Continuous blackouts! Our worst electric issue yet

Let's catch you up. Back in April, our inverter went up in smoke and was fried beyond repair. We had plans to travel up to New England shortly thereafter, but we decided to delay the trip. We didn't want to go without an inverter because we'd be forced to run on limited electricity. We have home-bases in MA and NH, both of which have little or no shore power. In the hot temperatures, we need to ensure we have adequate air conditioning for our pets, especially our senior dog, Tanner. Scrambling to find campsites with electric hookups during peak season in a popular region seemed daunting and expensive. So instead, we postponed our trip until we could get our inverter replaced.

The plan made good sense. We were attending a wedding up in VA's Shenandoah Valley the last weekend in June. By then, we'd have our new inverter, and we could continue north to New England. As we waited for our replacement inverter to come in, our lives changed a lot. We rented a cottage in Myrtle Beach and made the transition out of full-time RV life. Getting off the road had been in the works for a while, but living in Myrtle Beach was an unexpected decision, prompted by the inverter situation. Strangely, we owe the entire trajectory of our year to that inverter death, but as far as our Myrtle Beach cottage goes, we couldn't be happier. Waiting for the replacement inverter gave us plenty of time to furnish our cottage and move in, while our trailer sat patiently at a 50amp full hookup site across town.

The replacement happened on June 12, which gave us a week and a half to ensure all systems were running properly. We tested the new inverter both on and off hookups, and everything was working great. This was a huge relief because it meant we could bounce between our home-bases in New England and still have the ability to run our AC without constantly firing up our generator. It also gave us the flexibility to travel at our own pace. This wasn't a vacation, nor was it a grand adventure. In March, we escaped MA during one of our only snow-free windows, and things were so crazy that we didn't have time to grab all our stuff. Half our camping gear is still in a storage unit in NH! And now that we have the cottage, there are a lot of things we can move out of storage and into our new home. Our return also means we can see family and friends that we didn't get to say bye to when we launched back out. Fitting everything into our trip is much easier if we don't need to be in a specific place at a specific time. We can stay at our MA home-base (on Nicole's parents' property), and then scoot up to our NH home-base (our land) whenever it makes sense. Then as we mentioned, saving on campground expenses is another perk.

We headed out on June 23 and made our way to VA, first stopping for a couple nights on the NC-VA border for a regroup. We won't say things were going smoothly, but at least we had our new inverter. We could run our AC on travel days and stay cool during pit stops. We had plans to boondock on our way north, and our electric setup meant we could stay at 30amp campsites (which are very common the Northeast) and supplement the power with our own so we could run both ACs. Then once in New England, we could supplement the shore power at our MA home-base and boondock on our land. This was exactly the flexibility we needed as we adjusted to part-time RVing.

On June 25, after a drive filled with Washington DC congestion, steep mountain grades of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the quintessential narrow, twisting roads of the Shenandoah region, we arrived to our campsite. This would serve as our basecamp for the wedding weekend. It was a no-frills campground right along the Shenandoah River, but we picked it for the location and the resources: a water and 50amp electric site just a few towns from the wedding venue. Having the inverter is great, but knowing we'd be gone for long hours, we wanted to be able to run both ACs without any worry of depleting our batteries.

We settled in Thursday evening and started preparing for the festivities ahead: welcome reception on Friday and wedding on Saturday. Nicole checked in with our friends Sleepy Adventure, whom we had been keeping informed of our less-than-easy travel days, and was happy to report that we arrived and things were good.

Then as though our RV heard the update and decided to throw us one more curveball, suddenly, everything went dark. Our ACs kicked off and our thermostats read error messages. The 12V power cut our lights. Our touchscreen panel turned off. We were experiencing a blackout.

This, unfortunately, had happened to us before. We had a cascade failure of our batteries while boondocking in the Black Hills back in 2023. We also had a blackout one morning on our land as we were packing up to leave. Only this time was different. We were on electric hookups.

And because of this difference, we first checked our shore power. This campground lists in the rules that surge protectors are a requirement, so we thought that maybe the grid was sensitive and somehow a surge got through. We were also using a brand new surge protector and wanted to make sure it didn't malfunction. Everything seemed fine, but we plugged ourselves into the vacant pedestal next to us just in case we'd notice a difference. We didn't.

This was good news and bad news. The good news was, we wouldn't need to move campsites – or worse, campgrounds. The bad news was, it looked to be an issue with our system, and if we couldn't get power through, we'd be totally screwed no matter where we were, on a weekend when we really couldn't afford to have big issues. Nicole was part of the wedding ceremony, for crying out loud! Then we remembered something. On our drive, we were running one of the ACs on a high temp to keep the rig relatively cool. This is one of the advantages to having our solar setup. We can run one AC off the inverter and let the solar charge the batteries on drive days. This way we can better climate control the rig. Only during one of our pit stops that day, Anthony mentioned that the thermostat was off when he went inside the trailer. We knew we had set it before we left, as it's part of our drive day checklist. We just assumed one of us had hit the button accidently when we were in and out during our stop. But now we knew, no one hit any buttons. The thermostat must have shut off for some other reason, just like it had now. This means we had been having blackouts all day, whether we were on hookups or not. But why?

We dove into troubleshooting, but instead of shooting down our troubles, more piled up. We tried shutting off the 12V, but bursts of voltage continued anyway. It was like we had a ghost!

Anthony went and turned off power at the emergency cutoff switch in the storage bay, which worked. Whatever "worked" means in this case. Not even a flicker of power was coming through, and the sun was going down, leaving us in full darkness. Back in 2023 when we had our blackout, we discovered that our batteries had lost voltage, and so Anthony checked them. The history showed a stable 14.5V when we first hooked up to shore power, but when the power started cutting out, the voltage had dropped to 13.9V. RVs often have issues handling the voltage jump when an AC first kicks on, but our power was cutting even after the AC had been running for a while and all power draw should have been stable.

With the inverter, battery cutoff, and pedestal all turned off, Anthony checked the batteries at the leads with the voltmeter. It read 1.5V, indicating a residual voltage between the batteries that shouldn't have been there.

In addition to our experiences with blackouts, we've also had consistent issues with our thermostat not kicking on properly after we run our generator. When our batteries charge up to full, the voltages fluctuate too much, and so Anthony got in the habit of gradually increasing the power he let through as the batteries got close to full capacity. He started doing this after the dangerously hot day in Illinois during our Harvest Hosts Challenge.

Our experiences have taught us a lot in terms of finding quick solutions, but our recent visit to EcoEthic Solar shed light on some of the deeper issues that could be the root of many of our problems over the years. We've hinted in previous blog posts that they're recommending we get some fixes, and this is why. We all thought these fixes could wait, but now they were looking to be causing problems a lot faster than expected.

We narrowed our issue down to the batteries' interaction with the inverter. When the inverter starts pulling from the batteries, it reads an increase in voltage above the limit. As a safety precaution, the inverter then automatically shuts them off, causing us to lose 12V power. This means we lose power to our LED lights, fridge, thermostats, and USB outlets. When our last inverter fried, Anthony bypassed it so we could start getting shore power. Only this time, our inverter is working just fine. We just need it to stop inverting until we can get our battery bank looked at. So Anthony turned the inverter to "charge only." Thankfully, this allowed us to get stable power back while we were on electric hookups. It wouldn't help us at other points on our trip, but it helped us this weekend. We could attend the wedding events without worrying about the AC turning off.

During the troubleshooting process, we put everything in an email and sent it to EcoEthic Solar. They decided to lower the maximum voltage allowed by our solar charge controller. If the issue was that the battery voltage spiked too high when the inverter was running, then perhaps a slightly lower maximum would blunt the spike enough to keep the emergency shutoff from engaging. It wouldn't be a permanent solution because this could ruin the batteries over time, but it might get us through our trip.

We didn't test it until we had hours to spend at the RV, which was Friday into Saturday overnight and into the morning. We switched the inverter back to "on" mode and waited to see what would happen. Everything remained stable as long as the battery voltage was low enough. But then around noon on Saturday, the temperatures rose along with the sun. The solar charge controller began inputting power, and the ACs began adding more load to the system. We had hopes the lower voltage limit would help, but now we had our answer: the power cut out again.

Anthony tested a few more components, but even with no significant power draw, when the inverter was on, it was only a matter of time before we lost our 12V again.

Our running theory is that this is a problem we've had since our solar installation in 2023. When EcoEthic Solar installed the new inverter, they found wires that needed to be re-crimped with a larger gauge wire, from the batteries to the inverter. Our best guess is that this reduced voltage sag and increased the current draw when a large load runs. In other words, the rewiring fixed one problem, but unmasked a deeper problem: our batteries aren't wired properly, so they're supplying power unevenly.

So then why didn't these problems start right after our appointment with EcoEthic? It's possible they're getting worse. If other wires were already loose, the bumpy roads in Metro-DC might have jostled them just enough. Or perhaps there was some other tiny fix or other part of the install that is causing a progressive worsening of deeper rooted issues. We won't know until we can get the trailer back to EcoEthic Solar.

But when would that be? We were supposed to be heading north towards New England, not south back towards NC! With our inverter set to charge-only, we're effectively back to where we started, without an inverter. In fact, we're worse off than we were when we didn't have an inverter at all! This is because, without the inverter, we could run the electric off 2 50amp legs through our breaker panel. This inverter only has 1 50amp leg, and since it's still connected, that's the only avenue for getting power. If we continued our trip north, we'd be on the most limited electric setup we've ever had. This would mean boondocking would be nearly impossible. We could kiss our home-base stays goodbye. We'd be extra limited on the 30amp sites we already had booked. And we'd need to deplete all our flexibility, attempt to find 50amp electric sites in peak season, starting with the busiest weekend of all: 4th of July.

Could this even be done? Would we even want to continue on after our tumultuous year thus far? This trip would require a lot more grit than we were intending, and we frankly didn't know if we had anymore grit left in us.

We spent all our downtime that weekend pouring over campsite availabilities. Good campgrounds in MA are hard to come by to begin with, and on such a busy holiday, there was nothing available anywhere. Our goal was to hit MA first and then go up to NH. We had made a vet appointment while in the area and Nicole booked a harp yoga event south of Boston. But soon we realized that, if we wanted any chance of continuing this trip, we'd need to make some changes.

We flipped our itinerary on its head, looking at campgrounds in NH for 4th of July weekend instead. This yielded more results, including a surprising number of availabilities at one of our go-to campgrounds. This was enough for us to move forward, albeit reluctantly. Emotionally, we weren't ready for it, but we kept thinking "a stitch in time saves nine." We were already on the road, dealing with all the craziness the road breeds. We could continue north, complete our to-do list, and return to our SC cottage for the remainder of summer. Or we could turn around and go back now, and leave all the New England tasks hanging over our head until the next time we muster the grit to head up there. Our current situation wasn't ideal, but we had found a path forward. We rescheduled the pets' vet appointment and Nicole cancelled her work event. We started booking our campground reservations from north to south, keeping a few we had already booked and filling the rest in around them. It was arduous, but by the time we left Shenandoah, we knew which way we were headed. Onward and northward we went, with bated breath and crossed fingers that nothing else would hit the fan.