Just like the Nightmare on Elm Street our electrical problem went on and on. But I think we have finally arrived at the Final Chapter. To make a long story short, it seems that the problem is with the 50A socket on the campground’s electric box. It wasn’t that the socket was broken, just worn. Ted, our intrepid campground host, is going to try to fix it tomorrow.

In the meantime we are running off of the 30A socket. Both the refrigerator and the water heater are happily running on electricity again.

So I finally got around to diagnosing my inverter problem, which involved pulling all of the boxes out of our “basement” and crawling inside so that I could get an up-close-and-personal look at the inverter.  And there, right on the top of the box, was the label: CONverter.  Not INverter.  Instead of changing 12V DC to 120V AC it does the opposite – changes 120V AC to 12V DC.  As my problem involves the 120V circuits, that box clearly could not be implicated.

So take a step back, take a deep breath and think.  THINK, dammit!

Well, it seemed like the next thing to do would be to check out the breaker box and make double-darn sure that all of the breakers were functioning.  So I got my trusty voltmeter (now over 40 years old, I think) and took the cover off of the breaker box.  I made sure that all of the breakers were in the ON positions, then checked the voltage coming out of each one.

Well, well, well… the two breakers to the right of the main breaker had no voltage at all!  So I removed one of the breakers and checked the voltage on the bus (the metal bar that provides the incoming current).  Nothing!  But the voltage to the other breakers – the ones to the left of the main breaker – was fine.

Light began to dawn.  Seems that the 50A electric supply is provided with 2 120V feeds, just as in any normal 240V setup.  And it seemed that we were getting power on just one of the two feeds.

Next step: check the voltage at the campground box.  Both sides of the outlet were fine – 120V each.

This points the finger at my power cable.  Maybe one of the wires is broken or loose.  My guess is the male connector – which was held on with electrical tape when we bought the RV – has finally failed.  I just got a replacement connector today and will install it soon.  I will let you know.

All of this left me with a couple of questions:

1. What is on the two circuits on the dead side of the breaker box?  Clearly the refrigerator and the hot water heater are both there, though not labeled.  When this is all done and everything is functioning again I am going to have to spend some time correcting the labeling in the breaker box.

2. What is the actual impact of hooking up to a 30A service instead of a 50A service?  I had thought that it was just a matter of the peak power available, but as the 30A service is (I think) a single 120V feed, I am wondering if the two breakers that are dead now are also dead in a 30A scenario. Another thing to investigate.

Well, almost two years into the journey I continue to learn new things about our RV. In this case it is the inverter. I knew that we had an inverter and I knew its basic function – to convert 12V DC current into 120V AC current. However, I never quite figured out when it was used. I initially thought that ALL of the 120V outlets would be available when boondocking, but I almost immediately realized that the battery would last about a minute (and would probably explode) if was used to power the 3 TVs, the microwave, the coffee maker and the toaster oven. And it was obvious, when the AC power went out, that all we had left were the 12V lights. None of the outlets worked.

Or so I thought.

Three days ago the refrigerator suddenly and unexpectedly showed (via the idiot light on the front panel) that it was operating on propane rather than the 120V electricity. Yesterday I investigated and discovered that the outlet into which the refrigerator was plugged was dead. Later yesterday we discovered that the water heater was also not functioning when using electricity – we had to switch that to propane, too.

So what was wrong? Clearly it was an electrical problem and likely one that affected both the refrigerator and the hot water heater. I checked the breaker box, but there was no breaker for either the refrigerator or the hot water heater (which in itself was pretty surprising and not something I had noticed before). So first thing this morning I got online and Googled “399BHS refrigerator power failure” and came across some interesting articles involving… wait for it…

THE INVERTER!

Turns out that the inverter is used to power the refrigerator and, on some RVs, the hot water heater. This is a good use of that particular kind of AC power because it is on while traveling.  This makes a lot of sense.  If the refrigerator didn’t have electric power while traveling – and if you did the recommended thing and turned off the propane (to make an explosion in a collision less likely) – then your frozen food might not be so frozen when you arrived after a long day of travel.  The hot water heater is less vital, but if you like to take a hot shower when you stop for the night, it might be nice to have the heater active while on the road.

The inverter has its own fuses, so anything that runs off of it would not be found in the breaker box, which explains why I didn’t find the refrigerator or the water heater there.

I also learned that one of the kitchen outlets is on the inverter circuit used by the refrigerator, so there is, in fact, one 120V outlet that will continue to work while on the road or when the power goes out.  I’m not sure how I will use that information, but I think it is valuable knowledge.  For example, if we were boondocking (not likely) and I needed to recharge my laptop, I could use that outlet.

All of this newfound knowledge seemed to point the finger pretty squarely at either the inverter or the battery as the source of the refrigerator and water heater failures.  I inspected both the inverter and the battery this morning and didn’t see any obvious problem.  But as the lifetime of a battery is about 5 years and since our RV was built in 2009, I am betting on a bad battery.  I will replace it and see if that helps.  If not, I will have to call in a repair guy and check out the inverter.

But in any case I now better understand the role of the inverter in the anatomy of an RV. And that makes me feel just a wee bit smarter.