Melted fuses, learning a new rig and avoiding freezing.
It has been a while since I’ve made a regular post. Things have been pretty insane. Our new Class A became available late second week of December. We picked it up and immediately began familiarizing ourselves with it and planning where we would put stuff. There was also the quickly growing list of upgrades, changes
But it was cold, rainy, sometimes freezing, miserable Illinois weather…..
Among the things we decided to do: Install an Acuva water purifier, make an end table for the couch, install a CB, GPS and compass/temperature gauge. Add to that a 12V outlet for my CPAP, a USB outlet for the hotspot install a set of temperature sensors to monitor the refrigerator and outside temps and convert a small “pantry” slide out into shelf space. We needed to buy some things to outfit the rig that didn’t come with it. All the while we were also continuing to do what we could to downsize the house and help my son remodel his house AND get ready for Christmas with family.
Then, one cold but sunny afternoon – my wife noticed “light coming in under the back wall”. What? Sure enough, there was a gap under one side of the back wall. Behind this wall is a mostly empty space under the “back cap”. A call to Tiffin and they agreed that they needed to see the unit. As it was just before Christmas, their service facility was shut down until Jan 2. If we left town late December we could be “in line” at the service center when it opened. That meant leaving a week ahead of schedule. So we packed everything, installed the TPMS, fixed the wiper motor in the rain (see how the list keeps getting longer) and hit the road Dec 29th.
We made it to the Red Bay Service center and got into line. After a couple of days waiting (free full hookups), they stopped by to see our list of issues. We were most concerned with the back
We worked our way out west, met up my daughter’s family and traveled together to Quartzsite. We did some full hookups and some Walmart and boondocking. The biggest thing we learned along the way was that with this unit having a residential refrigerator and many other AC devices,
So, at Quartzsite, we found a good price on Battleborn batteries in the big tent, bought four and installed them. The difference was dramatic. But that still wasn’t the end of the story – which I will get to further down.
We spent two weeks there, then moved on through a number of locations: Saddle Back, Tuscon, Guadalupe, San Angelo – so on and so forth. We did a lot of boondocking. We learned a lot about our RV and continued to add to the list of small manufacturing errors. I have a separate blog post, soon to be,
We took a short trip out to the beach and came back to an RV with no AC power. I started debugging and figured out there was no DC power to the Inverter. Backtracking from the switch I came across a fuse that had been very hot, for a very long time. It was a type of fuse I’d not seen before. Black carbonized, plastic oozed out of it and the contacts between it and the two bus-bars were black and dirty. And the nut that held it in place was barely finger tight. We made some calls to Tiffin Customer Service and ended up talking to a Tech that walked me through a couple of tests and verified that generator power went through the inverter so I was out of luck on AC in the rig for most things until the inverter was fixed. It was then 8 pm, Friday night and nothing to do but borrow a small generator to plug the refrigerator into for the night.
The next morning, we started phone calls and headed out to Corpus Christi to try to find the part. Three RV dealers, a truck shop, hardware store, two solar installers (closed) and numerous phone calls – no one had anything like that fuse or anything with which to replace it. By early afternoon, running out of options, I remembered there was a West Marine in town. I called and they had a fuse holder and in-line fuse that size. We went there and purchased a couple of holders, fuses and they helped us make up some 2/0 cables that would be needed to hook the fuse up to the RV. We went home, installed the fuse – and then I realized it wasn’t just the fuse. Seeing the fried fuse, I had just assumed it was the sole problem. It turns out the inverter power switch was fried as well. So much heat from the fuse traveled up the aluminum bus bar to the switch, that it melted the plastic holding the contact in the switch. Another quick trip to West Marine for a switch and we were up and running again.
Tiffin did give us the names of two businesses that we could call. One, a mobile tech just got us an answering machine. The other was a radiator shop which didn’t interest us at all.
I’m quite sure the fuse never was making good contact. That it is partially responsible for the low voltage alarms we were getting when using high current devices on the inverter. I don’t regret though my decision to move to the Lithium batteries. We are planning on a significant solar installation which now will probably including completely revamping the DC power panel, fuses
We swung up through Colorado to Horsetooth