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Lost Power!

I noticed when I disconnected from the electric at Triple R to move to the gate that my TV turned off. Since it is rigged to run off batteries when not connected, that should not have happened. No time to fix it then so off to my new gate I went. I was on the gate for a couple of days running off a generator as usual and everything was working fine until I noticed the LED lights all over my trailer were dim and randomly blinking. Uh oh! Since they were all acting up, I knew it had to be a power issue. A quick check of my batteries showed their output well below normal. I maintain the water in them every month so I knew that wasn’t an issue. I next checked the converter with a voltmeter. It was dead! Power was good at the plug going in but nothing was coming out.

Being out in the middle of nowhere as usual, there are no RV shops nearby and I can’t leave the gate to go fetch parts anyway. Calling a mobile repair man was an option but we gate guards keep them pretty busy so it would take a few days to get one out here to do what I am perfectly capable of doing if I only had the part. There was also the huge service call charge to think about. I had been seeing UPS and FedEx trucks going into the ranch across the street so I checked with the gate guards there via our Facebook group to see if they had an address I could use to ship a new converter to. They were happy to help and do have an address there they use. I jumped on Amazon and ordered my new converter in. In the meantime, I disconnected everything I could from running on the batteries like my TV, DVD player, satellite dish box, and the satellite dish itself. All those things can run directly off the generator instead. I also used a flashlight instead of the DC lights but have 2 AC lights I could still run in the living room.

Meanwhile, my 4 6V golf batteries needed fed to keep my refrigerator going. I can run the fridge on either AC or propane but it has to have DC to run the controls. I disconnected the batteries, cleaned up the terminals, topped off the water, and began a round robin of charging each with my auto charger. I tried charging them with a jumper from my truck too but that really didn’t seem to help that much. For a couple days, I kept one pair of batteries online to run the refrigerator while I charged the other pair and went back and forth. That was fun… I sure wished then that I had solar panels. At the very least, a battery monitor would have been great both for charging and to catch this issue sooner. Definitely going to add a monitor soon and considering adding some panels too.

My new converter arrived and the other guards rushed it over to me. Pulling the old one out was very easy. Putting the new one in took a little longer as I had to modify the stand it sits on because the new converter is wider which I knew when I ordered it. I added a 1/2 inch square piece of wood to the side and drilled new mounting holes. Once it was done, I reconnected one pair of batteries that I knew were at equal charge while continuing to charge the other set manually one at a time. A day later, I added in the now fully charged second set, checked the water again on all, and closed everything up again. All are working fine. Whew!

RV Power Converter

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