pnoshawn

I am just returning from a 5 day trip with my new F150 and a rented 2016 28' Airstream International Serenity. I bought this truck specifically to power a trailer and rented an Airstream to see if my wife and I like it enough to put down $$$ on one.

Long story short, the F150 would not charge the trailer as it kept triggering a ground fault. It charged fine from my garage without triggering GFI and my truck will power other things, but they won't run together - which made for a very cold dark trip to the beaches in Western Washington. Like dragging a big aluminum tent.

I know that sometimes 2 GFI's in the same circuit will fight one another and trip continuously, but the house circuit has a GFI.

Any thoughts/experience with this? Since Ford advertises with Airstream, and vice versa, I would think they would have tested this out and have posted an FAQ.

vulnox

I've read of others having similar issues with generators, not just the PowerBoost. They usually found that there was a bad outlet or one guy found an outlet was flat wired wrong. The F-150 seems to be more sensitive to detecting that stuff, likely because there is a lot of money tied to it if something goes wrong, so I suspect there is a problem somewhere in the Airstream. I've seen plenty of Airstream and other TT owners who have no issue, and since the truck works on other stuff my money is a fault in the rental.

roadPilot

https://www.harborfreight.com/3500-w...tor-63584.html

mrv99

You are missing the point..... having this means you no longer need a secondary generator and gas to run it. Not to mention a trucks idle is much quieter than the best Honda generator.

dsg2003mach1

ya it may have something in the trailer. We have multiple Honda Generators to power our homes in the event of a hurricane, the same electrician wired all of our houses with the same plugs, transfer switches etc... Some of the houses everything was fine, others tripped the damn GFC on the generator (we even swapped generators between houses). It always ended up being a ground issue somewhere in the house circuit. its a 4-5 year old trailer, who knows what someone may have done to it or may have rubbed/come loose in that time.

BLoflin

Before connecting F150 ProPower to Airstream, go in an flip all the AC breakers off at the Airstream Electric panel. Connect ProPower see if it stays up (no faulting). Then go in an switch one breaker at a time on. If any breaker trips the ProPower fault, switch that breaker back off, start ProPower again, and continue with the rest of the breakers. Documenting any breakers that individually cause a fail.

Assuming you get this far, figure out what outlet/appliances that failing circuit breaker controls. If any appliances (like microwave oven, etc.) unplug them and try again. If it is just unused outlets, possibly with a GFI built-in, you need to determine problem. There are some cheap diagnostic tools (from Home Depot/Amazon) that you plug into each outlet that will show mis-wiring. Though the circuit needs to be active with AC power for some of them (i.e. you would need to power trailer with a different AC source that doesn't trip).

Or the manual way, remove all power (don't forget in case you have an inverter creating AC from your batteries/solar). And then check and/or un-wire each outlet on the failing circuit, until you have the problem isolated.

Good luck!

ddruker

I'm pretty sure your problem on the Airstream side, and not on the F150 side.

See this thread on the Airstream forum - https://www.airforums.com/forums/f23...ml#post2497565

If you are tripping the GFI on your F150, the likely problem is that your Neutral and Ground circuits are making a connection somewhere inside your trailer. If this was your own personal airstream, you could debug this for sure - you will need a multimeter to check continuity on each circuit coming out of your power panel in the airstream and figure out which one has is shorting neutral to ground.

The problem could also be a GFI behind a GFI - Meaning that if your airstream has either a GFI circuit breaker, or one or more GFI outlets - and if these devices to a self-test upon startup, then they could trigger an upstream GFI a second or two later. If you owned the Airstream, and you found this was occurring, you could replace the GFI plugs or outlets in your Airstream with new ones that don't self-test.

Most 30 AMP and 50AMP outlets in trailer parks are not yet GFI protected. 20 AMP outlets have been required to be GFI protected for decades. The NEC (National Electrical Code) changed in 2020 to mandate that new 50AMP and 30AMP and outlets are GFI protected. I expect this is grandfathered, so there may not be a big push to get every trailer park up to the new code all at once. The net of all this is that the day is coming - probably not soon - that all trailers will need to not trip upstream GFI's. With your F150 you are just ahead of this curve.

The net is that all of this is very solvable if you own your Airstream and can debug / fix it - my Airstream and my F-150 generator work fine together... If you are buying a new Airstream, it's virtually certain that it will be compliant with the new code and will not trip upstream GFIs...

Dan

vulnox

Troubleshooting and that is likely going to be largely useless to OP at this point, unless they have another rental lined up. They mentioned their post came at the end of their trip, so the airstream is likely already gone back to wherever he got it. A lot of good trips for others that run into this though.

Quan808

Could you at least go back to the place that you rented and hook it up to another TT/Airstream and see if it works or not?

Flamingtaco

Still it's good info. The OP may not be electrically knowledgeable, and the comments may make him feel more at ease with purchasing the TT him and his wife want.