Electrical Issues on new travel trailer
Hello, I'm a new owner of a 25' travel trailer. So I am completely not up to speed on the electrical. A situation happened when I was hooking it up to the meter panel for the first time. I was not...
Forum Discussion
First, welcome to the forum. Hopefully all the negative responses don't scare you away. There are many people here who are genuinely interested in helping but there are many others who look for any excuse to put others down or show their "superiority".
As others have said, some in less polite ways, if someone else provided an RV plug that fit your trailer, a campground for instance, they have some explaining to do and possibly some liability. If you installed it yourself or used an existing plug of unknown origin, you've probably learned a valuable lesson. We all make mistakes and hopefully learn from them.
So, now to tackle some of your questions. There will almost certainly be damage to the electrical system, especially if you saw/smelled the "magic" smoke escaping. The extent is the question. The full extent may take a while to know because some damage will show up as immediate failures and other failures may be delayed.
Methodical testing is the best path forward. If you're not comfortable testing, you may need to get a technician to check things out. You indicated that "much later there was another pop and then the microwave, A/C and TV turned on." That being the case, they don't appear to have suffered instant failure. How were they being powered when they came back on? The microwave and A/C are almost certainly not powered by an inverter, so you must have moved to another outlet?
Proper troubleshooting will require opening the main breaker panel in the RV and checking voltages with a voltmeter as well as some knowledge of electrical system. You can do limited testing without doing that. Start with turning off all of the circuit breakers in the RV's electrical panel. Hook up a surge suppressor with indicators to a known good/correctly wired power source and verify the indicators show proper wiring. Turn off the breaker at the hookup and connect the trailer with all of the circuit breakers still off. Once the trailer is plugged in, turn the breaker at the hookup point back on. Assuming it stays on and the surge suppressor still indicates good power, go inside the RV and turn on the main breaker in the RV panel. Check the indicators on the surge suppressor again and verify they are still good. Then one by one step through each circuit breaker turning them on and verifying whether the appliance or outlet they control works.
One of the circuits will be your DC converter. This is usually installed behind the RV electrical panel or sometimes it's part of the electrical panel. This converts 110V AC to 12V DC. This is what powers your lights, refrigerator control board, and furnace among other things. When this is not plugged in, these things run off of the battery. You may or may not have an inverter that provides 110V AC from the batteries for a few plugs and/or refrigerator, depending on the style of refrigerator. The inverter would not power things like the microwave or air conditioning.
Damages could be as simple as blown fuses, but if there was smoke, the damage is probably deeper. Verify what works and what doesn't.
As others have said, some in less polite ways, if someone else provided an RV plug that fit your trailer, a campground for instance, they have some explaining to do and possibly some liability. If you installed it yourself or used an existing plug of unknown origin, you've probably learned a valuable lesson. We all make mistakes and hopefully learn from them.
So, now to tackle some of your questions. There will almost certainly be damage to the electrical system, especially if you saw/smelled the "magic" smoke escaping. The extent is the question. The full extent may take a while to know because some damage will show up as immediate failures and other failures may be delayed.
Methodical testing is the best path forward. If you're not comfortable testing, you may need to get a technician to check things out. You indicated that "much later there was another pop and then the microwave, A/C and TV turned on." That being the case, they don't appear to have suffered instant failure. How were they being powered when they came back on? The microwave and A/C are almost certainly not powered by an inverter, so you must have moved to another outlet?
Proper troubleshooting will require opening the main breaker panel in the RV and checking voltages with a voltmeter as well as some knowledge of electrical system. You can do limited testing without doing that. Start with turning off all of the circuit breakers in the RV's electrical panel. Hook up a surge suppressor with indicators to a known good/correctly wired power source and verify the indicators show proper wiring. Turn off the breaker at the hookup and connect the trailer with all of the circuit breakers still off. Once the trailer is plugged in, turn the breaker at the hookup point back on. Assuming it stays on and the surge suppressor still indicates good power, go inside the RV and turn on the main breaker in the RV panel. Check the indicators on the surge suppressor again and verify they are still good. Then one by one step through each circuit breaker turning them on and verifying whether the appliance or outlet they control works.
One of the circuits will be your DC converter. This is usually installed behind the RV electrical panel or sometimes it's part of the electrical panel. This converts 110V AC to 12V DC. This is what powers your lights, refrigerator control board, and furnace among other things. When this is not plugged in, these things run off of the battery. You may or may not have an inverter that provides 110V AC from the batteries for a few plugs and/or refrigerator, depending on the style of refrigerator. The inverter would not power things like the microwave or air conditioning.
Damages could be as simple as blown fuses, but if there was smoke, the damage is probably deeper. Verify what works and what doesn't.
