Helping Chris with the RV

Today my son Chris and I were whomping up a lash up to connect his camper to the electricity.  Like all of us, when he puts his rig in the driveway, he wants to connect it to electricity.  But the plugs in the garage are just 15 amp wired with 14 gauge wire.

This will not begin to run the stuff in his trailer.  Perhaps some of it one at a time, but not much.

He has a wash room just inside the house from the garage that has both a washer and dryer.  He had used  12 gauge drop cords and plugged into the 20 amp circuit for the washer but it still will only barely run the AC.  And then everything else needs to be left off.

So I was eyeing the dryer plug.......  It is 220 volt and has a 30 amp breaker in the service panel.  I stopped by our local Lowes and started to sort thru the plugs and receptacles they had in the bins.  I finally found a plug that would fit his dryer wall receptacle and a 6 foot piece of 10 gauge three conductor stranded wire.   Black, White and Green in a Rubber jacket, perfect!

To my surprise they had an RV 30 Amp wall receptacle as well.  These pieces were not cheap, as Lowes does not sell a lot of them.  But with a metal box and some careful assembly we rigged up a cord that would plug into the 220 volt socket but that only had a wire on one side of the line giving us 30 Amp 110v.

After stopping at the local Wal Mart, for a 30 foot 30 Amp extension cord available in the RV section, we were in business.  Of course the dryer is unplugged while this is in use, but it gives them the ability to run all of the normal stuff that they would in a campground, including the AC while it is in their driveway.

It is so handy to have the AC running and the fridge on electric all at the same time while you are packing up the rig.  Seems like you can barely stand it inside one of these rigs in the summer if the AC isn't on.  For kicks we were running the microwave as well just to see if we could drop the breaker, but we never did.

Now if our motorhome wasn't 50 Amp 220v perhaps we could make a connection here, but the dryer is in our upstairs...........   I'm fresh out of ideas....... short of completely installing the service to the front of the house.

50 Amp extension cords are nasty priced items at camping supply stores, before you ever even think about installing the outside service.  So that won't happen anytime soon...

Retired Rod