Ok so I want to post and update as to what I have been doing to the 5er over the last few days. First off shedding a lot of BLOOD by way of the pesky mosquitoes that have seriously made me cut my work time to a fraction of what it could be. So very glad I don’t have to hurry to get this done.
For the ease of use, I’ve added an easily accessible wall mount 120 volt receptacle to the front utility compartment of the 5er which makes it much easier to access 120 volt from this location than at the inverters 120 volt outlet location
So now I have used all the inverters outlets, one for the utility area outlet and the two remaining outlets I am feeding to the transfer switch.
After thinking I had buttoned up the solar I took it for a test run as I worked on organizing my planned tool box for the camper. For test purposes, I had the refrigerator, ceiling fan and some other appliances running off the inverter to put a load on the system.
After about two hours I start hearing the auto transfer switch cycle several times so I walk by the front of the 5er to see how much of a hit my solar system was taking. Oh no, the battery voltage is down to 10.9 volts. How can that be, what is going on? I raced to shut off the main circuit bakers which shut down the 5er’s whole electrical system. After checking for damage I started to work on finding out what had caused the sudden high wattage draw.
Two friends of mine, Duane and Harlan, had just finished with work and came over to help. So we checked out what turned out to be a huge (almost 90 amp) draw being pulled from the batteries. What was found was that all circuits were drawing normal except for one. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, you can’t read what the label for any circuit says so it took awhile.
Eventually, through process of elimination, we discovered that the converter was still on line working instead of being taken out of the circuit by the switch I had installed earlier. My Bad, for buying a cheaply built toggle switch and for not checking with an ohm meter the “on vs. off” orientation. That being solved I shut down the converter by changing the switch orientation and presto, wattage dropped to normal levels throughout the system. What lesson has been learned by this? Never Assume!!!!!
So today I get a good chance of finding out how well the solar system works charging the battery bank because it is a very sunny day and the load pulled on the 5er battery bank that sucked the batteries way down during the issue described above is actually giving us as good a field test as one could ask for.
Next step, I am now waiting for a new soft start capacitor to arrive so I can install and test it while using the Briggs 3000 watt generator. The transfer switch has struggled to maintain connection with the solar system because of the drop in voltage the switch gets from the high watt rates drawn during startup of the A/C. I am hoping that by utilizing the soft start capacitor I can get past this issue, finishing the solar system install and moving on.
We next need to work on sanitizing the fresh water system in the 5er. This consists of the water tank, hoses and fresh water pump. Since Cindy has done quite an extensive amount of research on this, we have a plan of attack that I am sure will go off without so much as a glitch. After all what could possibly go wrong working with Bleach and water. It’s not like it’s plumbing……………… Oh wait that is exactly what it is! Well then, as always, when it comes to plumbing my bet is, I get wet.
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