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Leave.Today said:
I have been reading and I am having a similar issue to many of you. Today my land host hit me up with a $155 bill for power as my 5th wheel is pulling around 545kWh per month. I could tell she really didn't want to do it either. She is too sweet. I though it right and fair that I pay for my power usage, but also weird that the power jumped so much. Last month our power bill was $45, and we used close to 200kWh. This is crazy to me.
$45 / 200 KwH is 22.5 cents per KwH.
$155/545 KwH is 28.4 cents per KwH.
So the rate per KwH from one month to the next looks reasonable, as long as you didn't use the full 200 KwH last month. It's considerably higher than the national average, but that's California. Your land host may also have tiered pricing, where the cost per KwH goes up as you use more per month.
A little back story; I am new to all of this. I jumped in head first into full timing because my month rent increased to $3000/month. I have a 2016 Sandpiper 381RBOK. We bought the really nice package, but got bait and switched by camping world in Fresno, so we only have one AC, 3way fridge not residential, and while there is an outside kitchen, we keep the fridge in it off. I say all of this because I cannot figure out where all the power is going.
As noted elsewhere in this discussion, absorption cycle refrigerators are notorious power hogs. They use electricity or propane to heat the refrigerant that makes their cooling cycle work. Depending on the size of the fridge, they can use up to 600 watts. If it's hot outside, they'll run on a continuous basis to keep the insides cold. 0.6 Kw x 24 hours = 14.4 KwH per day x 30 days = 432 KwH per month. If it's on 2/3 of the time that's still 285 KwH per month. That's a big chunk of your power usage.
You can save money by switching the refrigerator to gas, the disadvantage is you'll have to buy propane more often. But there's a lot of energy in a gallon of propane, and the fridge will run for several weeks on a single 7-9 gallon propane tank.
As far as how much you'll save, there's 22 times more energy in a gallon of propane than there is in a KwH of electricity. Since you're paying 28.4 cents per KwH, you'll save money as long as propane costs less than $5 per gallon.
I am thinking it has to do with the length of cable between me and the home. Starting from a 20A outlet at my land host house, I have a (4/6) 50 foot 110 20A cable that feeds into a 20A/30A plug adapter, then into a 30A/50A pigtail, then into my 50 foot 50A shore cable to my rig. To sum that up, it's a total of 103 Feet, 50 feet each on 20A and 50a, and 2 adapters.
So I am thinking maybe its the resistance on the 20A cable? My rig doesn't know not to try to more that 20A. We know that we can't run the AC, but have popped the breaker (@ land host) with a microwave and 2x fantastic fans running.
Power (KwH) is Voltage x Current, so yes, you will lose some power along the cord. It will be proportional to how much power you're using, with zero power loss when you're not drawing power and the most loss when you're using a lot of power. But even at the worst case I doubt it's contributing more than about 5-10% to your power bill.
Of more importance is the voltage you're winding up with at the RV. Things start getting dicey around 105 volts, if the voltage drops much below that you risk damaging your appliances.
I recently bought a plug in kWh meter to try to be more accurate with my usage. I am thinking about solar, but none of my house outlets run off the battery, they require shore, so this will only off set the LED lighting. Ultimately I need a solution. $150/month is as much as my power bill from my bricks and sticks house. Your expert advise is always appreciated.
I'd forget about solar, the payback time for the amount of power you'll get from solar panels versus the cost of buying that same amount of electricity from the utility is somewhere around 10-20 years. Solar is popular with RVers that boondock without electrical hookups because of the convenience and freedom from having to run a generator every day. But it's not that useful when you're plugged into electricity.
Since you're not using the A/C, that eliminates it as a power draw. RVs aren't well insulated, and the ceiling and almost all of their walls are exposed to the outside heat and sun, so it's quite possible to use as much power to heat and cool an RV as a larger, well insulated house.
I'd switch your refrigerator from electricity (auto) to gas and see what that does to your power bill. Also make sure the electric element on your water heater is turned off and use the gas side instead. I'll bet these two steps will shrink your electric bill a lot in return for having to buy a little more propane.
If you got the Kill-A-Watt power monitor, since you're plugged into 20 amps you can plug the whole RV into it, then turn things on and off and see how much power they're using. You'll have to be a little careful since the Kill-A-Watt is only rated for 15 amps but it should be OK for a test.