Daily Archives: May 23, 2016
They’re Back . . .
After getting some coffee in me this morning, I got to work on fixing my satellite problem. Yesterday when I got everything set up, I found I only had one tuner active. My first thought was maybe this was the original problem with my ‘found’ Winegard Satellite Dome, and was the reason it was discarded.
But a quick swap of the cables at the dish told me it was a cable problem, since the problem followed the cable. So now I went along, checking each connector for bent center pins, etc., but finding no obvious problems.
Deciding to put aside further troubleshooting until later, and just get things working again. So I got out my 60 foot extension cables and ran them directly from the dish, in through the driver’s window, and to the receiver. And that got everything working again. I’ll ring out the cables a little later and figure out what’s wrong.
Well, our power problems are back once again, and now I think I’ve finally got a handle on what’s causing them. And the culprit is . . .
Low voltage.
To recap, every time we park in this inner ‘A’ circle, we have problems with the power popping off in the afternoons, especially when Jan is cooking, and running both the microwave and the toaster oven. But the problem only occurs in this area. Not at any other park, not in areas ‘C’ and ‘D’ here, not even right across the road (it’s on a different circuit).
But this afternoon when the power popped off, nothing extra was running, just the TV, computer, and both AC’s. In the past it took something like starting the microwave while all this was also running.
But Serendipity revealed what was going on this time. As the power went off, I was walking toward the front of the coach and looking right at the voltmeter located over the driver’s seat. This shows the rig AC voltage, whether from shore power or the genset.
Normally this meter is kind of blocked by the satellite cables running to the back of the receiver, but since I had temporarily moved the wires around this morning, I could see the meter as the power came back on.
Now my Progressive EMS (Electrical Management System) will drop out at 108 volts to protect things like AC compressors from damage from low voltage. Most other things in the rig would not be adversely affected.
So I turned the AC’s off and then going outside I flicked the switch that put my EMS in bypass mode, which meant that it was no longer monitoring the voltage.
A little bit later I saw this.
As the afternoon wore on, the voltage gradually started to rise, ending up about 113 volts by sundown. And at 1 am it now shows this.
The only kind of weird thing about this my Progressive EMS normally shows when it drops out due to a problem, and it did this time. But when I checked it after the first occurrence a month or so ago, it didn’t show an error, so I never checked it again. And that kind of confused things as I looked at the problem.
Tomorrow I’ll take my photos down to the office and get them on the problem.
Thought for the Day:
I’ve finally decide that there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s the world that has issues.
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