CAMC 10amp Electric?
I’ve just read a comment from a contributor on FB about French electrics often being only 10amp. He said he heard that the CAMC were going to be reducing their supply to 10 amp. Really? Does anyone know if this is correct?
Comments
-
I do wonder what the average number of times the electricity will trip before the user realises it's their fault for overloading? For some members a reduction to 10 amps will take a lot of getting used to. Be interesting to see if it becomes reality.
0 -
I checked with someone on ‘Live Chat’ and the reply - as follows -
“”I have checked with our sites admin and site opps teams and to the best of our knowledge there is currently no plan they are aware of to do this at the moment. They usually let us a know a bit in advance if there any concrete plans for this sort of thing. It could be something they may still do in the future, but nothing is on our radar as of yet “”.
We would usually have no problem during the summer (hopefully warmer) months but we do use more in the winter season for heating rather using fossil fuel gas.
0 -
I’m sure there’s a Parkinson’s Law - the more available, the more you use. 16 amps encourages excessive use of heating and electric hobs; a totally unnecessary accessory. Certainly in the summer 16 amps is not needed but I can understand people using the maximum in the winter if it’s provided.
3 -
Our Swift Conqueror we are able to control our amp usage, however, if they introduce a 10 amp limit we will have to buy a new electric kettle.
The CMC has introduced charges for electric vehicles, PHEV £2.00 and EV £8.00 per day, a PHEV need a 10amp charge initially which drops back down to 6 amps ? I am confused.
1 -
When we were at Sandringham at Christmas, we were told that only 90 pitches had been let out of the available 138 because the electrical supply couldn't cope with a full site in winter. Whether or not the Christmas lights were anything to do with that, I don't know.
0 -
I have never truly understood why overall usage of electricity should be greatly affected by having 16 amp available rather than 10 amp. The only change in my usage is to turn heating onto one kilowatt rather than two so that I don't have to think if kettle and toaster are going at the same time. Same temperature is maintained so presumably similar electricity is consumed. There are certain things when cooking that I prefer to do on the electric hob as it is more controllable I find.
0 -
If implemented i wonder if there will be a pro rata reduction in site fees?
0 -
and this is before we get an influx of EV's wanting to charge batteries, looks like a receipe for disaster when it comes to pitch fees, greater consumption of electricity but reduced income from site fees because they have to restrict the number of letable pitches per site due to insufficient power infrastructure.
1 -
When we had a caravan the 16 amps was useful as the heating could stay on 2kw, whilst we used the 1 kw kettle or microwave. Now we have a MH heating is only 1.8 kw max and the fridge and battery charger are the only other things we use on electric. Having switched to gas for kettle / toaster / coffee maker and not having a microwave. We managed with no problems on the 10 amp sites in France and on the 6 amp ones with heating at 900 watts. So for us at least it would make no difference. We do have an electric hot plate on the cooker but as in our previous two caravans it is never used.
0 -
I did wonder where the additional capacity for charging battery cars might come from without spending on upgrading the incoming supply. Now we know! What a whizzo idea - just curtail everyone else to 60% of the previous allowance and there will be plenty capacity for the next 10 years, by which touring will be dead and little huts will have taken over. And all it costs is a bulk buy of 10 amp trips!
2 -
This has been discussed elsewhere. Electric cars have a “granny charger” which is a transformer and 5m lead with a 13 amp plug which van be plugged into any supply. It takes 10 amps maximum but even the smallest cars would require at least 20 hours to fully recharge. So, you could plug it into your caravan/motorhome but it would leave you with not much capacity to heat the van, cook etc.
The solution is to have proper stand-alone rapid chargers and the Club has stated that they are looking at this. One difficulty would be that some site locations do not have the power cabling or capacity to do this.
1 -
".....and the fridge and battery charger are the only other things we use on electric."
Just as an aside, Steve, we are long terming on a site where terms change when staying over 31 days re: the electric supply...
the pitch is €2.5 a day cheaper but all the electric is metered at €0.40 per kw/hr. we have a 700w kettle, a 1200w hairdrier and thats about it, other than the charger (generating 12v) and the fridge/freezer.
a 'test' for a week or so with the charger on and fridge/freezer on electric saw a daily usage of a shade under 5kw/day....roughly €2 so slightly better off to the tune of half a euro a day....
a second test saw the charger turned off and all 12v items (tv, lights, ipad and phone charging, water pump, SOG etc) being provided purely by solar and the fridge/freezer was moved to gas...result, an 80% reduction in daily electric usage, now down to 1 kw/h, a cost of €0.40 and a further saving of €1.60....so pitch cost difference is now €2.10 better off a day...a serious chunk of nearly €63 a month.
the 'money' calculation is neither here nor there as i havent yet calculated what the gas would cost, although its cheap and fridge usage is reputed to be small) but i was seriously surprised at the amount of electric the fridge/freezer used.
i know this wont impact on a 16 (or even 10) amp supply as the pull at any one time is small but a bit of an eye opener and a clue to why, even in summer, each site will be consuming a fair bit of power 7x24.
0 -
i guess with a 1200w hairdrier is on for 5mins tops, so takes 10 days to use one KW.
similarly with the 700w kettle, even at 6 times a day (to make the maths easy) for five mins thats 0.35kw (i think)...same sort of usage for short period hot plates etc.
the thing is, the charger and F/F run for 24 hrs so 150w motor would use 3.6kw a day...easy to see how it soon racks up.
0 -
We rarely motorhome in Germany but on one occasion upon learning that the electricity was metered we used the absolute minimum that we could - gas for heating and cooking. Only when we checked out did we find that we were slightly over the allowance and very nearly incurred significant costs.
0 -
no dont thinks so, David, not like small campers have...its a three way thing.
0 -
Come on people what the hell are you doing with 4kw?
We have a large van and only have the heating on low and eco (if you are familiar with the truma control) and even in sub zero it uncomfortably warm for me, OH may disagree but its warm.
The only time we could trip is after breakfast if we shower in the van then I put the water on 2kw to get another tank of hot, and use a 600w kettle. Not too much trouble to turn the water heater off fo 5 min.
The insulation in modern vans is superb, I have LED lamps and a very low wattage TV.
The leisure battery should be charged in a few hours after hookup so shouldn't really figure, even in a large MH with twin batteries the overnight charge should see them pulling low current by morning.
This really is a first world problem.
3
