So I finally got around to diagnosing my inverter problem, which involved pulling all of the boxes out of our “basement” and crawling inside so that I could get an up-close-and-personal look at the inverter. And there, right on the top of the box, was the label: CONverter. Not INverter. Instead of changing 12V DC to 120V AC it does the opposite – changes 120V AC to 12V DC. As my problem involves the 120V circuits, that box clearly could not be implicated.
So take a step back, take a deep breath and think. THINK, dammit!
Well, it seemed like the next thing to do would be to check out the breaker box and make double-darn sure that all of the breakers were functioning. So I got my trusty voltmeter (now over 40 years old, I think) and took the cover off of the breaker box. I made sure that all of the breakers were in the ON positions, then checked the voltage coming out of each one.
Well, well, well… the two breakers to the right of the main breaker had no voltage at all! So I removed one of the breakers and checked the voltage on the bus (the metal bar that provides the incoming current). Nothing! But the voltage to the other breakers – the ones to the left of the main breaker – was fine.
Light began to dawn. Seems that the 50A electric supply is provided with 2 120V feeds, just as in any normal 240V setup. And it seemed that we were getting power on just one of the two feeds.
Next step: check the voltage at the campground box. Both sides of the outlet were fine – 120V each.
This points the finger at my power cable. Maybe one of the wires is broken or loose. My guess is the male connector – which was held on with electrical tape when we bought the RV – has finally failed. I just got a replacement connector today and will install it soon. I will let you know.
All of this left me with a couple of questions:
1. What is on the two circuits on the dead side of the breaker box? Clearly the refrigerator and the hot water heater are both there, though not labeled. When this is all done and everything is functioning again I am going to have to spend some time correcting the labeling in the breaker box.
2. What is the actual impact of hooking up to a 30A service instead of a 50A service? I had thought that it was just a matter of the peak power available, but as the 30A service is (I think) a single 120V feed, I am wondering if the two breakers that are dead now are also dead in a 30A scenario. Another thing to investigate.