If you have no interest in 12 volt electrical systems it may be better to skip today’s offering. Rusty is doing well, Layne has been overseeing a major clothes wash and the weather in Paraguay has been over 80 degrees and sunny with cooler good sleeping temperatures at night. We share the campground at Pequeña Baviera (Little Bavaria) with rescued animals not always to Rusty’s liking.
We came here for three jobs, new tires which are cheaper in Paraguay; fix our blinking red low voltage light and have a third try to fix a persistent tiny coolant leak. First up we seem to have fixed the low voltage light on the inverter and that’s a major success. Chris at work:The problem was the system worked perfectly, batteries balanced, charging systems doing their jobs but every time the batteries were being charged the inverter showed low voltage and occasionally shut down momentarily. The weird part was we could use the electricity with no problems. Sitting parked, cooking, running the a/c whatever, the inverter showed no problems. It made no sense.At first it seemed like it might’ve the negative cable coming out of the dc to dc charger. Chris wasn’t convinced. He did some research and cave to the conclusion the batteries were incorrectly wired. This trial and error took all afternoon. Chris wanted to switch the location of the negative cable from the three batteries. He figured it was in the wrong place reading only one of the three in the battery bank. From here:To here in the battery closest to the bus bar.A test revealed no blinking red light as I started the engine and charged the batteries as part of the test.no blinking red light. This could be the fix, re routing the negative cable from the long red line to the short one as marked by my finger tracing below:I am not completely clear how this works but apparently this minor change gives a more accurate reading across the three batteries for the inverter. And that seems to have solved an insoluble problem. Up next a minuscule coolant leak in the engine already fixed twice so third times the charm. Maybe.
