What is making those lights flicker????

Thursday and Friday May 22 & May 23, 2014
Brandywine Creek Campground
Glenmoore, Pennsylvania

 

THURSDAY May 22

It’s a short night after our attempts to discover clues for what is wrong.  We don’t sleep so well.  David calls Greg in the morning to make sure he has gotten the information we uncovered in our late night investigations.

 

We’re moving.

 

  Greg says that we should come over to the campground where he is parked, about 17 miles from us, and he will take care of the fees for us to stay as long as necessary to figure this out.  We think this is a very responsible business practice.  He is trying very hard to make the customer happy. 

We arrive about 11:00 and Greg and a Master Electrician he has called in to help with this electrical mystery show up and start trying to trace the problem.

Speaking of problems, Greg has two other installs today and it looks like his parade is going to get rained on.  That’s a problem.  Panels are put on the roof with an airplane adhesive which requires 4 days of 50 degree + weather to seal. And probably no rain.

Looking on the bright side, that’s one way we were lucky. We had 4 of the 7 days this install has taken so far rain free. Not sure how that happened since rain has followed us all the way up the east coast and it looks like it’s going to hound us for the next week. Wonder what an Ohio National Park will be like in the rain?

For now, we have a lovely water front view of Brandywine Creek.

 

 

 

Problem found.

 

As you can know doubt intuit, I have run out of steam for all of this and take no pictures of the two of them trying to find the problem.    It takes a few hours hours but they find a problem in one of the grounds.  Of course it was the one in the back of the batteries that is only accessible from under the coach.  Once fixed, everything stops flickering and things are looking up.

Everything is fine for the rest of the day.  We go to bed very relieved.

 

 

Friday May 23

We’re ready for blast off – FINALLY!

We sure hope the two installs beginning tomorrow are pieces of cake for Greg. I know he must be very glad to see us hitting the road.

 

We decide to take our chances with the Pennsylvania Turnpike since it shaves 25 miles off of the trip.

We are really pleasantly surprised to find that it is actually much much better than we remember it to be and far superior to most of the other roads we drove on in Pennsylvania.   Worth the $37.15 it cost us to go 176 miles.

We go through 3 amazing tunnels through the mountains and wonder how long ago these were blasted out.

 

 

 

 

 

We arrive at Shawnee State Park in Bedford Pennsylvania to find no one at the campground office.  Just go on in and find your spot I guess.  Thank goodness I made reservations back in March.  These crowds are something we are not used to.

First we have to take on water since all they have here is electric, also Thank Goodness.   This turns out to be the slowest water take on we have found.  45 minutes to put that many gallons into our water tank for the 3 nights we will be here.

 

 

 

 

Finally, we back into our site and get things leveled up.  The park is full, rigs on top of trailers on top of tents on top of 5th wheels.  It’s Memorial Day week-end and we’re just glad to have a site anywhere.  We’ll  lay low for the week-end and continue on toward that Federal Park in Ohio on Monday.  The duckies have a very busy view.

 

 

 

It’s later than we planned due to the long water fill,  putting the dolly in over flow parking and getting all set up.   More than ready to get started making dinner, we turn on the lights. 

 

GUESS WHAT?

 

The inverter monitor isn’t coming on AGAIN and the lights are flickering AGAIN and the refrigerator is complaining about low voltage AGAIN.    We are just ….well……back to where we were 3 days ago and so tired of this.

David fiddles with the magnum monitor, goes out and looks at the inverter, turns it off, turns it on and a hundred other things.  Finally he opens up the battery compartment and sees one of the brass bolts – brass?? really?? -  has broken off from securing one of the leads going to the shunt.  Was it tightened down too tightly??  The lead is hanging loose creating an open circuit. 

We call Greg.  He says just by pass the shunt.  David does as instructed but no dice, the flickering continues.  Seems like another ground problem.  But where this time? 

We make a trip to the hardware store 12 miles away looking for another brass bolt.  No dice.  Does it really have to be brass?  We call AM Solar who supplied this (what I now consider to be horrible) Magnum inverter/charger.  They are in Oregon.  It’s now after 6pm but that’s ok since in Oregon it’s only 3:00 PDT.   BUT, of course, on Friday they close at 1:00 PDT and they don’t work week-ends.   Hmmmmm  I sure never had a job that worked those hours.

We’re out of luck until Tuesday on the ‘does it have to be brass’ question.  We call Greg back.

Greg says he’ll send us another shunt.  Will that really fix a low voltage problem I wonder?  But if we can’t find a brass bolt we do have to fix the shunt problem and this is the only way.   It’s labor day week-end.  We can’t have anything delivered until Tuesday.  We won’t be here Tuesday.  We leave on Monday or should we again cancel our plans and stay here?  Or move on to a bigger metropolitan area in Ohio.

We are without lights again, with refrig problems again.  Until Tuesday.   

Nobody even gave me a hint putting solar on my rig was going to be SO difficult.   We are up until 1am testing everything we can think of and taking notes on what we find.    It just wasn’t supposed to work out this way.