On May 6, 2022, I'm towing my 2021 Reflection 2021 Travel Trailer from my house to Great Meadows Campground in Shenandoah National Park. After about 1 hour and 15 minutes of driving, I pull over to the side of the road to make sure my batteries are not getting run down by run my absorption Norcold 1210 fridge running in AC mode off of the inverter. Batteries are near 95% but I turn the fridge off of AC as I have a mountain to climb and don't want any extra load from the alternator. When I was outside of the camper, I smelled something electrical burning, and I looked around, but didn't notice anything. The inverter was working fine, RV batteries are charged, things seem like they're OK, no smell of burning noticable in the RV at the control panel.
45 minutes later, we pull into the campground, and the Victron Multiplus II 2X120 is no longer inverting. On the Victron touch panel, there's an inverter overload fault. This inverter can put out a constant 2400 Watts. At 120 volts, that's 20 amps. At this time, the fridge was not on AC power, so there was effectively no load on the inverter, yet it shut down due to an overload. I turned the inverter back on and there was an immediate overload of the inverter. I turned off the main 50 amp circuit breaker of the RV power panel and again turned on the inverter: no overload. I turned off all individual 120 volt circuit breakers and turn on the main 50 amp breaker, no problems. I turn on the breakers one by one, and as soon as I turned on the electric fireplace circuit breaker, the inverter goes into an overload. As long as I kept the fireplace circuit breaker off, everything worked perfectly so it was a good weekend. (Note that when I was traveling, the fireplace was turned off.)
Today, I investigate, and the connection where the solid romex 120 volt wire transitions to the flexible 120 volt for the slide/fireplace wiring looks suspicious. There had to be short inside of this connection assembly.
(1) why did it take 14 months of use for this short to happen?
(2) why did the inverter which can put out a constant 20 amps turn off (and thankfully save a fire from happening) instead of the 15 amp breaker for the fireplace trip?
Here are the pics:
45 minutes later, we pull into the campground, and the Victron Multiplus II 2X120 is no longer inverting. On the Victron touch panel, there's an inverter overload fault. This inverter can put out a constant 2400 Watts. At 120 volts, that's 20 amps. At this time, the fridge was not on AC power, so there was effectively no load on the inverter, yet it shut down due to an overload. I turned the inverter back on and there was an immediate overload of the inverter. I turned off the main 50 amp circuit breaker of the RV power panel and again turned on the inverter: no overload. I turned off all individual 120 volt circuit breakers and turn on the main 50 amp breaker, no problems. I turn on the breakers one by one, and as soon as I turned on the electric fireplace circuit breaker, the inverter goes into an overload. As long as I kept the fireplace circuit breaker off, everything worked perfectly so it was a good weekend. (Note that when I was traveling, the fireplace was turned off.)
Today, I investigate, and the connection where the solid romex 120 volt wire transitions to the flexible 120 volt for the slide/fireplace wiring looks suspicious. There had to be short inside of this connection assembly.
(1) why did it take 14 months of use for this short to happen?
(2) why did the inverter which can put out a constant 20 amps turn off (and thankfully save a fire from happening) instead of the 15 amp breaker for the fireplace trip?
Here are the pics:
Comment