Mains power tripping-THE WHOLE SITE

[Garfield]

If the main fuse is 100A supplying 20 caravans on 16A supplies

and each is pulling 10A - well within the post/cable limit, the current is 200A - bang goes the fuse. At home if you add up the value of all the circuit breakers in the consumer unit, they will always be greater than the main supply fuse of 60A or 100A.

Kettles are not likely to be such a problem as they are a short term, intermittent load and it is very unlikely that all 20 caravans boil a kettle at the same time but a 2KW heater pulls 9A, early, cold morning as everyone is getting up there is a high possibility of all heaters being on, 20 x 9 = 180A

 

[Chris_374413356]

The caravan trip should kick in first before the main site.

Not necessarily, it is the demand of the whole site which is taking out the supply, not the load that each van is taking individually as this may be well below the van tripping setting.

 

[peter_374547077]

Any caravan park owner or warden will tell you that they dread an early, cold, Easter, as it is very likely to cause problems with tripping electrics. We have suffered in the past but avoided trouble this year, despite being full. No caravan park has a system that can handle maximum demand from every pitch at the same time. As Garfield rightly says, your house system could not take every circuit operating at maximum power, nor can a caravan park.

We gave all our customers a note as they arrived, explaining the potential for a problem and asking them not to use fan heaters or domestic electric kettles, so that everyone would have an uninterrupted supply. Fortunately our customers understood the reasoning behind our request, and we had a trouble free weekend.

The problem is not overloading of individual hook-ups. It is too many people wanting to use power at the same time.