craigmar wrote:Well, the heater is working and I am amazed at how dumb I am and how simple the solution was this time. When Alaskan mentioned the breaker, I again took a look at the front of the heater and in the upper right hand corner found the small breaker had been tripped. For being ignorant, my wife and I could have spent some cold nights had it not been for the aux heater on the air conditioner. If a person goes to Alaskan's picture that was posted on Nov 6th of 07,("another furnace question") you will see it shows the front of the heater with all the covers still attached, my breaker was located on what looks to be a small box in the upper right hand corner with one screw, the breaker was sitting on top of that box.
Glad it was something simple!
Here's a link to the thread with the pictures.
This problem while now being solved, brings up another question or two. 1st, why would that breaker trip?
Good question. I'd keep an eye on your furnace. It shouldn't be tripping the breaker unless there's a short or it's drawing too much current.
One thing you might want to do is pull it out (you'll have to disconnect and reconnect the gas line) and just clean it thoroughly. It's not hard to remove or reinstall and there's more than enough wire to get it out to work on it (pull the fuse, though).
2nd, how do you use the heater for more than a day without draining the batteries, other than having a solar charger if the sun were available, do you start the vehicle and run it for awhile, could you plug in a charger unit to your gen set or shore power and keep it charged. 3rd, if I am reading Skater correctly, then the shore power should run the heater and the converter should be charging the battery, maybe its time to change the converter in this unit also. What do you experienced winter campers do. Thanks again for the info, Craig
I usually camp with shore power, but you're right - the furnace will kill the battery pretty quickly (your propane supply, too!). I'd expect to get more than one night out of it, but I haven't actually tried it. Here are some ideas that occur to me:
1. Add an additional coach battery.
2. Look at getting two 6-volt golf cart batteries. My memory on this is hazy but you can hook them up in series and get more current than a single 12 volt deep cycle battery. Do some searching on the internet for this.
3. Verify your converter is working correctly - if it's not fully charging the battery, you're sunk, unless you run the engine a long time. The new converters have 3-stage charging and will maintain your battery without killing it, unlike the original one. I replaced my converter and put a good deep cycle Optima battery in, and I haven't had to worry about it since.
4. Verify your deep cycle battery is in good shape. Specifically, if you're using the original converter, be sure it hasn't cooked it (although it doesn't sound like it has, if you have that much battery power).
5. Solar cells would help, but run the numbers - if the cell produces 50 watts, that's ~4 amps (50 watts/12 volts), which may not be enough to run the furnace continuously. It'll definitely help, of course, but you'll still slowly run down the battery. There are a bunch of sites on the internet you can find that will help you calculate how much solar power you'd need, but you also need to know how much current everything draws. (I'd help by testing mine for you, but it's in the shop having some leaks repaired.)
I haven't had a lot of luck with my furnace. It squeals badly when it runs. I believe the problem is that the bearings on the motor are bad, and unfortunately this is my second motor doing it. I think what happened is that one or both of the fan blades are out of balance, causing the shaft to vibrate. A new motor fixed it for a while, but the root cause was still there, causing it to start squealing too.
This means I've been using an electric space heater for my winter camping - it works well, believe it or not - but it's a hassle too, especially if you want to camp without 120 volt power.
Also, you probably figured out that the heat strip in the air conditioner doesn't respond to the thermostat, so it'll get the camper nice and toasty... and then keep warming it up even further! In theory you're not really supposed to use the heat strip this way - the manual says it's meant to help take the chill off for a little time in the morning. I haven't had a problem though, except for it getting too warm in the camper.
For the converter: I'll just say that a couple problems I was having went away with the new converter - for example, the florescent lights no longer flicker. The water heater starts up better. The lights don't flicker when the water pump runs. It's great. You can find my writeup about it
here. (Note - I see some errors in my definitions of the blinking light - I'll fix that. But everything else should be okay.)
