by JudyJB » Tue Dec 04, 2012 4:48 pm
As I understand it, here is what caused the brownout and the converter fan to keep operating. CoachNet and the service place they called for me explained it as this:
1) I had parked my RV for four days while visiting relatives. I had left the front and rear furnaces on low because night temps were going below freezing. My batteries were a little more than half full by the end of that period.
2) When i left the parking area, I did not charge the batteries using the generator. I figured that they would charge as I drove. They did, but not completely.
3) That night I was plugged into power, and that is when I noticed the fan motor sound under my bed. When it kept running, I figured something was wrong and shut down the circuit breaker. In reality, the converter was trying to recharge my batteries and I should not have turned it off.
4) I did not realize that when you were hooked up to shore power, the lights were still 12 volt and ran from the batteries. The brownout was caused by the converter being inoperable due to the circuit breaker being pulled, thus not being able to recharge the battery. While the battery looked as if it was charged, in reality, I was pulling a lot of power because I had quite a few lights on at that time. Because I was operating a lot of lights, I was discharging the battery and not noticing it.
5) When I switched the circuit breaker on, it turned on the converter, which started doing what it had been trying to do--charge the batteries!! It made the lights immediately get brighter because it was now sending power to the batteries. When it got things back to normal after a few hours, it shut itself off, just as it should have done.
So the only brownout was to my unit, and it was my fault for misunderstanding how things worked. I did not realize that the lights worked off the batteries, regardless of whether I was hooked up to shore power or not. What the shore power does, at least for the lights, is power the converter so it can charge the batteries so they can operate the lights!! Nor did I know I had a converter under my bed!! Duh. I have learned something.
The reason I had not noticed this fan before was probably because I had never been on batteries for so long before without running the generator to recharge them before I drove off to another place.
Now that the batteries have finally caught up and I am not turning on every light in the place, all is well. Except of course for the mess I still have under the sink from the dishwater soaking the cabinet "carpeting" with smelly water. I have sprayed it with lysol and with a chlorox water mixture while using my hair dryer periodically to dry things out. If the smell does not go away, I will get something else to spray when I can get to a store.
So when I can, I am going to get some peel and stick tiles or a chunk of linoleum and put it under the sink, using caulk on the edges, and maybe turning them up so it is a pan, not just a flat surface. It would be much easier to clean up if this pipe comes unhooked again. Whew!