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Pastimes : Car Nut Corner: All About Cars -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gg cox who wrote (1891)	12/1/2007 10:54:36 AM
From: SI Bob	Respond to of 5723

Actually, it's got such a switch, easily reached when leaving the rig. I haven't been using it because of the number of things that have to be set up from scratch when you do. I planned to use it only if the rig is sitting idle for weeks at a time, which it will when/if I ever get it back. No idea what kind of progress they've made, but they've had it for over a month now. I'm not optimistic, as it turned out when I was talking to the mechanic that he was only aware of a few of the issues with it. Someone at the dealership got the two-page problem list I faxed over, but the mechanic apparently didn't get a copy of it. Some of the issues being evident of really poor quality control and even build attention. No water to the fridge's icemaker. Hot water running to the toilet. Lots of stuff like that, along with the biggies, like the generator only showing up as (and working like) 30 amps, and the one time that the automatic generator starting system actually managed to fire up the generator, it'd left it on for nearly two days. Only to have the house batteries nearly dead just two days later. I have yet to do the math, but as big as those batteries are, I'd expect them to survive a 36-watt load a lot longer than they do. A similar (but probably inferior since I was using marine batteries) setup in my car hauler took a 320-watt load (8 40-watt fluorescen tubes) for 24 hours before draining the batteries down to the inverter's 10.5v cutout. I was using 8 Walmart 12-volt batteries in the car hauler vs the 4 higher-quality true deep-cycle 6-volt batteries in the RV, so it's not apples/apples. At face value, the car hauler had about 4 times the KwH capacity. I suspect that in reality because of the higher cut-out voltage of the car hauler and lower capacity of the individual batteries, the car hauler's advantage over the RV might've been more like 2x, so the 36-watt load should've taken more like 4 or 5 days to drain the batteries, I think. Anyway, I'm going to try very hard to get them to replace the batteries with new ones of higher capacity. It'll be tough to try to convince them they should give me full-price or nearly full-price for the trade-in batteries, but I'll try to use their own argument against them. The guy actually said it's GOOD for these batteries to occasionally be drained all the way down. And when I get it home, I'm going to park it in the workshop and since I won't be winterizing it (we plan to use it this winter), I'll just plug it in to 15-amp power and run a couple of small electric heaters in the "basement" storage areas.