Griff in Fairbanks wrote:
Direct current (DC) has polarity and polarity is important.
Alternating current (AC) doesn't ... current flows first one way and then the other on the hot leg. (60 times a second in North America.) Current is flowing the opposite direction on the neutral leg.
Standard colors are green for ground, white for neutral, and black (and red on 240VAC) for hot.
I've seen white and black reversed on 120VAC outlets. Also, I don't trust wire colors on any wiring done by anyone else (including by manufacturers and professional electricians) until I've checked it myself.
Also -- VERY IMPORTANT -- 12VDC colors are often different from 120/240VAC standard. It's common for black to be negative (ground) and red to be positive (hot) in 12VDC motor vehicles.
I have a bunch of different colors for 12vDC Positive, and I'll admit that it threw me for a loop, when I first started digging into the lighting, replacing the incandescent units with the LEDs.
As you can see from my pictures, Green, White, Black, Blue, Yellow & Red are Positive. I also understand that they did this so the fuse panel wouldn't be a confusing mess, if wires were ever disconnected.
By the same token, Green, Black & Brown are Negative....the Green is what I had to really study. Why they chose Green as a Positive from the Converter to the House Battery is beyond me. And this is the part that really ticks me off, because there should have only been one color for Negative, the part that had me confused, because Brown shows up somewhere in the walls...it is NOT present anywhere on the Negative Buss Bar.
Compounding the confusion is that Monaco never provided a wiring diagram with their manuals, just the decal on the inside of the fuse panel with no color legend (and there's an error on it), and I have all of the original manuals that came with the coach.
Heck, the original 8-Track player didn't even have its own dedicated circuit...it's connected to the interior lights, and then the brilliant Monaco worker must have run out of the correct color wire, or he just didn't give a darn, because the Positive & Negative wires are the same color, resulting in an 8-Track player that never worked, because the wires were reversed.
I will most definitely be making a wiring legend, in case I ever do sell it, so that the next owner won't have the headaches I did.
