On Sat, 8 Dec 2007 15:08:46 -0800 (PST), Itinerant
wrote:

We are having difficulties figuring out the shorepower. Everything
was working fine on 30A, but now that we have moved to a new dock
where there is only 110 we have attached our pig tail to take the 30
to 110 but it trips the breaker on the dock as soon as we plug it in.
We tried using the neighbour's pigtail (which works for him) and it
still trips it. We have the Xantrex inverter/charger and have
adjusted the powershare level to 10 (from 30).

Any ideas?

More details would be useful. As it stands, your description doesn't
make sense to me, as the common North American 30 amp shore power
service _is_ 110 volts. Do you mean that the boat has a 30 amp power
inlet and shore power cord, but the dock only has a household-style 15
amp/110V outlet?

If so, first thing I would do would be to turn off all the AC panel
circuit breakers - both main and branch. Then connect the shore power
cord. If the shore breaker trips, you have a wiring problem in the 30
- 15 amp adaptor, the dock outlet (unlikely) or on the boat (also
unlikely, if things worked when plugged into a 30 amp outlet.)

If the shore breaker hasn't tripped, turn on the branch circuit
breakers one at a time, til it does - then you _may_ have found the
source of the problem.

One local marina uses the 15 amp household-style outlets, and has
several outlets on one breaker - this caused blown breakers several
times on a club cruise there, as we all wanted to run heaters - I
think we eventually got the boats distributed between breakers, and
heaters turned down, so we could all get some heat.


--
Peter Bennett, VE7CEI
peterbb4 (at) interchange.ubc.ca
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