Saturday, April 27, 2019

POWER!!!!

So there is a sign on the compartment that has all of the power systems in the motorhome.  It says 120/240, but don't you believe it!!!!  I made the mistake of wiring up a 220 to plug my new baby in.  It is a massive 3-prong plug that looks like a dryer or stove type of connector...and at 30 amps!  Connecting it up and turning it on made massive growl and then a loud "thump".  I knew I was in trouble.  Well, after a 1.5hr trip to an authorized repair facility for my inverter/charger, it was declared that "It's dead, Jim."   That was a $1,500 mistake.  Now it wasn't acting perfectly healthy to begin with, but that certainly finished it off.

So yesterday was a very stressful day for me as I was going to install the new inverter/charger myself that I had ordered off Amazon.  I couldn't see driving back 1.5hr to the repair place when I could probably hook things back up myself.  Everything was fine until I couldn't get ANY power from my shore connection.  I found that there was yet ANOTHER breaker inside that provides power connectivity to my inverter.  Once I figured that out, all was golden.  Here is a picture of the new pure-sine inverter that I installed in place of the destroyed modified-sine inverter that I put out of its misery.

A few weeks ago I replaced the "house" batteries as well.  The original setup was using (4) 12v deep cycle batteries in parallel.  I wanted to make sure I had lots of reserve power as I am looking forward to getting off-grid for camping.  I put in (4) 6v batteries that are connected in series and parallel.  I will get the same 12v power, but I will have a lot more runtime.  It calculates out to 450ah of power at 12v.
I chose to go with the Trojan T105 batteries...in case you are interested.  These are the gold standard for deep cycle off-grid RV type application.

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