gsadmin
09-05-2006, 12:40 PM
So I go out to my rig last thursday AM to hook it up to the boat and get it ready for the departure later in the afternoon for the holiday weekend. We were going up to Bear Lake.
When I got in the coach, the house batteries were dead such that the jacks and the slides would not work. I started the genset and everything worked fine. Hmm... so I went out to the solenoids in the electrical compartment (one of the ones without a lift support, thanks again GS) and put a test light on them...no juice on them and no juice on the solenoid trigger. So, I went out to the batteries and with the coach plugged in, put my multimeter on them, it was only reading 11.2V...immediately i suspected the converter/charger so I put the meter on the output cables from the converter and ground and got 13.5...hmm. So i then put the positive on the converter cable and the negative on the battery negative terminal where the ground to chassis was connected...11.2V! Shazam! So I unbolted the chassis to battery ground cable and sure enough it was full of rust...I took sandpaper and files to everything, reassembled and BAM, back to normal everywhere!
Moral of the story...
1. When troubleshooting, almost always suspect faulty grounds before faulty equipment.
2. Every couple of years remove and clean the chassis ground.
Hope this helps some of you all.
P.S., I had to guess which wires were coming from the converter...I wonder why that was?
When I got in the coach, the house batteries were dead such that the jacks and the slides would not work. I started the genset and everything worked fine. Hmm... so I went out to the solenoids in the electrical compartment (one of the ones without a lift support, thanks again GS) and put a test light on them...no juice on them and no juice on the solenoid trigger. So, I went out to the batteries and with the coach plugged in, put my multimeter on them, it was only reading 11.2V...immediately i suspected the converter/charger so I put the meter on the output cables from the converter and ground and got 13.5...hmm. So i then put the positive on the converter cable and the negative on the battery negative terminal where the ground to chassis was connected...11.2V! Shazam! So I unbolted the chassis to battery ground cable and sure enough it was full of rust...I took sandpaper and files to everything, reassembled and BAM, back to normal everywhere!
Moral of the story...
1. When troubleshooting, almost always suspect faulty grounds before faulty equipment.
2. Every couple of years remove and clean the chassis ground.
Hope this helps some of you all.
P.S., I had to guess which wires were coming from the converter...I wonder why that was?