Some projects around Conroe - Situation 2 - power cord

Continuation of our projects around Conroe:

Situation 2: The first evening that we were here in Conroe, at about 10pm, our power from the pedestal went out. We figured it was a flipped breaker at the pedestal, but upon checking, Carl found that the pedestal was fine. We had had a problem at Lake Tawakoni, when we first plugged in, we didn't get power to the coach from the pedestal. We unplugged and plugged back in and it worked. We had no problems at Hickory Creek -- but the fact that we'd had a couple of problems made us think that it could be a faulty cord reel or a faulty plug. Carl rigged up a combination that worked for our first night, and the next morning we connected our 50A extension cord for a longer term fix.

When I put the 50A extension cord away when we were leaving the farm in Virginia, I "buried" it deeply in the underbay storage. It took a bit of doing to extract it from the bay... 

... but here it is hooked up. In the picture, you may be able to see the extension cord is plugged into the outlet marked "male xfer switch into coach". A few years ago, Carl made a change in the electric bay so the cord reel was no longer hard-wired to the transfer switch in the coach (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2022/05/electric-bay-project.html). This gives us flexibility not only so we can put the autoformer and Power WatchDog into the electric bay, but also allows us to bypass the cord reel and the cord on it if it develops a problem.  This allowed us to provide power to the coach until we could debug what the issue was.

Carl surmised that the issue was in the plug; we had had a problem with it last fall (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2024/09/another-day-around-campground.html)... 

... so we took it apart and found that the neutral wire (white one) had, once again, come loose and this time had been arcing.

The tension created when we roll the cord up on the reel causes the white wire to get pulled deeper into the cord, to the point that eventually the wire won't be attached anymore.

After taking the wires loose, we could see that the blade had gotten hot and melted the plastic, so we could not use this end anymore. Thankfully, we could order a new cord end and have it delivered to Kim's while here in Conroe.

Carl decided to prepare the cord end for the new outlet so we'd be able to put the new one on when it arrives.

The bizarre thing to us is that the plug worked when we plugged it in, and worked for a number of hours, until about 10pm when it decided to fail. We're not sure what the final straw for the camel's back was in this case.