30 Amp Service

Our new coach is a fully electric coach. It needs a 50-amp service to run all of the onboard electrical systems.

A typical household breaker might offer a 20-amp service although our panel has quite a few 15-amp breakers. A 20-amp service requires 2,400 watts. A 30-amp service will need 3,600 watts and a 50-amp service will take 12,000 watts. That is quite a difference in power between 30 and 50 amps.

Plugging a 50-amp coach to a 30-amp service means that you won’t be able to use everything on the coach. In our case, we have two large air conditioning heat pumps on the coach as well as a number of large appliances. Connecting to a 30-amp service, we could only run appliances if we used our generator.

Last week we had our electrician install an outdoor 30-amp service for our RV. For a number of reasons we could not go with a 50-amp service.

We had room for the 30-amp breakers in our panel and we also had 8/3 wiring roughed in from the panel out to the back of the house. 8/3 can easily support 30 amps. For a 50-amp service, 6/4 wiring would be required.

For our site, the electrician had to run a conduit from the side of the house, trench an 18-inch conduit out to a decking post, and terminate the 30-amp service in a covered outlet (pictured above). It took two electricians a full day to complete the task. And it was very expensive. The cost of site inspection, labour, the trenching equipment, the conduit, the 50 feet of additional 8/3 cable as well as the outlet was much higher than we expected. It was important to us that we installed the service to code. Make it right.

The coach will be on our site for a number of months and we need to have some shore power. We will need to run our generator if we are in the coach during the hot summer months to have some air conditioning. For cooler evenings, we can do our work in the coach and have enough power to run the lights and perhaps the AV system by being connected to our 30-amp service. And it will give us a bit of practice for when we have to connect to 30-amp services at other sites.