Finally the parts arrived at Jayco Ballarat to replace the rear right tail light moulding I damaged. More than 6 weeks to get Jayco spare parts is very strange as we are only 100km up the road from the factory. I had the van booked in on the Monday a little over a week ago. As we wanted to spend a night free camping I decided the day before the booking at Jayco, to get the genset out and run some tests. I had powered the aircon a few months ago and was happy. This time I needed to try heating. I had a 2 het setting fan heater of 1100 and 2200 watts. Also the aircon has a 1600 watt heat setting.
I was surprised when the 1100 setting on the heater showed 11.2 amps and 2656 watts. I turned the aircon on the heat setting and the genset tripped out!! Tried again on mains power and popped our house circuit breaker!! I got to thinking why the 1100 watt setting was drawing so much current. Was it charging the van battery as well, but the battery was charged. Anyway gave up as I had to go to the hospital for my sleep study. Eril got me booked in and headed home while the technician was wiring me up. Eril rang and said she had no tv!!! I said I had just turned it off with the remote as we left. Eril said there was no lights in the tv or pvr at all so I said to go check the circuit breaker board. She did and there was one CB popped. So as I settled in for my sleep study Eril now had tv.
The next day after release from hospital I took the van to Jayco. The next day they rang and said they had the club lounge out and would we like to come and have a look. They also said that the van tripped the power off as they plugged it in. I mentioned that I had problems the night before, so they said they would have an electrician have a look. When I picked the van up on the Thursday morning they told me that there was a short caused by incorrect routing of a power cable and it was fixed by Jayco at no cost to me.
When I got the van home to get organised to leave for Adelaide and then Loxton I fired the genset up again and the 1100 watt heat setting was now showing 6.2 amps and 1448 watts. I expected somewhere around that and I could run it at the 2200 watt setting showing 9.4 watts and 22331 watts. We were lucky during our 3 shake down trips that we did not end up without being able to use 240 volts!!! Could have been some stress AND an electrician bill, or possibly a 240 shock worse than the bill shock.
Aussie Paul.
-- Edited by aussie_paul on Tuesday 12th of August 2014 11:08:50 PM
Regarding the high current being drawn by your 1100w heater, we had a similar problem when we were setting up our inverter, we eventually found it was the hot water service that was drawing around 5 amps, and it was un predictable, in otehr words it would turn itself on and off when you least expect it.
Ok, I am having some difficulty with my Adelaide business deal so left for Loxton to settle down and smell the roses for a few days 'till he gets his act together!!!
