Campgrounds and RV Parks: Pedestals, Hookups and Seasonal Loads

Why this matters

An RV park call almost always arrives as one site's problem: "site 14 has no power", "the water at 22 tastes funny", "the sewer is backing up at 9". The tech who treats it like a house call fixes the pedestal at site 14, leaves, and gets called back to site 15 two hours later. A park is a small utility with dozens of customers on shared lines, and the complaint shows up wherever a camper happens to notice it. This card covers how a park is laid out, what the code expects, why the cause usually sits upstream, and who can actually say yes to the fix.

How a park is wired: shared feeders, not separate services

A house has one service and one panel. A park has a main service and a set of feeders, each running down a row of sites and serving every pedestal on it. The pedestal (the code calls it site supply equipment) holds the receptacles a camper plugs into, each on its own breaker. Water and sewer are laid out the same way: a shared main with a tap at each site, and a shared sewer lateral with an inlet at each site.

 PARK PANEL   feeder A (loops through each pedestal)
 [ main ]==+======+======+======+======+======+
           |      |      |      |      |      |
         [P11]  [P12]  [P13]  [P14]  [P15]  [P16]
          30A    50A    30A    30A    30A    50A
          20A    20A    20A    20A    20A    20A
 water main -----+------+------+------+------+---
 (shutoff at       each site: hose bib + backflow
  the road)
 sewer lateral <-+------+------+------+------+---
                 each site: inlet with cap,
                 lowest site floods first

Three facts follow from that drawing. A fault anywhere on feeder A affects every pedestal downstream of it. A bad connection inside one pedestal can sit in the path of every site after it, because many parks loop the feeder through each pedestal's lugs rather than tapping it. And on the sewer, a blockage shows up at the lowest inlet above it, which is not where the blockage is.

The receptacles. A 30 amp, 125 volt receptacle (TT-30) serves most travel trailers and smaller motorhomes. A 50 amp, 125/250 volt receptacle (14-50) serves larger rigs and carries two 120 volt legs. The 20 amp receptacle is for small loads and is where a camper plugs an adapter when the big one is dead.

What Article 551 asks of a park, as adopted

NEC Article 551 covers recreational vehicles, and its Part VI covers the parks they plug into. It is law where your state or locality has adopted it, in the edition they adopted. In substance, and check the edition on your job:

• Every electrified site gets a 20 amp, 125 volt receptacle, and set minimum shares of the park's sites must also offer 30 amp and 50 amp service (551.71). The shares have changed between editions as rigs got bigger.
• GFCI protection for the 125 volt, 15 and 20 amp receptacles at the pedestals.
• The park's feeders and service are sized with demand factors (551.73), which assume that not every site draws its full rating at once, and the factor falls as the number of sites rises. That assumption is reasonable on a Tuesday in May and is exactly what a full park on a 95 F holiday afternoon tests.
• Grounding and the pedestal itself have their own rules, including mounting height and the disconnecting means at each site.

Beyond the NEC, many states license campgrounds through the health department, which inspects water, sewer and sanitation, and some require a backflow preventer at each site connection. That is the agency behind the water complaint, not the electrical inspector. This is not legal advice; your state's campground rules are the place to check.

Why the complaint arrives at one site and the cause sits upstream

Campers report what their rig tells them. A modern RV often carries a surge protector or energy management system (EMS) that disconnects the rig when voltage goes outside its window, so the camper says "no power" when the pedestal is in fact live at low voltage. Another camper three sites down has no protector, sees nothing wrong, and runs their air conditioner at 104 volts until the compressor fails.

How to locate the cause is a reading at several pedestals, not a repair at one:

• Voltage falls gradually down the row under load: the feeder is undersized for what is plugged in, or the park is beyond what it was built for. The fix is load management or a bigger feeder, which is the owner's decision.
• Voltage drops in one step between two neighboring pedestals: a high-resistance connection between them, usually a loose or corroded lug or a failed splice. That connection is heating.
• One 120 volt leg high and the other low across a row of 50 amp sites: suspect an open or poor neutral on the feeder, which is dangerous to every rig on it, and the feeder should be shut down until it is found.
• Only one site affected, neighbors normal: now it really is that pedestal, or the camper's cord.

Water and sewer follow the same logic. Low pressure at the end of a row on a Saturday morning is the shared main at peak demand. A sewer backing up at site 9 is a blockage downstream of site 9 on the shared lateral.

Holiday weekends: the load the system was sized against

Parks run near empty midweek in shoulder season and completely full on summer holiday weekends, with every rig running air conditioning through the hottest part of the afternoon. Demand factors were chosen so the park would not be overbuilt for the average day; a full park in a heat wave pushes the feeders as hard as they will ever be pushed. Connections that were marginal all spring fail on the Fourth of July.

What this means for a shop:

• Calls cluster on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon of holiday weekends. Know which parks you serve and expect them.
• Any repair that takes a feeder down knocks out every site on it, full of paying campers. The outage has to be planned with the manager, and campers told, not discovered when the lights go out.
• Preventive work belongs in the shoulder season: torque checks and infrared scans of pedestal connections under load (by a qualified electrician), before the first full weekend.

Opening and closing the season

Seasonal parks open in spring and close in fall, and both are scheduled work a shop can sell.

Opening: pedestals are inspected after winter for rodent nests, water intrusion and corrosion; GFCIs are tested; water lines are recharged slowly with air bled out, every site checked for leaks and backflow devices tested where the state requires it; the sewer lateral is flushed. Recharging a water main that froze will find every split fitting at once, so do it with someone walking the row.

Closing (winterizing): water mains and site lines are drained or blown out with compressed air so nothing freezes; backflow devices are drained per their manufacturer's instructions; pedestals are left energized or de-energized according to the owner's choice, since some parks keep a few sites open for winter campers.

Who you are talking to: host, manager, owner, camper

The campground host is often a volunteer or seasonal resident who handles check-in in exchange for a free site. The host knows which site called and where the pedestals are. The host usually cannot authorize a feeder outage, a purchase, or anything beyond a small repair, and many do not have keys to the main panel.

The manager runs the park day to day and can usually approve routine repairs and schedule an outage. The owner, sometimes a family, a company or a public agency, approves capital work such as a new feeder. The camper is the occupant who called but is not your customer; they cannot authorize work on park equipment, and you do not work on their rig unless that is a separate job they are paying for. See related: Who Can Actually Authorize Work in a Business.

A worked case: site 14 on the Fourth of July

A licensed electrician from a small shop gets a 4:10 pm call on July 4 from the host: site 14 has no power, the camper is upset, the pedestal breaker is on. The row is feeder A, sites 11 to 16, fully booked, heat index near 100 F.

At site 14 the camper's EMS shows "low voltage, disconnected". The electrician reads the 30 amp receptacle at the pedestal: 108 volts. The breaker is fine and the receptacle is not scorched. A house-call instinct says replace the receptacle. Instead, the electrician reads the 30 amp receptacle at each pedestal on the row, through the receptacle face with covers in place, as the rigs are running:

 READINGS, feeder A, 16:25, receptacle hot to neutral
 P11  119 V
 P12  118 V
 P13  117 V
 P14  108 V   <- complaint site
 P15  107 V
 P16  106 V

What the numbers say. The first three readings fall by about 1 volt each, which is ordinary conductor drop under load. Between P13 and P14 the voltage falls 9 volts in one step, then resumes falling about 1 volt per site. A step that size between neighbors is a high-resistance connection between P13's outgoing lugs and P14's incoming ones, not a site 14 problem. Sites 15 and 16 are low too; their campers have not called because their rigs have no protector.

Why it is urgent. That connection carries the current for every site after it. Say sites 14 to 16 are drawing about 60 amps on that leg between them (illustrative). Of the 9 volt step, about 1 volt is the normal run between pedestals, so roughly 8 volts sit across the bad connection, and 8 volts at 60 amps is 8 x 60 = 480 watts of heat at one lug, the output of a small space heater inside a closed pedestal. It will get worse, not better.

Routing the decision. The host cannot approve shutting down three occupied sites on a holiday, so the electrician calls the manager and lays out the choice: shut feeder A down now for about an hour to repair the connection, or keep it running overnight with a connection heating under full load. The manager approves the outage, the host walks the row and tells sites 11 to 16 that power will be off for about an hour, and campers start generators where they have them.

The repair. The electrician opens feeder A at the park panel, applies lock and tag per the shop's electrical lockout procedure under 29 CFR 1910.333(b)(2), and proves the pedestal dead at P13 and P14 with a tester checked on a known live source before and after (NFPA 70E Article 120, section 120.5 in the 2021 edition). With P14's dead front off, the incoming lug shows discolored insulation and a conductor that turns in the lug by hand. The conductor is cut back to clean copper, the lug replaced and torqued to its marked value, and P13's outgoing lugs checked the same way. Power is restored only after covers are back on and the host confirms nobody is handling a cord.

After restoration, at 17:40 with the rigs back on: P13 116 V, P14 115 V, P15 114 V, P16 113 V. The step is gone. Site 14's EMS reconnects.

What would have changed the call. If the readings had fallen 2 volts per site evenly from P11 to P16 with no step, the feeder was simply too small for a full row in the heat, and the honest answer would be load management tonight and a proposal to the owner for a bigger feeder, not a repair. If one leg of a 50 amp site had read high while the other read low, the electrician would have shut the feeder down immediately for a suspected neutral fault, holiday or not.

The failure mode. Replacing the receptacle at site 14 would have taken twenty minutes, looked like a fix, and left a 480 watt connection burning under a pedestal full of campers' cords.

References

• NEC Article 551, Part VI (551.71, 551.73), in the edition your jurisdiction has adopted
• 29 CFR 1910.333(b)(2), lockout and tagging for electrical work (general industry)
• NFPA 70E Article 120 (120.5 in the 2021 edition; check the section number in the edition you use), verifying an electrically safe work condition
• Your state health department's campground licensing rules, for water, sewer and backflow
• See related: Marinas, Docks and the Electric Shock Drowning Hazard