Breakdown Information

FLMOHOMER wrote:
03, Fleetwood Discovery, Freightliner chassis, Cat 330HP.

On trip from Florida to Arizona, I was less han 100 miles from home when the low batery light came on. I pulled over as soon as I could and wedged a tooth pick in the emergency start switch. This tied the house batteries [4 six volt] to the chassis system and the light went off. I stopped later at a large parking lot and checked the alternator belt and it was OK. I decided to continue the trip using the house batteries to furnish electrical power. When I got the low battery light again, after running several hours at night, I started the generator and continued the trip.

We completed the roundtrip of over 4,000 miles by using this method. We would charge our batteries in the campgound each night and only run the generator when both battery banks got low. Once I almost waited to long to start the generator and was barely able to get it to start on the low battery.

I saw in previous posts that others had run home on generator. I was able to keep the generator off for the majority of trip by using the emergency start feature.

After we finished our trip, we returned the coach to our dealer and had the alternator replace under warranty since it had only 11,000 miles when it failed. I had called Fleetwood to report the failure before I reached 12,000 miles and they stated that I could have the work done under warranty when we returned to Florida.

Doug Ray

I always wondered if this could be done (use the emergency switch to provide power to the chassis in an alternator failiure). Any other side effects? I would agree that you could run the batteries down, but running the generator would not sacrifice them that much, right?