Air Cond not running on 30amp service.

phoebe

Member
I have a brand new 2018 Road Warrior 427 and my campground only supplies 30 amp service. The dealership assured us that we would be able to run at least 1 AC on 30amps. It's barely been 2 weeks and now only the back AC cools a little and the living room and bedroom units blow hot air. I think that the dealer didn't charge them fully especially because they missed a lot of other things they were supposed to do. Now they are telling me that I have to have 50 amps and that even 1 AC won't work on 30. We were doing just fine until a day or so ago though. Does anyone have any experience with this?
 
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jimtoo

Moderator
Re: Suffering with 30amps, in a 50 RW427

Yes,, you should be able to run at least one a/c on 30amp, Have you had the park check to make sure you have good 120v/30amp service to the box? Low voltage can cause lots of problems and ruin some things.

I'm sure some others will jump in with more info for you soon.

Jim M

I moved post and started your own thread.
 

pegmikef

Well-known member
Re: Suffering with 30amps, in a 50 RW427

Yes,, you should be able to run at least one a/c on 30amp, Have you had the park check to make sure you have good 120v/30amp service to the box? Low voltage can cause lots of problems and ruin some things.

I agree with Jim. When my Oshkosh is at the house I can run one of the air conditioners off of a 20 Amp circuit. My old North Trail was only a 30 Amp trailer and it ran the 15K btu A/C just fine as well as a lot of other stuff. We just had to be smart about balancing the load (e.g., could not run the A/C, Microwave and coffee pot at the same time).
 

jerryjay11

Well-known member
Since I am a retired HVAC/R service tech and RV roof AC units are not much more than a window AC I can tell you that one roof unit does not require 50 amps. Two units yes, particularly when starting and even then once running together they do not pull anything near 50 amps. The reason you need a 50 amp power source because of other electrical items operating at the same time. I've ran my single roof AC on 15 amp outlets. Just need to watch what else I turned on when doing so.
 

CDN

B and B
Make sure your water heater is on propane and if equipped with 2 way fridge it should be on propane as well. Between the AC, Convertor and other loads such as TV's that is about all you can draw on 30 amps. Rule of thumb 60% of a ratd supply is proper loading. Most breakers are not designed for draw above 60% when loaded heavily. I doubt the breakers used in the RV are 80% load factor.
 

Gary521

Well-known member
Yes, one AC will run very well on 30 amp service. You mentioned something about the dealer not charging the units. Well, this type of AC is not charged by the dealer. It also sounds like you are trying to run both AC at the same time. You cannot do this and run anything else in the trailer. ( on 30 amp service )
 

phoebe

Member
Thank you all so much, your posts have been most informative. Last night we were actually able to run 2 air conditioners with no issues - the living and bedroom ones. We had left them off for some time before then. We were thinking that maybe the garage AC takes a lot more power or had maybe been put on priority accidentally and was messing with the other two. The auto function now also works when before it didn't seem to do anything and the fan would always run on high no matter what setting was selected. We are thinking that we might have just been changing the settings too frequently and they never got a chance to fully kick on, does this make sense to anyone? Do similar Dometic units always have the fan going on high volume no matter what the setting? I was thinking that changing from high to low and vice versa would change the fan speed but it doesn't seem to. At least now it appears that the auto function is working and we can leave one on during the day and it will kick on when it needs to. I believe when we have 2 units on and nothing else we were reading at about 19-23amps - I think the 19 was when they weren't working. Someone mentioned putting the fridge on propane to give the ACs more amps to work with - unfortunately that's not an option for us as we have a full residential fridge. For now our AC issues seem to be resolved and we do have the portable unit for backup which is big and bulky but very powerful and much quieter.
 

phoebe

Member
Actually they're still making a loud noise for varying degrees of time before returning to the normal fan noise. Is this because it's been on for too long?
 

david-steph2018

Well-known member
We also have 2018 427 here is what we do. We can run 2AC, fridge, tv, satellite on 30 amps at one time. Check and make sure your PCS switch is on it is in the control panel, it looks like the regular red wall switch. This help monitor the electrical load and will allow the ac to rotate to cool the rv. Now both ac will not run at the same time but I checked my amp usage and I was at 29 amps.
As far as running coffee pot, toaster, crook pot microwave with everything else probably won't happen. Just be careful what you want on at the same time.
Make sure you do secure your fridge doors before travel time.

Have you found a curtain or screen for your patio doors yet?

You can PM us and I'll send pics of what we did for our unit for the patio door
 
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