Daily Archives: November 19, 2014
A FixIt Day . . .
And a somewhat expensive lesson.
As soon as I got up this morning I called Bob Parker to pass on some info I found out last night about his Intellitec 900 system. I came across several posts about this system, and they said that when these systems start acting funny, to completely reboot it. You do this by removing shore power and then disconnecting the coach battery for about 10 minutes. You want absolutely no power coming to the unit, and using the coach battery disconnect won’t always disconnect every last thing in the coach. I know it doesn’t on our coach. Even better, when I talked to Nick around midnight, he said exactly the same thing, passed on by Florida solar/electric expert John Palmer. When I talked to Bob, he and Donna were in Livingston, but he said he would try it when they got back. While I had him on the phone, I also told Bob I had his Wi-Fi router fixed and would drop it off when we got back to the park.
Next up was a couple of my own problems. I finally had the time and the decent weather to let me get back on my turn signal problem. And now I had a new problem to work on. Yesterday I noticed my brake lights weren’t working. So as a workaround, when we went out I would just turn on and off the headlights/taillights to simulate brake lights.
I decided the brake light problem was the most urgent so I started out at the brake light switch attached to the brake pedal under the dash. And I found no voltage there, so it was back to the fuse panel on the driver’s side edge of the dash. But there was no fuse for the brake lights here. And the owner’s manual was no help either.
So I was back to my Haynes manual, and that told me about a brake light fuse in the power distribution panel under the hood. Up till then I had always thought that everything in there was engine/transmission related. And most of it is. What I found it there was a bunch of these 1″ long cartridge fuses, a type I had never seen before.
Checking the specified fuse with an ohmmeter I found it was open. Eureka!
But what’s this? Five spaces down from the brake light fuse is one labeled ‘Turn Sig/Haz”. Could it be this simple for that problem too?
And that fuse was bad too. Just to be sure, I went back through all my books and manuals and nowhere was it mentioned that there was a fuse for the turn signals under the hood. They only mentioned the one in the dash fuse panel, and I had checked that one with no luck.
Blog readers will remember that a couple of weeks ago when I was working on this problem, I bought a $70 flasher control module to fix this problem because all the online stuff said this was the fix. But I was not able to pull the old one out from under the dash. I couldn’t get a grip on it, so I thought I’d let my son Chris try it when we get together Friday night.
Since I had never seen fuses like this before, I went back online for a little research. Found I could order the fuses online, but locally the Dodge dealer seem to be the only place that carried them. No luck with AutoZone, CarQuest, etc.
So, since it was now after 3pm Jan and I headed out for a couple of errands and then dinner. And my first stop was the Chrysler dealer in Conroe to get two of the fuses.
Coming back out to the truck with my $13 worth of fuses, I plugged them both in and, VOILA!, I had turn signals and brake lights again.
Of course I also have a $70 flasher control module just waiting to be used if my original one ever does go out. OUCH!
With that fixed, we were on our way to have dinner at Applebee’s, one of our favorite chains. And no matter what we order as an entrée, we always get the Green Bean Crispers appetizers.
These are lightly-breaded green beans, flash fried, and served with smoky bacon ranch and creamy horseradish dips. Really good, and well recommended.
Somewhere in here, I talked to Bob Parker who said that rebooting his panel fixed the problem with his Intellitec system. Great!
I love it when a plan comes together.
Finishing up our meal, our next stop was the Academy Sports & Outdoors for a bottle of the diesel biocide to be sure that the colder, wetter temps don’t cause algae growth and clogged fuel filters in our coach.
Next up was a quick stop at the Wal-Mart before we headed back to the park, and along the way I dropped off the router at Bob and Donna’s rig.
Some readers may wonder about the two fuses and why they would blow, and why I wasn’t worried about a short in the system causing the problem. And why I wasn’t too worried about the fact that I had two fuses blow.
Well, when I closely examined the fuses, there was no indication of a ‘hard’ blow. No burnt, smoky areas inside, no melted plastic. etc. In fact it was hard to tell the fuse WAS blown without testing it.
Fuses age, especially in an automotive environment with the heat and the vibration, so sometimes they just up and quit. And that seems to be what happened this time. And the coincidence of two fuses dying in a relative short time, well, as Sigmund Freud is reputed to have said,
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
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Thought for the Day:
“Trying to describe a building is like trying to describe a beautiful woman: the proper medium is a picture.” – Robert A. Heinlein
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