A new built-in safety device will completely disconnect an RV if it detects a pedestal fault. With the first units shipping in roughly nine months, most campground operators still haven’t heard of it — and no one knows how many pedestals will pass.
Sometime next summer, a guest will arrive at a campground in a new RV, plug into a pedestal, and get no power. The RV will not be broken. Instead, the pedestal will have failed a test the RV has never run before.
The new test is the Grounding Monitor Interrupter, or GMI, which will be required in every new 30-amp and 50-amp RV beginning with the 2028 model year. When a GMI detects a fault in the campground’s grounding or wiring, it blocks shore power before current reaches the coach. The result is a dark RV, a confused guest, and a complaint at the front desk that many operators are currently unprepared for.
The safety problem the device targets
The GMI exists because of a hazard the RV industry refers to as “hot skin”. An RV’s chassis and body are designed to be bonded to the campground’s main service panel. If that ground connection fails due to a damaged power cord, a bad adapter, or a loose or missing ground wire, the metal skin of the RV can elevate to 120 volts.
No one inside the RV notices the fault because appliances keep running and there are no visible sparks. However, a person standing on damp ground who touches the door handle, the steps, or the tow vehicle can be severely shocked or killed.
“Electrocuted means killed by electrical shock,” said Mike Sokol, an electrical safety educator who writes under the name RVelectricity. “Reporters use this wrong all the time.”
Sokol, a former Corning Glass engineer who served as his plant’s in-house OSHA compliance instructor for electricians in the 1970s, shifted his focus to RV electrical safety around 2010 after a live-sound colleague was shocked on a tour bus. He subsequently posted a white paper in 2011 for the National Electrical Code community.
The severe risk of this hazard is well-documented: in 2014, a 3-year-old boy in Illinois was tragically killed after touching a camper door handle while standing on wet ground, an incident attributed to poor camper grounding.
What a GMI actually does
The GMI is built into the RV, Sokol said. “It’s not removable and you can’t bypass it.”
When a GMI-equipped RV plugs into a pedestal, the device checks the ground path back to the service panel before allowing current to flow. If there is a problem in the pedestal wiring, the grounding system, the shore power cord, or a dog-bone adapter, “power is shut off completely going into the RV,” Sokol said.
The 12-volt system inside the RV will continue to operate, and an onboard generator will still run, but shore power will not return until the fault is isolated and repaired. A GMI is fundamentally different from a surge protector, and it is not a GFCI (ground-fault circuit interrupter).
“A GFCI allows you to get shocked and tries to disconnect before it kills you,” Sokol said. “A GMI is proactive and it’s constantly testing to make sure nothing bad is happening, and it will disconnect your RV completely from the pedestal in the event that it discovers something that it doesn’t like, even if you’re not touching it.”
Monika Geraci, a spokesperson for the RV Industry Association, said in a written response to Modern Campground sent September 18 that GMIs “do not impose new electrical demands on campgrounds or change voltage or amperage requirements; rather, they verify that the existing electrical supply is properly grounded and wired before allowing current to flow into the unit.”
In a September briefing for CAMP, the association of campground association executives, Ciceri framed the point for operators: “GMI-equipped RVs aren’t going to create problems at a campground — they’re going to reveal the ones a property may already have.”
How the requirement got here
The requirement originates in Article 551 of the National Electrical Code, which governs RVs and RV parks. The 2023 edition added language on loss-of-ground protection — but for years, no device existed to enforce it.
“Imagine if there was a law that said that you have to put a doohickey in every kitchen in the country,” said Tristan Ciceri, vice president and co-owner of Electrical Works, a contractor focused on RV parks, campgrounds, and mobile home communities. “Well, the doohickey doesn’t exist. You can’t enforce it until it actually exists.”
Ciceri serves on Code-Making Panel 7, the body that oversees Article 551, and contributed to OHI’s GMI resource through its cross-industry task force. The effective date was still unsettled this spring, he said. “Even as of June, they didn’t have a fully committed date,” Ciceri said. “They were still back and forth. Do we push it another year? Should we push it to 2028?” In June, he said, the group concluded the industry could meet the 2027 timeline.
The RVIA board set Model Year 2028 as the enforcement date, after an earlier delay.
The scale of the rollout
Geraci said RVIA member manufacturers produce approximately 98% of all RVs built in North America. Because members must comply with adopted NEC provisions, the transition will cover nearly every new 30-amp and 50-amp unit beginning with Model Year 2028.
Sokol estimates the production volume. “My best guess is they’re going to need between 350,000 and 400,000 GMI units for the 2028 model year,” he said, spread across a 12-month window rather than delivered all at once.
Most operators still haven’t heard of it
The first obstacle is not cost. It is awareness.
Sokol polled attendees of his electrical safety classes at the Hershey show in September. Fewer than 20% had heard of GMI, he said, and half of those had read his articles.
State associations are only beginning to communicate the change. “We will now that we have more information,” said Michael Moore, general manager of the Texas Association of Campground Owners and a representative of CAMP.
Asked how many members are aware of the requirement, Moore said: “Hard to say.”
In her September 16, 2026, email response, Cyndy Zbierski, president of the Massachusetts Association of Campground Owners, was direct about the early stage of the process. “I don’t have enough information to share at this point,” she said. “This has just started in the last week.” MACO will pass along updates as 2028 models reach production in the first quarter of 2027, she said.
OHI, the national association for private campgrounds, declined an interview request but provided a statement through David Basler, its chief strategy officer and senior vice president of government affairs.
Basler said OHI’s focus has been “making sure campground owners and operators have access to clear, accurate and actionable information about GMI.” The association is holding off on numbers: “We want to be careful not to speculate about industry-wide costs, the scope of potential infrastructure needs, or potential business impacts without reliable data to support those conclusions,” he said. OHI’s GMI resource page is its primary guidance for members.
What an assessment looks like
Every source in this story points operators to the same first step: assess the property.
Electrical Works charges roughly $2,500 to $4,000 for a property-wide assessment, according to Ciceri, with the figure shifting by park size, location, and remoteness. A professional assessment includes an executive summary, a proposal, and photographs, he said; cheaper walk-throughs can amount to a notepad listing which lots are “good” or “bad.”
Asked how many pedestals an electrician can inspect in a day, Ciceri paused. “That’s really tough to say,” he said. “Yeah, it’s kind of hard.”
Sokol offered a working estimate for properly wired pedestals: “You should be able to test one in five to ten minutes,” which works out to roughly 5 to 10 pedestal per hour when nothing is wrong. But any error found in a quick test could take up to an hour or more to confirm the failure mechanism.
The most common failure is not age but decades of unqualified repairs. “It’s been repaired and fixed and added on through the years by people that aren’t really qualified to do so,” Ciceri said. “In the process of fixing it, they do more harm than good.”
Remediation is harder to bracket. A bad breaker or receptacle might cost “a couple hundred dollars,” Ciceri said. A property with undersized wiring and no ground wire at all can run into six figures. Full rewires involve permits, utilities, and equipment lead times that can reach five months.
An assessment also accounts for conditions that are not visible on a quiet weekday. A park with two residents in April behaves differently than the same park on July 4th weekend, when every site is full and the farthest pedestal sits 400 feet from the panel, Ciceri said.
What early testing shows
KOA, the largest campground system in North America, has conducted controlled field tests with prototype GMI devices, according to a written response from Eric Rathburn, vice president of real estate development at KOA Development, and Ryan Bergen, manager of campground design services, sent September 25.
The central finding: “We have not encountered a single pedestal that when properly wired has failed using the prototype GMI testing device.”
Grounding method and site-level infrastructure age were the critical variables, the response said, not region or the overall age of the park. Ground rod installations performed well, though results depend on soil conditions.
Standalone GMI devices remain in early development, but one leading manufacturer has committed to delivering a unit for KOA’s field testing within the coming weeks, according to the response.
KOA is not imposing a deadline on its franchisees. Communication “has been primarily educational,” aimed at reassuring owners that KOA is working toward a solution and will advocate for them. The company recommends that operators “begin assessments now without urgency,” noting that most parks likely have some compliant sites ready to market as GMI adoption ramps up.
“It is important to remember though, this is ultimately a code compliance requirement, so systematic planning now prevents costly emergency upgrades later,” the response said.
Who pays for the upgrades
There is no cost-sharing program. Geraci said RVIA collaborates with campground associations on technical guidance and educational materials, but the association’s position is that the requirement does not originate with RVIA.
“Characterizing this requirement as an association-directed mandate misrepresents how national safety standards are established,” Geraci said. “The requirement originates from the NFPA’s independent, consensus-driven standards process, not the RV Industry Association.”
The RVIA GMI resource was developed in partnership with OHI, RVDA, CAMP, TACO, and more than a dozen state and regional associations, Geraci said.
Independent analyst John Marucci has reported that some industry experts have characterized the change as an unfunded mandate. In a September 4 post, he noted that RVIA has not surveyed any category of campground pedestal conditions.
The reputation risk
For operators, the hazard is not only electrical, but also commercial.
Marucci’s scenario is straightforward: an owner plugs an old RV into a pedestal without incident, buys a new GMI-equipped model, and finds the same site now refuses to deliver power. The natural reaction is to blame the RV, not the pedestal.
Sokol put the conflict in dollar terms. “Somebody’s going to show up at a campground with their $100,000 or $250,000 or $500,000 RV and not be able to get power,” he said. “And they are going to raise a fuss big time.”
Heidi Doyle, director of business development at Electrical Works, said the concern she hears most is reviews.
“You don’t think about how one bad review can make a difference in your business, or, in this case, it could be 10 bad reviews,” she said. “A lot of people have said, I don’t want to have complaints about this. I want to get it over with.”
Ciceri called it the industry’s largest concern. If new buyers keep hitting dead pedestals at multiple parks, he said, the failure gets attached to the RV, not the campground. “Why did I buy this thing? I don’t, I can’t plug in anywhere,” he said.
The pressure cuts both ways. Doyle said dealers are likely to tout GMI as a selling feature for 2028 models — a reason the old rig does not measure up.
Geraci said having a licensed and insured electrician perform annual inspections “has long been the recognized industry best practice,” and the GMI does not change that guidance. It only makes a failed ground visible, because the device checks ground presence before permitting power into the vehicle.
KOA framed the same risk at the ecosystem level. “Removing friction for RV campers strengthens the entire industry,” the response said, adding that the company’s responsibility “extends beyond KOA’s system” because GMI challenges affect the whole camping ecosystem.
What to do now
The first step is to find out what the property has. Sokol recommends testing pedestals now, before the first 2028 units arrive in July. He is developing an online training course expected within the next two months, along with one-page handouts for campground owners and RV owners.
He cautioned against hiring a residential electrician for the work. “A campground probably does not want to hire a residential electrician,” he said, because pedestal and RV power differ from house wiring. Testing also requires a meter that measures ground impedance, not a standard voltmeter. “You can’t do it with just a standard meter,” he said.
Doyle said Electrical Works is coordinating with state association executives on regional tours that bundle multiple assessments into a week to reduce travel costs. Parks do not need to remediate every site at once, she added, because new rigs will not fill a park overnight.
“No matter what their park situation is, the entire park doesn’t need to be rectified and fixed,” Doyle said. “They could do it in phases or segments.”
For campground operators, the timeline is concrete. The first 2028 models begin leaving factories in early 2027 and reach campgrounds by summer. Finding a bad pedestal now costs an assessment and a repair; finding it next summer costs a stranded guest and a review that is hard to undo.
The device will not negotiate and cannot be bypassed. It will either find a proper ground, or it will not deliver power. The RVs that carry it are already on the way.
Modern Campground reached out to all sources on September 15, 2026. This article was published on September 30, 2026, and its contents reflect information available as of that date.
Jhareyna Pagao contributed to proofreading and editing.
