O’Leno State Park, High Springs, Florida
Oh what a night . . . . and day we had! After being up until after 11pm watching the Super Bowl, we woke up at 2:30am to something that sounded like neighbors periodically slamming their doors. It wasn’t the neighbors. By the way. Why does it seem like things usually happen around 3am?
Blaine said it sounded electrical. What?? Being an electrician for 35 years, I guess he would know, but Doubting Thomas me, wasn’t convinced.
He fiddled around inside and out for an hour, before deciding to just turn everything off. We didn’t think we’d sleep, but there was nothing else he could do in the pitch-black of the middle of the night. We managed a couple more hours, and then he was up and at it again by 7am (the end of “quiet time”). I stayed quiet and out of his way. I worked on the blog and paperwork and took a walk.
He worked on it all morning, before calling the ranger station to report a problem. An hour later, no one had showed up so he called again. “Oh.” The guy said. “Do you still have a problem?” Umm. YEAH! I could use a few choice words, but after all, he’s the same volunteer we encountered the other day. Personally, I think they need a new volunteer or, if he happens to be a paid employee, they need to find him another job where he doesn’t have to talk to people.
So anyway, he said he’d send out their mechanic. An hour later, Blaine sent me to the station to talk to them in person and see if there were any other sites available. The same guy was at the desk and coped an exasperated attitude with me, but true to form, I did not. (I actually enjoy being nice to people like that. It surprises them. 😊) Usually, that earns me a change of attitude if nothing else. Today was one of those rare times when it didn’t. However, a ranger sitting in the back started talking to me. I didn’t get any information, but at least he had a nicer disposition. Oh. And they had absolutely no openings.
Meanwhile, back at the coach, a ranger had stopped by and with his permission, Blaine opened the campground’s electrical panel and showed him the problem. Again, with his permission, Blaine put a temporary fix on it. It’s three days later and we’ve still not seen a mechanic. That may be because it’s fixed for now and also because the ranger said they’d have to turn off power to all 31 sites in this loop to fix it.
So that’s my take on things.
Here’s the professional version:
The electrical issue was a very difficult to determine problem.
We have an electrical surge protector and an automatic transfer switch that work in conjunction with the campground power and our battery bank/inverter.
After hours of testing and trying out different combinations, I determined that the issue was with the campground power.
The reason it was so hard to detect, was that the voltage read good (122 volts), but as soon as a load was put on, it would drop down to about 60 volts. And then the automatic switch would switch to batteries. Two minutes later, after it saw the good voltage, it would switch back to the campground power. A few minutes later, it would return to batteries – – a vicious cycle.
Sometimes the campground power would hold as long as 20 minutes. It never did the same thing twice, which is why it was so difficult to detect.
There were times, I actually thought it was a problem with our coach. I started our generator and ran that for two hours to recharge our batteries, and that worked fine.
By 11am I was pretty sure it was a campground problem, so I called. I pondered moving to a different site just to check if it was us or them, but then the Ranger showed up.
When the Ranger showed up, I explained the situation. They always want to believe it’s an RV problem. “95% of the time, it’s the RV’s problem.” I explained to him that I was a retired commercial electrician and I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I believe the problem is in the campground pedestal.
He agreed to have a look (even though he knows little about electricity). There are two breakers in the power pedestal. One is 30 amp, one is a 20 amp GFCI. Our coach will not run on a GFCI breaker because the automatic transfer switch trips the breaker.
He pulled both breakers out of the box. As soon as he pulled the breakers out, I could see the problem on the 30 amp side. It had overheated and was heavily corroded.
With his blessing, I cleaned up the breaker as best I could and moved it over on the electrical bus where the 20 amp breaker was. I had to remove the GFCI breaker because it wouldn’t fit in the 30 amp slot. I put everything back together and turned it on. Everything was fine.
He said he’d have a mechanic come fix it. Doubtful that will happen – at least not while we’re here.
This is a campground power pedestal.
This is where we plug in.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the breaker slot above #2 is empty.
So now you see how blessed I am to have an electrician for a husband!
We ended our day with a walk to the suspension bridge, just to get out and enjoy the beautiful weather and check the water level. It was down about a foot or so since it hasn’t rained for a few days.
We were in bed between 8:30-9:00pm.