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Junior Member
Brand: Thor Motor Coach
State: California
Posts: 4
THOR #26057
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Progressing Electrical Issues
TLDR: We had some very strange and progressing electrical problems in our Class A this weekend. Looking for some help on what’s going on.
I hope this group likes mystery novels, because this one is both mysterious and long (sorry about that). It’s also about escalating electrical RV issues. Although really, I hope this isn’t a mystery at all. I hope someone out there reads this and understands right away what’s going on and comes back with something like this, “Oh I’ve had that too, all you need to do is reset your flux capacitor and everything starts working again”, or “sounds like your dilithium crystals are stale and you need replace them, they’re located under the bed right next to the fuse box”.
A little background. We have a; 2017 Thor Ace 29.3 (Class A). We’ve had it for about a year and half and put 25K miles on it, all with fairly limited problems. The RV has a Xantrex Pro XM1000 inverter, 2 house batteries, and one chassis battery. No solar.
I’m not sure if this is what mystery novelists do, but I’m going to propose 3 likely suspects before I even get into what happened, just so you all can keep these in mind throughout the story, although of course, these may be red herrings and the actual culprit may be something completely different.
Suspect #1: Bad chassis battery
We had what amounted to a 30K mile service on the RV a couple of weeks ago. At that time it was determined that the chassis battery was on its last legs and needed to be replaced. There was also a bunch of corrosion around the positive terminal. Due to the cost of having the shop replace the battery ($206 for the battery and $195 for the labor) I elected to do this myself, but since they said it wasn’t critical (and I had emergency starting power cutover) I neglected to do this before our last ill fated trip. I’m deeming this suspect low probability, but including it for the sake of completeness.
Suspect #2: Water
Yes, the enemy of electricity makes an appearance in this story. The day of departure I was sanitizing our fresh water tank. I was at the point where I was emptying the bleach water from the fresh tank into the sinks. I stupidly had not just left the gray water tank gate open. I stepped away for a minute thinking that if the gray tank would overflow, it would first overflow at the low point in the shower giving me some time to turn off the water. For some reason that’s not what happened. The sink in the bathroom overflowed first. I quickly shut off the water but maybe 1 to 3 cups had overflowed onto the counter and floor of the bathroom. Some water was also coming out into the storage bin underneath the bathroom, and some underneath the RV itself onto the ground. The one electrical component I can see in the bin underneath the bathroom is for the RV leveling jacks (which worked perfectly this trip).
And if that first water incident wasn’t enough, when I was filling the fresh water tank back up, at the end of the fillup, I noticed more water coming out of the bottom of the RV right where I was filling it. After going under the bed (sleeping bed) where the water tank is located, I noticed the intake hose was a bit loose from the intake bracket attached to the wall. I managed to tighten and while I was there I noticed some wet wood under the bed behind the tank, but no standing water. The fuse box and a bunch of electrical wires are located under the bed as well, but on the other side of the tank, and there was zero water in that area.
I would think the water would be a strong suspect, but everything was still working fine for hours after both these incidents, including the slide, the lights, and the stereo (more on all those soon).
Suspect #3: The “Bump”
This one I will save for the actual story, but in terms of timing, this one seems to be the strongest suspect as the first incident happened at the time of the bump.
On to the timeline!
We left home in the evening for the first 4 hour leg of our trip to Death Valley. The plan was to boondock at a gas station that night and drive into the park in the morning for a weekend of dry camping. When we left the house everything was working perfectly. We had been moving the slide in and out as part of the packing process. All the lights were working, and we were happily listening to the stock Axerra stereo at the beginning of our drive.
About 45 minutes into the drive we hit some railroad tracks which gave us a really good bump. Normally I would have slowed down, but it was dark and I didn’t see them coming. Right after that our stereo rebooted, then it did it again a couple of minutes later, it did that over and over again for about 10 minutes. I figured it was a loose wire behind the stereo and just turned it off. I did see the blue power light go and off for a while longer, then eventually it was just off, indicating that the stereo had no power. Of course this meant that our back up and side cameras were out of commission too.
When we got to the gas station we were going to spend the night at, I pulled the stereo out but didn’t notice any loose wires.
The next morning we realized our second problem. When we tried to turn on the generator from the coach control panel we got nothing. No sputtering, no nothing. The generator starting system just wasn’t getting any signal from the control panel. When I went to the generator itself, it started just fine from the ‘start’ button on the generator itself. It also powered the coach just fine. One other strange thing. While the ‘start’ button didn’t work, I was able to turn the generator off from the control panel. I was able to do this for the first two times I manually started the generator. After that, the ‘off’ button didn’t do anything and for the rest of the trip I had to manually stop the generator by using the button on the until itself. At least the generator worked and powered the coach though.
Later in the day, we had stopped at a gas station and I wanted to check to see if the slide would open. The slide did start to power up and go out, but remembering how the generator worked in only one direction, I quickly stopped and tried to retract it. It didn’t go back in! I then briefly checked to see if it was still powering on the way out, it was, but still not going back in. I tried one more time and nothing. Zero signal from the slide in either direction. It was like that for the rest of the trip. Fortunately the slide had only gone out about ¾ of an inch so the rig was still driveable.
Later that night we tried the main cabin light switch and nothing. That along with the outside door light and the led awning light were no longer working. Those had been working earlier in the day. The other under cabinet lights and bedroom lights were working just fine.
To recap, these are the RV components that stopped working: the control panel connection to the generator (which still worked manually), the slide (which was still receiving power, because when I reset it, the reset lights were blinking), the stereo (no power), the main cabin lights along with two of the outside slides.
Everything else was working, the bed above the cab was going up and down (fortunately as we have two kids who sleep up there), everything powered by the inverter, the water pump (now that would have been really bad), all the chassis stuff, the awning, the storage bin lights, the propane water heater, the fridge (powered by both electricity or propane) - all these things and more were working.
What we tried and some weird things we noticed:
- Powering the non-working components when under shore power and generator power: no change - still not working.
- “Rebooting the system” by unhooking both house batteries and chassis battery: no change, but things got weird here. When we unhooked the chassis battery, I was still able to start the engine, without use of the emergency cutover switch (is this a clue?). This worked once, but when we reattached the chassis battery it was dead, and from that point on I had to use the emergency cutover switch every time to start the engine. The trip log also reset to 0 every time we drove. In addition, we are now getting an engine light on the dashboard.
- Replaced the chassis battery with a new one: no change
Set the battery breakers (two in the house battery compartment and the one for the chassis batter in the ‘off’ position. We did this to once again try to reboot the system, but this time with a good chassis battery. The RV still had power even with the generator off, no shore power, and the breakers in the off position (another clue?). I’m assuming that’s not how it was supposed to work.
- Checked all the fuses and breakers in the coach fuse box: all breakers were in the on position (I did flip them off and on too), all fuses were working. I didn’t check the chassis fuse boxes since those are hard to access and all the chassis components seemed to be working
- Opened the coach control panel to look for loose wires: didn’t see anything loose.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re my hero. And if you actually know what might be wrong, you’ll be my superhero.
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