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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

I camped in a yurt in rural Maine last fall on a motorbiking trip. Needed to keep my phone charged for nav; woke up to find it hadn't charged all the way.

Went looking for the campground host and bumped into another camper, who was pissed the power went out. "Don't worry though - if you need to charge something, you can put it in my truck."

Ended up on a phone charging expedition that landed me in a local library for the first time since I was a child.

Came back and met the host: "Sorry about the power last night - some dumbass tried to charge his truck and tripped the breaker to the whole campground."

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Charging a truck does that? What's that campground going to do with someone plugs in their 50A 43 foot-long tour bus RV?

(I'm sure there's more to the story, and the details aren't important, but if charging a vehicle is tripping breakers for the whole campground there's something wrong.)

“yurt in rural Maine” did not convey RV glamping to me.

Yeah, probably not your typical campground, now that you mention that detail. Still, something seems off, but here I go down a rabbit hole that isn't important to the original comment.

If pulling 24 amps through a TT-30 or 40 amps through a 14-50 trips a breaker, then it's the host's fault for the campground having a shoddy electrical system, not the truck driver's fault.

Lol in what world? Campgrounds routinely have next to no funding, if they even have power pedestals I wouldn't expect them to be wired for anything more than an RV.

The entire reason we have so many different types of receptacles is so to keep you from plugging in something that the circuit can't handle. They shouldn't be giving people 14-50's if they don't have 50A peak and 40A continuous available. (There is a code exception to only allow 40A peak/32A continuous to a 14-50, but that's all most portable EV chargers draw anyway, so I doubt it even met that. And TT-30 offers no such exception at all.)

Since the whole campground went dark, presumably it was the main breaker. The branch circuit must be sized to the outlet type, but the total rating of all branch circuits usually exceeds the main breaker rating.

That would be a reasonable explanation if most of the campsites had people charging EVs at their max individual current, but it sounded like just one did.

Approximately zero campgrounds have the capacity to charge more than one EV. They are sized for intermittent loads, just because it uses a 14-50 does not mean it is intended to support 80% steady draw.

Is that not the point of a 14-50 socket? To say that you can draw 50 amps? If you can't supply 50 amps without tripping a breaker, don't install a 50 amp socket.

At the risk of saying something obvious, the socket and the breaker are sized for the peak load, not for average load. A typical home might have 300-400 amps if you total up all the breakers even though the mains are 200A or even 100A.

Also, a bog standard 14-50 is likely not suited for 80% steady EV usage anyway. They make EV-rated 14-50s now because people keep melting the older ones. And that happens even though the vast majority of chargers won't draw more than 32A on a 14-50 due to the historical popularity of using 40A breakers for a 14-50 receptacle.

I would definitely be carrying a battery pack or two if going on a rural motorbike trip.

I installed a Peak Design Qi charger for the trip. Turns out their charger and their phone case weren't electrically compatible. I was pretty mad about it.

Battery's not super useful if you want to put the phone on your handlebars while riding. Screen is a lot more helpful than audio cues. If you can only charge when parked, it's either charge from a battery and have to top up the battery later, or just charge the phone directly.

The friend I did the trip with was on nav for the first part of the trip, but he had to turn back early for family stuff.

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