Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Pere Marquette State Park - Lightening - Progressive Electrical Management System - Open Neutral

July 31, 2017

Today was a travel day. We moved from Fisherman's Corner C.O.E. Campground to Pere Marquette State Park, Illinois.  Once again we managed to make a four hour trip a six and a half hour trip. Why? well, first we got a false reading from one of my Tire Minder sensors which showed a progression of leaking during the first ten minutes of our trip. It took more than 45 minutes to find out that the sensor or the tire valve extension may be bad. I took it off the left front tire, checked the pressure only to find we had 106 psi in the tire (4 pounds low). So we moved on. 

In Carrollton, Illinois I started having stomach distress which I later determined was a result of some packaged ham that I ate earlier in the day. I had to make an emergency pit stop and afterwards all was well but that stop put us another 10 minutes behind schedule whatever a schedule is?

To add to our tardiness we made a detour because of bridge with low weight restrictions of 28 tons, we are 41,000 pounds or 21 tons but didn't want to risk it. We finally arrived at the park at about 6:30 pm.  

As per normal we found our campsite and leveled the coach and deployed our slide outs.  Next I went to plug into the 50 amp service at our campsite and nothing, zilch, nada, no power. I mean, WTF? My Progressive EMS/Surge protection system didn't even try to turn on.  This had me worried until I read the manual. In fact it is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing. 

The fifty amp service was non-operational as well as the 20 amp service on the same power pedestal. I ended up finding the the campground host and he came to check out the problem along with his own personal 30 AMP cord. We tried power from an adjacent 30 amp site and zero.  Next I used my 20 amp extension cords at the 30/20 amp site and we finally had power.  So, tonight we are running on inverted power with 20 amps recharging our batteries on bulk charge. 

The campground host is going to have the park electrician look at the two power pedestals in the morning. Afterwards we found out that there was a lighting strike yesterday that significantly damaged a nearby tree. I am guessing that the power to our camping loop was also affected. Time till tell.

I will update the blog tomorrow about the electrician's findings. However, I am betting that when he/she investigates they will find an open neutral on the input power.




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