HELP....No Power/ UPDATE

I have read trough the other no power posts and I'm still not sure.

First problem, leaving very early Friday morning and it's raining right now.

Came home after work and hooked up so we could leave in the morning, unplugged the shore power and all lights went off.
Checked the fuses and found nothing blown. The slide was the only thing that still worked. Hooked the shore power back up and everything worked again. Unhooked the shore power again and also unhooked the truck plug to make sure the charging circut was not powering the batteries. Tried the slide and it still worked fine but still no lights or frig or anything else. I would think that if the slide still works that there should be enough power to run some lights ?

The only recent change i have made was to add a 50 amp breaker for the slide (per Forest River)

Anyone have any ideas i can try once we get to camp ?

Thanks

Did you check the power output from the converter? You ain't gonna like this suggestion, but it sounds like the converter is fried.

You'll note that the slide motor for the hydraulics runs directly off of the battery circuit and not through the converter. At least that's the way mine is wired. All of the 12VDC convenience items in the coach (lights, furnace, ect.) run off of the converter. I believe that the 12VDC motor for the landing gear is also wired directly to the battery circuit.

That's my suggestion.

Check the circuit breakers by the battery. I had a simular problem last year and found one of the resettable breakers had tripped. Look for a little black button on the breaker.

Schrowang
My batteries are still charged, will the charging circut still work even if the 12v side is bad ? Was unable to check converter output tonight but will tomorrow.

Talala
Mine has the auto reset breakers so unless they can stick i don't think it would be the problem, but hey, I'll check anything once.

Thanks to all for suggestions !

His lights are working only when connected to shore power. This tells me his converter is putting out voltage.

Its when he unplugs the converter from shore power he is losing voltage to the lights.

As you said his battery is still putting out voltage because his slide and jacks are direct wired to the battery.

This leaves us with either a disconnect switch turned off, a bad or tripped breaker by the battery or possibly something wired wrong with the new 50 amp breaker he installed.

Are your breakers by the battery auto reset or manual? Check voltage coming in and exiting each breaker.

Did you get the hot feed cable from the battery to the new breaker installed correctly?

Mine has three breakers with only one hot wire feeding them. They are connected together on the line side with a copper bus jumper. Did you get this copper bus jumper put back inplace that parallels the line side of the breakers together?

EDIT - Sorry I was interupted with a phone call after I started typing and didn't see the other replys.

Mines an auto reset breaker, per Forest River, i simply added a 50 amp breaker to the top of the exsisting 3 by joining it togeather with the others with a copper strip on the left side and then joining the exsisting slidebreaker with the new one with a copper strip on the right side for a total of 80 amps.

That sounds correct. Be sure they are all connected together on the line side.

You did get the other end of the cable hooked back to your + battery?

Did you check voltage entering and exiting each breaker by the battery? (I am an electrical contractor and automatically assume everyone owns a multimeter)

Not yet, to late and wet, plus the trucks already hooked up. I'm just trying to get any info i can from you guys before we leave in the morning, that way i have more things to check when we get to the campground.

Good luck and hope you have a fun trip!

Well after expecting the worse I'm happy to report that the problem was minor. The auto reset breakers are located behind one of my battery boxes. After taking the cover of the battery box off so i could get to the breakers i found that the factory had done a terrible job of crimping on the ring connector to the main wire from/to the converter and that it had simply fell out. After reattaching and crimping everything works fine again.

Thanks to everyone who offed suggestions.

Glad to hear that you found the source of the problem.

That makes you a happy camper .....