30A receptacles in the power box.

I had not seen this kind of hookup before seeing it in a couple of sites here. It is a bit of a cheat as one rig is taking both of the power plugs that are intended to service two sites... and if the campground were full, I am certain that the management would not allowed it. But, when the campground is not full, it allows this RVer to make use of a double-30A site, making them more satisfied, I suspect, if they were not able to find an available 50A site.

I did a search on Amazon and found what I think these are:
https://www.amazon.com/Marinco-157AY-Y-Adapters/dp/B0064N07EQ?th=1
They look to be pretty pricey to me!
I can't really tell from the information whether this would mean that you would get 50A (50% of what you'd get if plugged into 50A receptacle) or 60A (60% of 50A receptacle).

This article has dealt with our 110V electricity... we then also have systems running on 12V! And inverter/converters that will allow us to use our 12V batteries (when we're not plugged in) to power 110V appliances (as inverters - DC to AC)... and they also are used to charge the 12V batteries while we're plugged in (as converters - AC to DC). I'm not going any further in this discussion!