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Richard Casady

On Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:26:57 -0400, wrote:

On Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:31:38 -0400, "Eisboch"
wrote:

I went through this in Florida with a camper we had. I knew the AC was
straining to start due to voltage droop just by listening to it. The
section of Florida we were in was not noted for decent electrical service to
begin with. During peak hours the voltage at the distribution box in our
house would occasionally drop to 114 volts or so. I put in a 30 amp, 120v
service for the camper, located about 200 feet away. Even though I used 6
awg wires for the hot and neutral, I'd still get as low as 105 volts at
times at the camper location when the AC unit tried to kick on. The extra
current draw is not healthy for the compressor motor windings. I ended up
buying an automatic boost transformer that kicked the voltage up by 10%
whenever it sensed that the supply voltage dropped below 117 vac.

#6 wasn't big enough wire. At 30a that drops almost 6v
The goal is to drop less than 5% from the service point to the load.
You lost that much in one feeder.

There is a huge lack of appreciation of voltage drop in most camp
grounds and RV parks. When I was working for the state we redesigned
some of these parks and actually looked at the drop. It took some
doing to convince old timers that was really necessary but a quick
check with a volt meter on a few occupied sites confirmed the problem.
The best design is to let the utility do most of the distribution with
medium voltage and feed the sites from a 50kva pig, radially from
the center of the cluster of sites.

You want the well in the same place to minimize the ammount of pipe
required, and, of course, that gives maximum voltage to that downhole
pump, the one motor that better not burn out.