Obviously having a hot skin issue, but I've got no idea where to start. Lucky one of my safety chains was touching the ground – I used a wooden post to lift it up and the meter went up to a full 120v!
So the only way to know where the short is happening is to power the unit back on and flip breakers off one by one until the issue goes away. With that info you can then determine which run of 110 has a short and start pulling the receptacles or switches on that leg until you find the issue. If it’s not visible or easily locate-able you have a break in the wiring in the walls. Harder to locate at that point but you’ll have to get into the walls to find the break and repair
Good, you have a meter. Are you in a park or at home? Do you have a surge protector plugged in that looks for issues? Is this an RV with a transfer switch? Checking for issues at the pedestal would be where I started. Inspecting and ohming out my power cord would be next. Transfer switch next. If you find a low resistance, then you can flip breakers to see if you can remove the issue.
Checking that the ground pin on the shore cable is connected is the first step that I would take here
An open neutral can do this. I’d check the outlet that you plug your power cord into. Make sure you see proper voltage between the hot and neutral connections. If you do not see voltage between hot and neutral, but you do see voltage between hot and ground, you have an open neutral. An open neutral can be very dangerous in an RV.
Here’s a story for why we should all have a quality electrical management system (EMS) which among other safety measures will not send power to your rig from a miswired post.
Check to make sure (or ask someone qualified) that the shore power box is properly grounded.
One very important detail about multimeters: their voltage sensing range is high impedance. This means it isn’t showing you if there is a lot or a little bit of power available.
You can get stray voltages induced in pieces of metal. The voltage setting on your multimeter will not really tell you if it’s a tiny amount of current that will immediately dissipate if you were to make contact with it yourself.
I’m not actually sure what the best way to measure this would be. Probably connecting a resistor between the multimeter terminals. But I’m going to guess you don’t have resistors with you 🙁
Source: Dog started yelping when he stepped into the camper (see caption)
