After being gone for 9 days we drove 500 miles home today to find out someone left their brain in bed and turned off our 200 amp breaker at the shore power distribution box. Our 26 cubic foot fridge has dumped its contents...$350 easily of food lost...the resulting leaking goo or under our floor tiles and they will now have to be replaced...I'm so frustrated right now I could pinch someone.
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Check with your homeowners insurance company.
Home is our bus. We are full timers. It's not a huge deal, it's just frustrating. We have electric heat. If someone does this to us in the winter, our pipes freeZe
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Used to happen in our area, in the mobilehome parks. They are all equipped with a pedestal that contains (among other things) the main breaker for the home. Kids ( we assume) were flipping the breakers off in the dead of winter ( -25 to -40) when people were away from home.
A couple of hours at those temps result in frozen waterlines under the homes, and a day may result in inside temperatures below freezing.
Put a padlock on your panelbox, and hope the vandals don't carry boltcutters.
How do you know it was turned off versus tripped? Some breakers just go to off when tripped instead of a trip position. (The breakers in my house just go to off when tripped.)
Because my 50 amp
Pedestal breaker would trip before the 200 amp one would. We are the only ones here. I think the maintenance guy did it on accident
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Present a reasonable bill to those responsible and see if they'd rather pay than fight?
I recall a recent thread on one of the boards containing the concept of "fail safe" with lots of good words by Sean.
Would the coach fuel supply have been able to sustain that many days of refrigeration/freezer support unattended?
happy coaching!
buswarrior
The possibility of some other service on the 200amp disconnect may have caused your outage ?
Dog doo happens,sorry. >:(
Eagle, no..it turns out it was someone here on the school campus not sure what they were doing. There are now locks on the breaker panels :-) They are prorating our monthly rent to cover the cost. ;D
BusWarrior...clue me in??? I'm not sure the 150 gallons I likely have in the tank would have lasted all week with a genset...ok...actually it would have...but wow...thats some bucks in fuel costs. If they made a 25 cubic foot fridge that had an ice maker that was propane/electric...I'd buy it...
Sounds like a good opportunity to mentor a "bus sitter" when you are gone! ;)
Auto generator start and stop, triggered by battery condition, a pass-through inverter which picked up the slack when the shore power dropped out, auto transfer switch to swap from shore to genny as it comes on line.
A solar panel or two to minimize generator run time to top the batteries off fully/moderate the net consumption during daylight hours.
The coach electrical system is designed to be completely self reliant no matter whether the shore power is on or off, and needs no intervention other than a continuing source of fuel for the generator. The loads intended to be sustained determines to what degree a bit of solar might be able to carry it without any generator auto start at all.
Those who need to leave pets in the coach while away, those with larger cold storage capacity, those with important medical equipment needs, all might desire such a collection of controls and self reliant features.
happy coaching!
buswarrior
all might desire such a collection of controls and self reliant features.
at what cost ?
I'm guessig thousands...
NOW for the smell from rotten meat,( which is the smell of death), get some bags of charcoal that they use in aquariums and place it in the fridge and freezer on an open plate, close doors and let set for 24 hr, then remove and Bake it for 1 hr at 350 degrees, keep doing this till most of the odor is gone, we have been there also, this the best solution we found that works, Will take a while for the smell to completely leave, But its a Bus Memory you will never forget..
We will have someone watch the bus when we're gone from now on...but the autostart genset feature would be great. Someday...as for the rotten meat smell, we're vegetarian mostly so we didn't have to worry about that. Fridge is squeaky clean now...and we're slowly restocking. It's a huge fridge.
I would be looking for some kind of alarm system that would send a message to my phone when anything was amiss.
A few thousand, yes, but perhaps already spent?
A Trace 4024 inverter/charger, or similar product, is almost all the way there, depending on how you set it up.
Charge controllers and panels are quite reasonable these days, and payback the busnut in saved generator fuel, and extended battery life.
Many of us already have devices with vast capabilities that we do not routinely take advantage of.
There are busnuts who simply must have the coach capable of taking care of itself for extended periods.
The rest of us might want the peace of mind?
Some of us may be able to achieve a similar level of readiness with the devices we already have, or by adding a little more.
happy coaching!
buswarrior
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Interestingly enough the whole alarm system that contacts my phone would be great, but we don't have Internet in the bus that's reliable. Mobile aircard with Verizon...
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Interestingly enough the whole alarm system that contacts my phone would be great, but we don't have Internet in the bus that's reliable. Mobile aircard with Verizon...
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