Help

[J-KB]

This morning I think we had a power bump and now we have no power to the island, TV microwave and fireplace. I have checked the gfci's and the fuses/breakers on the converter but nothing looks bad, I'm not an electrician but know enough to get myself in to trouble. any ideas ?

[rohrmann]

Don't worry about the fuses, they are only for the 12 volt circuits. The first thing to do is, at the pedestal, completely switch off the breaker, fully moving the switch to the off position, then switch it back on. Then, in the inside electric panel, do the same thing with the main breaker. Then do the same to all the single handle breakers. Then check everything that was without power. If that didn't fix the problem, you will need a voltmeter to check for power at each breaker. To do this, you will need to remove the cover from the breaker panel. It is possible you have a failed breaker, either outside in the pedestal or inside the trailer's panel.

[BB_TX]

A tripped breaker is not obvious just by looking. A breaker does not flip to the OFF position when tripped. It just moves very slightly from the ON position. If you look closely at a tripped breaker you can see it looks slightly different than one not tripped. And pushing the handle it will feel "soft" and move slightly. Turning it off and back on will reset it.

[DQDick]

We have three GFI's in our rig so you need to make sure you've got them all then hit the test button and turn it back on to make sure it's on.

[jcurtis934]

Microwave is on its own 20 amp breaker! Others will probably be on two others. Doubt that two or three tripped. Junction box issue in kitchen slide possible, but would still mean two circuits going bad at same time...possible with water intrusion. John

[J-KB]

found out if I hook up to the 30amp receptical everything works, so I think it's a problem with the 50amp breaker on the pedestal outside.
Thanks everyone for all of your help.
John

[Art-n-Marge]

Yup, sounds like one side of the 50 amp is broken. I experienced this problem, when I found I had a defective shore power cable and one of the wires fell out of the connector. This pretty much shut down half the trailer. The other half of the 120v circuits worked fine. The only thing I did not do, since I was in a hurry to get my rig back up was find out what trailer circuits were on which part of the 50 amp.

I ended up purchasing a brand new higher quality 50 amp cord that the connectors are molded ends whereby I don't anticipate this cable will lose connection. I also purchased a good quality molded end right angle connector to eliminate pressure and minimize the chance that a straight connector would disconnect wires like it did.

Now I have confidence this will no longer happen. I need to mention, that two times prior, I noticed that the older cheapie 50 amp cord was coming loose, but caught it in time to prevent a problem and made repairs by fixing the connections. I am convinced that the fact the cord did not have a 90 angle caused too much stress over time and this pulled the wires out of their respective sockets.

Good luck to you. I hope nothing got damaged. In my case the wires first shorted and took out our microwave/convection oven and a couple power strips. Fortunately, my wife RARELY used the MW so I just removed it and we used the cabinet for storage which DW uses all the time. As for the power strips, I got new ones and we are back up and running. I will admit we were lucky we didn't lose more electronics. This could have been real bad.