Troubleshooting RV with no electrical power. Replacing the transfer switch

today we're gonna troubleshoot this rig as to why there's no power in it it has no power at all it's been in storage it's plugged into the wall so should be getting 120 volts that should be powering the battery tender so it should take the coach batteries charged and the Indian battery charge no power at all of course you can't start the generator if you don't have any battery power so we're gonna troubleshoot and figure out why this unit doesn't have any power I'm gonna assume that you've already checked your circuit breakers and that you know the power supply the circuit breaker from the house or the pole wherever you get power from is on and you have power there so we're gonna start off by looking where it plugs into the rig and then go downstream from there bear with me the since we've got no power I can't pull the slide out in so as we look at the power side here in a second we're gonna be underneath the slide-out so bear with me okay here we are under the under the slide-out here's my power supply from the shed and this is where it plugs in to the RV so first step obviously is to make sure we have power coming in okay and we've got 110 volts by the way I'm using one of these handy little testers they're about 12 bucks at Home Depot or Lowe's or Ace Hardware or true value wherever pretty handy nice thing about them is you won't accidentally short out a couple of things but you can also use a standard multimeter and there are times when having this multimeter is the way to go you have to have one but for when I can I use this because every now and then with this probe you actually can shore to get across two pins and when you're dealing with 110 or 220 that can be a bad thing next step is to check our power cord so we'll plug the power cord in okay the little blue LED is lighting up so I'm pretty sure that the power cord is getting power and then by the way this is a 30 amp rig so we're dealing with three three wires on a 50 amp you'll be dealing with four so we'll check here okay so we're getting 110 to the end of the power cord so I'm pretty confident that our power cord is good okay so the next step is we're going to take this receptacle off plug it in and check for power on the backside of this receptacle to make sure we're getting power I have seen that issue before and I'll describe that to you here in a little bit so let me see if I can do this bear with me here to take this receptacle off there's four screws on each corner and there may be some silicone around the edge so even when you take those four screws out it might take a little coercion to get it to come out of the rig and there should be three wires on the inside on the backside rather there should be three wires on the back side of this so once these four screws are out it won't just fall out you should be able to pull it out a couple of inches and you'll see those wires and where they attach on the backside of this receptacle [Music] pull the receptacle out just a little bit and you can see some access holes on each side there once I get the seal moved out of the way there's a little access hole there three of them around so that you can check the terminals for where this plugs in so now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna plug the unit back in being careful not to put my fingers into those holes because there'll be 110 in there and then we'll use our voltmeter to check for 110 volts okay not the ground where's the positive lead here okay so we know this receptacles okay because I'm getting power to this wire and just for giggles we can check on this a little bit of Rome accident exposed here so I know I've got 110 volts going to the romex that goes into the rig so this receptacle is okay but while I'm here I'm going to show you something real quick so we've confirmed that this receptacle is not the issue so I could just put this back in and then we'll continue troubleshooting inside but while we're here I want to just show you a couple of things real quick so maybe this was the problem not the case in this video but maybe for you at home maybe this is where you find that there's no power here and you have power here the next step is to take this cover off and have a look at the terminals in there so what I'm going to do is unhook this cable and then I'm gonna check again check again with my sensor to make sure that I don't have power before I start sticking a screwdriver in here anywhere okay this is clear no power so I'm gonna take off the clamp on the back here and I apologize this is a little bit tough to show you here but basically there's two Phillips screws that clamp this back onto the romex there [Music] now we can slide that cover back we don't have a whole lot of room here to work with but I think you can see where the romex comes in here and there's a clamp screw for each wire so on a 30 amp rig you have just like in your house you have three wires a black which is hot a white which is neutral and then a bare wire sometimes it's green which is your ground you can see where they are clamped and there's three clamps it's just a little phillips when we first bought this rig I was having power issues this wire was getting hot inside the rig and our AC quit and when I was troubleshooting I took these four screws out and this whole receptacle just fell off I believe that when they assembled to the rig they were just going so fast that they didn't get those crank clamped down right so this one happens to be Phillips so you just take your Phillips and maybe first check them to see that they're snug and that the wire isn't pulling out okay in this case I'm gonna take the whole thing off so just loosen each of those maybe a turn or two it doesn't take much but if you give the wires a tug on the back they should stay in if it's properly tightened down so there you have it and you can see that these are color-coded on the back so Green is for ground black is for hot and white is for your neutral just like in the house it's the same 110 wiring that's in your house so even though this wasn't the problem we double checked and it could be on your rig as you're troubleshooting but basically I'm gonna give each of those wires a tug and make sure it's secure if it's not secure make sure the wires going all the way into the fitting and then tighten those screws down there's a little clamp screw right there for each wire there's three of them you can put a little dot of conductive grease on there tune-up grease bulb grease just it's got to be conductive and that'll help keep it from corroding okay it's got the receptacle back in I made sure that the seal is motion out just a little bit as I tighten the four screws down to make sure it's compressing just a little bit you don't want it to completely deform but it should mush out just a little bit so I'm gonna plug it back in and then I'm gonna clean up just a little bit and then we'll go inside the rig and continue our troubleshooting now the first step is the obviously the plug on the side of the rig and what's the next thing downstream from that is your transfer switch so the generally transfer switches are in a box that looks a little something like this apologize for the glare no power in the rig so I can't turn on any light so I got bright light shining through the window behind the camera here so this is a transfer switch there are a couple different models out there this is one of the more common ones sorry got it upside down so inside this box there's a set of contacts for where Shore power comes in where a generator power comes in and then where power goes out of the switch to power everything in the RV the inverter the circuit breakers the fuses all of that is downstream of this it's very common to have this underneath the bed usually it's also in close proximity to your circuit breaker panels so bear with me as I move the camera around and I'll do a quick panoramic of how this rig happens to be which is a fairly common construction so here you can see my bed and I've got half of the panel pulled up so that's my freshwater tank in there side of the bed here is no we definitely don't have enough light here's my circuit breaker panel and fuse sorry circuit breakers and fuses on the side of the bed so that gave me a good hint and then you look at the back you can see all the power lines coming in and here's the top of my transfer switch so panning back around so we're gonna go with that camera set up for the moment so here's my transfer switch have the cover off already to take the cover off on this particular model which is progressive dynamics pretty common company and pretty good pretty good quality stuff you basically push the two pins in on either one side or the other and the panel will snap off for you so you can see this one looks just a little bit different than the one that I showed you so this has screw terminals which is a little bit nicer then this one which has pigtail terminals okay before we go any further let me let me point out that if you're plugged into Shore power you may have 110 volts in here so you don't want to go grabbing these wires until you check some of them you can see that we have three lines at the bottom there there's one there one there and one there all right so I've already labeled these the last time I was working in this area we have a generator line so this is my generator line so that should be dead we have the output and we have the power coming in from shore power so before I touch anything a troubleshooting step is to see if we're getting power to the transfer switch so the line coming in from shore power which I've traced before this one here it has power this is the line that goes out and there is no power there so the problem is here in the transfer switch now a couple of things that could go wrong for example you could have something like this where that was a wire nut that melted it was a poor connection and it got hot probably had the AC running and maybe even somebody turned on the microwave we were out in the desert and the line got too hot on that poor connection and it just melted it but inspecting that here looking it at these connections I can see that one looks good this one looks good that's the power coming in that's the output power and the generators would look okay but I'm looking closely in there at the the fine detail and I could see a lot of corrosion now I'm in Florida where it's very humid so anything metal that's exposed even if it's in this box this box doesn't have a seal on it because then it would get too hot so you can't really seal it so I get a little bit of moisture in there and I bet those contacts have have corroded so that's my guess at this point seeing that I have power coming into the transfer switch and no power coming out of the transfer switch you could test that by using something non conductive to push on the switch here so now I can have power on the switch oh and I just heard the microwave beep so now I have power going to the rig because I'm manually holding the switch down so my transfer switch is not flipping properly so I'm gonna go ahead and replace that so the next step then is to remove all power that could possibly come into this box before I start taking wire nuts off and unbolting stuff things to check unplug the rig make sure your generator is not on which isn't too hard if you have a solar system make sure that that inverter is turned off or you're not piping power into your transfer switch and then you got to think about your batteries too generally you won't get any feedback the battery power will stop at the fuse box and not come into the transfer switch because that's 12-volt power but I know my batteries are dead I'm gonna go throw that fuse anyway so I'm gonna go unplug the rig and then we'll swap out this transfer switch so I unplug the rig my generator is off and I popped the circuit breaker or through the circuit breaker in the battery compartment for the Coach batteries so there should be no power coming into this box and again the battery is just a backup it that shouldn't be an issue if you have solar that maybe an additional line bottom line I'm gonna check every black wire and then for backup check every white wire for any current all right I have confirmed that there is no power in this box so now I am clear to pull these three lines out then I'll take this box out and wire in the new box already but the first step of this is just taking all these wire nuts off so I can pull these lines out if you haven't done so already it's not a bad idea to mark them you can mark on it with a you can mark on it put a piece of tape in a permanent marker or you can mark right on the wire it's just so you can read it next time you get in here on [Music] these pigtail style it's mostly pigtails to undo every now and then you'll run across a crimp fitting maybe in which case you have to cut it with a with a dikes or side cut or wire cutter but the grounds are gonna be in this ground bus here and they are going to be clamped by a screw so to get your grounds loose you have to use a in this case as a flat headed screwdriver and loosen that screw so you can back get those wires out [Music] to pull them out the bottom of the box if you happen to have the terminal style instead of this pig stay a pigtail style your box will look something like this and to remove the wires you'll need to back out these screws and then pull the wires down I'm going to install this so if you have this type you'll see when I install this how you would go reverse that to take it out if you already have this style installed so the next step is just pull those wires out and then we can take this box out [Music] so there's the box fourth that's power coming from one source and then coming up would be power from the other source but I bet those are corroded all right so that one goes in the trash there should be one big ground wire from the outside somewhere that's separate from all the other wiring so there's my ground wire that I had to cut it cuz I couldn't get the screws loose in the old panel so there's where I cut all the old grounds and that's where I cut off the main ground by the way I've got this one off of Amazon it's progressive dynamics which is a pretty big brand this is the screw terminal type instead of the old one which is the pigtail type so if you're reinstalling a pigtail well the they had both of them on Amazon both of them progressive dynamics brand which I'm pretty happy with their equipment the price difference was about three bucks so I went ahead and got the little more expensive one it was $77 and free shipping with Amazon Prime so it can't beat that my personal opinion is this makes better connections and there's fewer connections with the pigtail style you have the twist connection and then you have another terminal connection back inside it either one is easy enough to put in so I went ahead and went with the screw in terminal type it's labeled so there's labels underneath each of these terminals there's you those are your generator hot and neutral Shore power hot and neutral which is the power coming in and then the power out to the panel so pretty simple I'll go ahead and show you here I think it might be a little easier to demonstrate how the connections are made here while I'm holding it in my hand before I get it mounted but you'll run your romex in through these and you just push it up in those little tabs will bend back personally I like to put a little bit of conductive grease up in those terminals I happen to use this type but there's plenty of different brands that will work just fine basically you loosen the terminal with a Phillips head screwdriver right I got a little bit of conductive grease on there you stick that up inside there and then tighten the terminal down on it there we go and you give it a little tug to make sure it's secure and that's all there is to it so just make sure you get your connections going in there the right way generator going to generate or shortish or and the panel to the panel and you should be going so I'm gonna go ahead and hit fast-forward and we'll get this guy mounted [Music] don't forget your master ground should come in there should there's a hole here on the side to come in and go to that ground bar just underneath all the terminals good idea to do that one first [Music] [Applause] before you clamp your terminals your wires into your terminals have a look at them and make sure that they're clean and bright and shiny if they're not you can take a little bit of Emery cloth and scuff them up a little bit no reason to start off with a poor connection [Music] we are all wired up you can see I put a little relief bend and most of these wires that's preferable you want to make sure that that wire isn't under tension so it will naturally stay in the clamp of course you want to make sure the clamp is tight so you're gonna give a little tug to each one to double-check that they're nice and snug double-check one last time that you have the right wires going into the right terminals you know anything that says hot should be a black wire anything that says neutral should be a white wire and then every one of those plus your master ground should go into the ground bar on the bottom and those are the bare wires or they may be a green you want to make sure that the insulation the black or white or green coating does not go inside the terminal into the clamping area but does come behind what's white in this in this case usually it's white sometimes it might be black or another color this plastic so you want the insulation to extend into there but not into the clamping mechanism or you're not making an electrical connection usually it's about three-quarters of an inch that you need to strip make sure that it's not under tension that everything's just naturally there give your your terminals one last check to make sure you wire them right and then you're ready to go turn the power back on and see if we got it so I'm gonna skip outside the rig here plug it back in and we'll see if we got this wired right okay so I've got power plugged back in now I'm gonna take my tester and we'll check it so power coming in from shore power and going out is good and power going out to the panel is good so the last check I want to run and by the way I heard the microwave beep and the light came on I must not have turned the switch oops so I know I've got power in the rig so I'm basically solved now I just need to button everything up and clean up one last test that I'm gonna run here is get the generator running and make sure that the transfer switch then switches over to generator power when I unplug it from the wall then I will be sure that everything is working correctly in here and I'll be a happy camper that wraps it up thanks for watching I hope you don't have this issue but if you do I hope this is helpful if you have questions comments suggestions of better ways to troubleshoot better ways to check stuff by all means please put it in the comment section there so the next person can benefit from your knowledge or your experience thanks for watching

Channel: hesty32

Views: 47,253

Keywords: transfer switch, rv electrical circuits, rv power cord, rv power plug, RV power receptical, RV shore power, RV generator power

Id: 7xxWagd-Q8Q

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019