Advice on 120 volt wiring

[itdave]

I am look for some help on the 120 volt wiring my coach. I have been having a problem with popping the shore power 50 amp breaker. When it popped I was drawing more than 35 amps on one leg. I know that there maybe a weak breaker but in checking what is on each leg it does not make a sense.

On leg 1 there is Front AC, Water Heater, Bedroom Plugs and Block Heater.
On leg 2 I have Rear AC, Inverter, Washer/Dryer and Refrigerator.

The breaker that is popping was leg 2 where it is not unusual to have all the items on that leg on at the same time. However on leg 1 I rarely use the block heater and the bedroom plugs only have a pump for a Sleep Number bed so the only thing that is normally on is the AC and Water Heater.

I am thinking of switching the Washer Dryer and Block Heater has anyone done something like this or do you have any thoughts.

[bigskymt]

Could you try swapping phases in the transfer switch box to see if the problem follows first? That might isolate the problem to either coach or shore power. What happens if you use the gen.?

[itdave]

Everything is fine on the Gen so I am pretty sure it is a weak breaker on the shore power pedestal. Just now I went to make sure the breaker in the coach that says washer/dryer is the washer/dryer turns out the plug inside the cabinet is being feed from the inverter, I think thanks to some changes I made when we first got the coach and did not have a washer/dryer. I guess I need to restore the original configuration before making addition changes.
I just though it was strange that they put so many regularly used things on leg 2.

[Sixpack98]

Last year while at Hilton Head I had a problem with tripping the main breaker under similar conditions you mentioned. I had a big difference in the votages on L1 and L2 which should have not made a difference. The 2 50 amp main breakers were bridged together (at the toggles) which made no sense since nothing in the coach was 240v so I removed the bridge. L2 breaker tripped about an hour later with about 25 to 30 amps reported by the Progressive EMS. I started the genset and ran it all day (until quiet time) without tripping L2. When I went back to shore power the breaker tripped the next morning. Out of desperation I swapped out both breakers and no more tripped breakers even with the L1/L2 voltage difference. I have never been able to make sense of why breaker was tripping tripping.

[wa8yxm]

You could swap as you suggested.. But I think it's a bad breaker myself.

[deaton]

Is this happening at home or on the road.

I've never had a breaker problem on my coach until last weekend - Memorial Day - when we were at a campground that is normally about half full. Well, for the holiday they managed to fill that sucker up and the more coaches and fifth wheels that arrived, the worse the power got. By the time it was full, the voltage on both legs had dropped from 120 to about 104 or 105 and I was popping the breakers on the pedestal about every couple hours.

I was also showing an unbalanced amp load on the two sides of my 120 supply. No problems when I cranked up the generator and pulled the shore plug. By Tuesday, when the park cleared out, everything was back to normal.

[itdave]

I agree that it is a bad breaker on the pedestal, so I will try to get maintenance out to do a swap of the breakers. We will be parked in this spot for the next few months so running the gen is not an option.

Thanks for the feedback.