I'm hoping one of you will know a little about this. I don't have access to my TT right now, but I'm planning on stopping on the way home to pick up a breaker and installing it before I leave on a 4 day trip tomorrow. My converter is on the same breaker as my TV outlets, and since I'm dry camping I plan on running those outlets on an inverter so I need to separate them. I'm going to add another twin breaker (15Ax2), this will allow me to put the converter on a new breaker and have a spare for later use. Do any of you know what kind of breaker this would be, I'm only familiar with what my house uses, so I'm wondering if this is a standard household breaker, or a special type.

 

Send a PM to Steve (RV_Tech) and I am sure he can get you fixed up in no time.

 

In my TT's electrical panel, I have Square D twins in there. They are the same ones I got at the local home improvement store. My inverter was split off when I had to make a repair to it. I took the time to do this while everything was powered down. My panel is a WFCO branded electrical distribution panel. I would double check your panel but chances are you will may have a Square D in your panel like mine.

 

Pretty sure mine are Square D also. 2015 Jayco White Hawk. I would think Jayco would use the same from model to model

 

I picked up an EATON 1515 from Home Depot the other day and installed it yesterday morning in the top spot. Just had to break of the blank-off in the panel cover. Now the converter is a dedicated breaker and the non-GFCI breakers (TV plugs and a couple others) were moved to the new breaker. Installing it took about 5 minutes and I was able to tell which wire went to the converter as it was soldered braided wire instead of solid romex. I just need to label it and the very top 15A is an unused spare for the time being.

I should now be able to plug into the inverter and turn on just the Main and new 15A and have power to ONLY the Television/Surround System outlets in the living room area and bedroom, as well as an outlet in the bunk area.

 

As others have noted Square D is the standard, although almost all others fit.

So you are putting an adapter on your 30 amp shoreline and plugging into your inverter instead of a campground pedestal right?

Steve

 

I figured it would be fine as long as it fit, EATON was what Home Depot had and someone on another forum said the '06 Jaycos used EATON breakers, never did the check the brand of the other ones, but they look the same.


And yes, I'm doing a temporary setup so I'm just hooking a portable inverter to the batteries and connecting the shore power cord to the inverter. It's fairly small one, so enough to run the TV and DVD/surround system. Eventually I'll do a more permanent install with one big enough to run the microwave or a coffee pot for example. I'll probably still just put a plug in the storage bay though and plug the shore power cord into it so I don't have to rewire the load center.

 

All sounds good and as long as the breaker fits, it is fine. Harder to find ones that don't fit than do.

You setup makes perfect sense and is straight forward.

Steve

 

Northwind,

Glad to here that the breaker worked out. It's nice to have the converter on it's own circuit.

 

This is a great thread!

My new-to-me '95 has an 'romex' wire pigtailed off of the AC breaker that also powers the converter.

I suspect the thought is that the amp draw is so little that it doesn't warrant its own breaker.

I recently changed the battery charger module that also came with an upgraded DC distribution panel with 12 fuse locations instead of the 9. This let me split two wires that were jammed into one log on to separate fuses.

My AC breaker panel is full...at least the cover plate doesn't have any more breakouts to remove. Is getting the converter onto its own breaker important enough to put in a sub panel or similar?

 

Not important at all, unless you are needing to split circuits for a specific reason.

Steve

 

The only reason I did it was to be able to run my television and other items of an inverter without my converter being on since that would cause me to charge my batteries while using the batteries to power the inverter that is powering the converter that would be charging the batteries....you get the idea. Not sure what would happen, but I would have dead batteries very quickly I'm sure.


Some of the more powerful converters can draw quite a bit of power when your batteries are low, so having the converter on the same circuit as another high draw item such as the water heater or a kitchen GFCI circuit powering a coffee pot could potentially trip the breaker.


Just doing very crude calculations in my head of worst case scenario, if your converter is putting out 50AMPS at 12V it will be drawing around 5A on the 115AC side (assuming impossible 100% efficiency, and charging voltage will be above 12V of course) and if you turn on a coffee pot it may draw around 1200 watts, which would be around 10A, so right there you are at 15A just running a coffee pot and your converter. Not very likely, but it is possible.

 

Also, another thing I've been wondering...what is the purpose of the 2 reverse polarity 30A fuses on the DC side? Are those connecting the converter to the battery, or is it protection if you hook your battery up backwards? Just curious how it all works, it bugs me to own something and not know how it works. It can come in handy, but sometimes I probably waste time learning how something works even though I'll never have to repair it.

 

Polarity protection guards against reversing positive and negative leads at the battery. And yes, if they blow, the converter will not be charging the battery, but you normally will still have battery power to the fused until the batteries run down.

Converters are normally on the utility or general circuits. Normal amp draw is about 2 amps. With 50 amp converters you will rarely see more than 20 amps at the batteries. Rating sounds impressive but about the only time I have ever saw a full 50 amps was when I used a deck mount to charge the chassis batteries on a diesel pusher. 50-amp WFCO actually showed 55 amp output on my meter.

Four young men in very rough shape from too much celebrating at race ran batteries completely down. Also managed to tear several cabinet doors off the high-end diesel pusher they rented for the race here in Bristol. I got their engine running, but no I did not glue the cabinet doors back together.

Steve

 

The math is good. I figured around 6 Amps at 120V myself allowing for inefficiency during the converting process based at 80 percent like a computer PSU. 6 Amps to drive the unit at full power. The converter in my trailer was a 55AMP output at 12V. This is similar to what I had in mind. I figured having the converter on separate circuit can also help troubleshoot trouble. When my converter took a dump due to cracked solder joints, I used a battery charger that obtained locally to where I was camping at the time. I would never draw more than 50% on the gauge when most of the systems were running on the trailer. The battery charger was set at 10 Amps and it ran the trailer just fine. It felt a little like Apollo 13. It's a good thing power saving LEDs and running the T stat a hair lower helped out the load on the charger but in the end it still worked. So if anything the charger was probably outputting about 100-120 watts. Maybe 150 watts max. Since when the converter failed it was in the fall. This means the largest load was the furnace fan motor at any given time. When I slide out was moved, we turned off the furnace as a precaution. The water pump and furnace was no problem.

Anyway, my father in law soldered up the broken joints and coated the backside of the board for moisture protection. I brought the generator to the trailer's parking spot. Wired everything up. No problems as a matter of fact I notice things running even better than before so the joints were probably failing for some time. Plus I learned how to trouble shoot the converter in the future plus saved a few bucks by not buying a replacement.