Thor Forums

[VinnieSmith]

My apologies if this has been addressed in another thread. We are one cross-country trip, plus a month into living temporarily full-time in our Aria 4000.

We're plugged into a 50-amp shore power, and because Winter, we fairly often run two ceramic space heaters- one front and one rear. Sometimes, we forget to shut one or both off when we use the microwave, induction stove, or oversized toaster oven, and the inverter will stealth break, giving no warning until TVs start to shut off and the lights start to brown out. When I have a look at the control panel, it shows power to the inverter, but no charging of the house battery, which will be running at a critically low 10.5V typically. The main house breakers will be intact, and resetting them just for giggles does nothing to correct the problem.

The first time this happened, I walked outside to have a look at the inverter itself, and noticed the integrated 30A pop-out breaker had indeed popped out, so I reset it and all was well. However, the next two times this occurred, the main breakers were still intact, and the pop-out breaker on the inverter was also intact, so stabbing at it did no good. However, after competing my just-for-giggles "resetting" of all the aforementioned breakers and clomping around in the rain, after a minute or so, I was able to toggle the status of the inverter and select a house battery charging mode using the control panel, and all was right with the world again (the kids got to keep watching Harry Potter). The only other thing I did last time, and I don't think it had any effect, was to press a button on the solar panel interface which should have only showed me the type of connected battery, but a light came on and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It was night, so that wouldn't have been affecting the house battery anyway.

So whaddya think- defective part, intended functionality, or operator error?