Friday repairs

I mentioned a few posts ago (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2022/05/electric-bay-project.html) that the electric bay project was "finished", but that one leg of power into the RV was not working. Carl knew that it was associated with the "pigtail", as, after he took all other components out of the equation, the problem persisted. 

When Carl was working on the project on Wednesday, he noticed that some of the connections were not as clean as he would wish (there was a tiny bit of copper wire showing...). He has told me that his standard of excellence is by whether it would pass inspection by "Aunt Zola", and he did not think this would pass her eagle eye (as if she would ever see it!). He also said that he did not want a future owner or maintenance person to see it and think, "This was done by an amateur." Anyway, he decided to clean up the connections as he was finishing the task, and while doing that, it was getting late in the day and he mistakenly connected two wires reversed...

Can you see the two (or four) wires opposite each other that don't match up in color? Yep, the bottom white and black wires (coming from the pigtail) needed to be reversed. Thankfully, it was an easy correction to make, well...

... easy after removing everything out of the electric bay! (Carl took the cord off the cord reel before removing it this time -- made it a lot lighter!)

Everything back in, and it all works!

We can even use a bluetooth connection from inside the coach to determine how many amps we're drawing via the "Power Watchdog". This is particularly handy when we're on 30A hookups to know whether we can start another appliance or whether we need to cut something else off before we start the next appliance.

The last project that Carl did on the bays on the driver side was to put in some additional insulation on the door of the battery compartment.

The lithium batteries are sensitive to cold, specifically, we should not charge them if the temperature of the batteries is less than freezing. In general, we avoid being in freezing weather, and we have the charge controller configures so that charging from the solar panels will stop charging the batteries if the temperature is below 35F. We can manually stop charging of the batteries if we are running the generator or on shore power and the temperature is below 32F. But, we'd like to just make sure that the batteries don't go below freezing, and insulating the compartment is one way to help with that. Originally, the compartment was not weather-tight; in fact, for lead-acid batteries, it had to be open to the outside air to allow for off-gassing of that type of battery. Carl has added insulation to most of the open places in the compartment, and insulating around the door was the last place he wanted to improve. After this last improvement to the battery bay he checked, and on Sunday morning, the outside temperature got down to 39F, and the batteries did not get lower than 48F.

We're glad to have this project completed, and glad to get the extra pieces of styrofoam out of the Jeep!