Charge Line Check

Even after having had our camper for nearly five years, we continue to learn things. When we were in the southwest and in Baja this winter we seemed to be having some battery related issues and it didn't occur to us how to diagnose those problems, and being in Mexico and not knowing a lot of Spanish, the thought of trying to find someone to diagnose the problem for us was an only-as-a-last-resort sort of option. It kept us from boondocking for more than a day at a time, but most campgrounds were cheap enough that paying to camp wasn't that big of a deal. And that usually meant we were closer to a decent restaurant when we were in a campground.

We bought a cheap Harbor Freight 7 function multi-meter for $6, as a means of testing how much AC power we would find at various campgrounds in Mexico (this is a big issue in the summer, as low voltage can reportedly fry a lot of air conditioners - I suspect it isn't that much of an issue for our Dometic or much of anything else, other than possibly some of our electronics). Recently I used it to test the voltage coming off the charge line of our van, and ended up with no reading. We went to where we had our wiring installed and had it checked out. It turned out one of the battery isolator fuses was blown. We replaced it and it blew again, so our suspicion is that when Ford installed our new battery, they probably disconnected our battery isolator and didn't reassemble it correctly. We'll have that looked at when we take the van in in a couple of weeks to have the wiring for our solar panel done.

As Steve and Betsy pointed out in a different thread, wire corrosion can also occur to also prevent the alternator from charging the camper battery, so investing in a cheap multi-meter and learning how to check for voltage can help keep you from having insufficient battery power at an inopportune time. I suspect we will get into a routine of checking the charge line voltage when we refill our propane tank (about every 3 months), as we often do that at U-Haul, and they would be able to help us if there is a charge line problem that we can't fix on our own.