Use 50 amp or 30 amp

[BruceinFL]

My 5er is 30 amp and I have a male 50 amp to female 30 amp dogbone adapter. When I go to a site that has both 50 amp and 30 amp connections, is there any advantage to hooking to the 50 amp with the adapter or should I always use 30 amp when it's available? Any problem using the 50 amp connection?
Thanks

 

[Ned]

No advantage, but no problem, at all.  All the 50A to 30A adapter does is connect your 30A power cord to one leg of the 50A service.  You  still can only use 30A as your main circuit breaker is 30A.

 

[Gary RV_Wizard]

There is esentially no difference, assuming the 50A outlet is wired properly, i.e. 50A/220V.  However, each of the two hot legs of the 50A circuit has a 50A breaker, whereas the 30A circuit will have a 30A breaker.  Your Rv's power panel, of course, has a 30A breaker in either case.  The subtle difference is that you don't have 30A breaker protection on the connection between the site power pole and your main breaker.  Not something I would lose sleep over.

It's conceivable that in any given situation there will be a difference in the actual power available on one outlet or the other, due to the vagaries of park wiring.  No way to predict that, but if I were having low voltage problems on one I would switch to the other to see if it might make a difference.

 

[Ned]

In some parks, the 50A wiring is newer than the 30A which may have been in place for years.  In some cases, you may get better power from the 50A circuit than the older 30A outlet.  As Gary says, monitor the voltage and switch if it becomes a problem.

 

[John From Detroit]

I belong to the KISS school (Keep It Simple Stupid) and thus would normally avoid using the adapter unless I had problems with the 30 amp power jack.

NOTE: my rig is wired for 50,  but I have a 30-50(marine) pigtale (short cord 30 amp plug and 50 amp marine socket matching rig) which I usually use in the cooler times... I only need the full 50 x 50 amp power in the summer when I run the AC after all.  and the 30 amp cords are a lot easier to wrangle than that 50 amp job (3x 10ga v/s 4x8ga, a out half the weight)

 

[fixitman]

If the 50 amp is avalable use it, if not 30 amp is fine....

 

[BruceinFL]

Thanks for all the input. If a campground is loaded with 30 amp rigs on a hot summer's day, all using air would use of the 50 amp circuit preclude being affected by a brownout assuming there aren't too may 50 amp rigs? They're totally separate circuits, right?

 

[Karl]

Nope. Sorry, Bruce

Power is supplied to the park from a transformer commonly called a pole pig. It supplies both 120V service and 240V service from the same secondary legs of the transformer. Any overloads can affect all those plugged in regardless of whether they're usinbg the 50A or 30A service. It is possible, however, that newer sections of the park may use a different leg of the 240V feed than older sections. Then it depends on how heavily each leg is loaded. If you're on the less heavily loaded leg, chances are you will get a higher voltage, but the only way to tell is to get out your multimeter and measure each leg of the 240V feed. If the difference is only a volt or two, it won't make much difference. If it's more than that, it may be worthwhile, but that's assuming that your dogbone is wired to use the higher voltage leg. I guess you could build your own - one for each leg.........?