We were back again & ready to do our next upgrades on The Ohana between house projects.
First thing was first, Laura’s new garden needed a bit more head space.
Such Happy Plants!
So as we had designed and planned, I easily added a second tier to the roof’s garden box. Now it was time to tackle a project I had been super nervous to take on…
… Overhauling the camper’s electrical system. 😬
Under our couch lie a rats nest of mystery and clutter. For a long time now I had known our system needed some serious analyzing, organizing, and upgrading.
It was time!
Hiding So Many Secrets 
Couch Removed For Now… 
Ye Old Charge Sentinel! 
She Has Done A Great Job For Being A 30+ Years Old
Next it was time to begin meticulously chasing each cable, finding it’s purpose, and labeling them accordingly.
I began by opening up the Charge Sentinel and figuring out what each wire was doing. Before I actually began touching wires, I figured it was time to disconnect all the power from the coach battery- so I headed outside to get to it.
When I stepped outside I was greeted by our local Sandhill Crane family. The two towards the back are the chicks from our previous posts.
They were almost fully grown! That sure didn’t take long!
I began removing all the connections from the battery, chasing each cable to it’s destination and labeling them accordingly as I unhooked them.
Pulling In Good Solar This Day!
With the battery unhooked the electrical system was officially de-energized. I began disassembling the Charge Sentinels wiring.
Meanwhile… Outside.
A little while later, she was removed and her wiring labeled.
That afternoon Laura came home, and was excited to check on her garden with it’s newly raised roof!
I removed our “short out” sconce light from above the bed.
Then it was time I sat down to do some more studying of how to install the new Progressive Dynamics PD4045. And when I say some studying- I mean ALOT of studying. A thousand Thank You’s to these two individuals for posting the info they did online:
https://youtu.be/F8hvTeLcInk
&
http://tnttt.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=67143
I cannot even begin to relay how much chasing wires came after this! I chased the 110 cables, moved the boxes and remounted them in a much more convenient location.
With our coach battery now being AGM- the separated battery compartment was no longer necessary. We had decided we would remove it and open up some more space under the bench to lay things out.
Then I went on to modify the boundaries of the cutout of the old Charge Sentinel to accept the new PD4045.
Since it wasn’t a perfect fit all around- I cut some paneling to fill in the gapping around the new unit as well.
With the old battery door not needing to be vented- we sealed up the old venting gaps.
It was time to un-hook the solar and set it up differently. I had just recently learned something online while was researching upgrading our solar setup.
When you hook up a solar charge controller, you have to hook it up to the battery first to allow it to establish the connection before connecting the power coming from your solar panels. So when I re-installed the controller I would but a switch between the panels and the controller for ease of properly turning things on in the right order when I connected everything back to the battery.
From there it was tons more chasing and labeling cables. We removed any old, abandoned, and unnecessary cables that were running about. Also we added in new cables that were required to do things properly, then fed back everything into the cable loom on it’s new route.
Next, we went to hook it all back up into the new PD4045!
As we worked out way through the “ever so” long process of “every so” slowly making sure it was all wired in properly, we went about gluing in and mounting the new panels so we could secure the unit into place.
Also we taped and caulked the door into place and let it set. There had been some “disassembling” of the door frame required to get the battery box out 😏- so we had to take some steps to make her watertight around the edges again.
Now here is the point we ran into half a day or so of chasing a ghost in our wiring; and here’s why…
One simple choice of wording- bus bar vs terminal block. From the information we thought they were the same thing. It turns out with a bus bar you can have many connections that can all connect to the same piece of internal metal, and then run a single ground connection out. With a terminal block they only allow connection of the wires across from each other, so a lot of smaller plates allowing connection between the 2 sides.
Long story short, we were hooking up our ground connections to our terminal block thinking it would act like a bus bar, and couldn’t figure out why a few of our appliances were not working. In the end, they were not running current to ground. Rather than go buy a different bar, I simply made a bunch of these little jumper cables that would take the currents from each cable down to the grounding cable at the end of my terminal block.
It worked perfect! (Just wasted a lot of time to figure it all out… 🤔)
So now all our appliances were back to running properly on 12 volts! But that only have the goal. The point of the new PD4045 was to efficiently convert 110 to 12 volt, and analyze and maintain our battery more effectively.
So it was time for the moment of truth! Time to hook it up to shore power and watch for anything that might spark, ark, or catch on fire! 😬🔥🔥🔥
Laura stood by with fire extinguisher ready as we plugged in our new system… 🧯
The fan of the new system quietly kicked on for a moment and that was it- we had POWER!!!
There was still quite a bit more to do under the bench, but with that we had survived, explored, and learned a TON about how our rig worked through 3 days of spelunking our way through our wiring system.
And that’s why we nick named this chapter- 3 Days In The Caves!
So say hello to our new PD4045! See you all next time!!!
Geoff Murphy 8/2/2021