How to trace any power hiccups between your rig and trailer…
A couple of days ago, our customer Alistair dropped by. On his last trip he damaged the 12V wiring between his 200 Series and his Pioneer camper. He really needed a quick fix so he could get it going again.
I took a quick look and found he had caught the wires in the trailer at some point and they really just needed to be rejoined. The quickest way at the time was to simply add another Anderson plug in.
I wanted to reconnect the wires with a cable connector but I didn’t have the right size in stock, so the Anderson plug was the next best thing.
I bared the wires and crimped on the new terminals, fitted the terminals into the Anderson plug, and within a few minutes we were connected again.
Fortunately, Alistair knows how to operate the Redarc BMS Charger, so he started the 200 Series and checked the system to make sure it was charging. We had a look at the screen and found that the system was still not charging from 12V.
He told me the batteries were full as he had charged them on 240V and the BMS worked. He also pulled out his solar blanket and connected it and it was charging from the solar input as well.
My next move was to check through the system and make sure that the BMS was getting its 12Vs to the unit and to confirm it hadn’t blown a fuse. I quickly ran over the cable and found a few fuses that were OK.
Not knowing how the wiring had been run, I thought the best way to check this was to go to the Redarc BMS itself and check that it had 12V power getting to the unit. This isn’t too hard to do because the harness wiring is well labelled and I could easily check it at the rear of the unit with a test light.
I would suggest using a multimeter if you have one so you can be 100% sure of the voltage you have to the unit. My test light had a light on it but it also has a gauge which tells me the voltage.
A standard 12V test light can work well but you would expect to see the test light shine really bright, if it is dull then you could still have a problem with the wiring somewhere.
Once we had confirmed correct battery voltage to the unit, I then made a phone call to Redarc Technical just to run through things with them because the wiring looked as though it was all OK.
It turned out that with Alistair’s fiddling and playing with the system at some stage the system had been set to 24V. The unit wasn’t charging from the 12V side because it was looking for a 24V input.
All in all, it was a relatively easy fix in the end but you still need to check through the basics to get the correct outcome.
It also pays to have knowledge of the systems you have in your 4WD and it definitely pays to have a team like Redarc behind you so if you ever have an issue they are there to give a bit of help along the way
GO NUTS!
Adam
