Thor Forums

[TurnerFam]

if the 120v Shore or Gen power to the Inverter's Battery Charger/Pass Thru is to be 'bypassed', as you suggest, you would probably need a manual Transfer Switch, which would allow you to move the incoming power to the sub-panel for the Inverter-powered circuits/breakers within your Main electrical panel... might be a chore, and it can certainly be engineered, but it sounds like a long, expensive way around a simple problem that doesn't happen very often.


The other night, on the way home from Thanksgiving, and overnighting at Sam's Club, we experienced a 'AC OVERLOAD' or similar named fault, on the Magnum Inverter panel. This only happened after all day of travel with no issues, and only after we parked. Weird.

Ok., so I did a 'reset'. No change, and no power to ANY outlets in the coach while on the Inverter.
So, I cranked the GEN to see if 'shore power' would override the issues. No change, only now the 'Charger' would try to come on, but it would then start almost resetting itself, before eventually going back to the original 'AC OVERLOAD' fault. Really weird.

I even 'hard reset' the Inverter by pulling the main POSITIVE cable for a minute. No change.

Then, I had an idea, since all other 120v items were working fine on the Generator, maybe this is simply an 'outlet' problem within the coach. I knew that there was really no 'overload' of any of the outlets, or any circuits, but the thought that an outlet might have a loose wire, or something plugged into an outlet could be suspect, even though nothing new had been plugged in, etc.

So, rather than 'unplugged' everything from every outlet, I decided to simply start by TRIPPING the Inverter's sub-panel 30amp main breaker.

VOILA! The system then went back to normal, except that now no outlets worked.

o.k., so we have started to figure something out here.

I decided to then TRIP only all the sub-panel's INDIVIDUAL breakers, and flip it's MAIN breaker back on. The inverter panel remained calm. Good.

I started to flip each individual breaker ON, until 'BAMM' and 'BUZZZZ' was had when breaker number 3 was flipped on. The Inverter went back into it's 'AC OVERLOAD'.
Now, we were on to something.

So, for the time being, for the short overnight, I simply left that single individual breaker OFF, and the others on, and everything was fine, except for several outlets that did not work, of course.

Got home, and a few days later I had time to 'figure this out'. I pulled anything plugged into these 'dead' outlets, and then flipped on that individual circuit breaker. All was GOOD. Now we know that it was 'something' plugged into one of these outlets.
One outlet up front got my attention, as it is full and makes use of an outlet extender, giving it 6 plug-ins instead of only two.
But, come to find out, that was not the issue, but only one item that was plugged into that outlet - the power cord of my LAPTOP. IT WAS THE PROBLEM. Removing this power cord solved all the issues.
I then inspected the power cord, and found that since my laptop typically sits on top of the 'computer pull-out' desktop, the power cord snakes around behind it and down thru the lower section of the desktop that articulates up and out when you want to sit down and have the computer close to you. That articulating framework is metal hinging, which was catching the power cord and, over time, pinching it to the point in one section that apparently the section 'shorted', causing the Inverter to sense this 'overload' draw of power.

It's good that it was as simple as that.

Today I took the power cord, did my little 'backyard' engineering on it, and now it also continues to work fine again.


All is good.