Overloaded!

Will this story have a happy ending? I’m not sure. Last night, Lorraine had too many devices active in the kitchen of our coach. A microwave, a kettle and a toaster. Whatever device she turned on last cut AC power to the coach.

No problem. A circuit breaker must have tripped. I’ll go and reset it.

All the circuits were fine. Odd. I went over to the Magnum inverter and it had a red light with the warning “AC Overload” on the display.

Okay. I haven’t seen that before. I cleared the warning light by turning the inverter off and then on again. Still no power though.  I reset the GFCI plug in the kitchen.

Power restored.

But the Magnum inverter was no longer charging our house batteries. Turning the charger on had no effect. We were inverting only. And that meant we were running our AC off the house batteries.

That is not good. We can only do that for a limited period of time.

It was late last night when this happened and I waited until this morning to deal with the issue.

I called Newmar and they walked me through a process to restore the Magnum inverter: reset all GFCI plugs, turn off pedestal power, turn off inverter, engage the battery disconnect. Wait two minutes and reverse the process.

No joy. We could invert — using our house batteries to produce AC power — but we could not charge.

Newmar suggested running the generator.

No joy.

Newmar suggested resetting the inverter.

I emptied out our slideout tray. Laying prone on the tray, I had Lorraine slide me into the underbelly of our coach. For whatever reason, the inverter is located between the rails of the basement of the coach. Very difficult to reach and not very easy to get in and reset the unit.

I reset it by depressing the power button for 10-15 seconds.

No joy.

As I write this post the house batteries are at 11.8V and soon we will be really stuck. The inverter will cut off at around 11.2V and then we will have no refrigerator, no air conditioning, no oven and, possibly the most serious issue, no Internet.

We have a mobile tech coming out this morning. His service call will cost several hundred dollars. If the inverter is bad, that will cost us about two thousand dollars (CAD). Amazon has them in stock and I can get delivery tomorrow plus another few hundred to install.

Sigh. There is always something with a motorcoach.

The lesson of this story: do not run multiple appliances at one time. Plug one too many into your coach and you may fry your inverter and it might cost you a few thousand dollars to repair.

The service tech has another option that he will try before we go down the path of replacing the inverter.

We’ll know in a few hours if that option will work.