2016 Jayco Eagle HT 26.5 bhs-looking for the solar wire drop

[klassic]

^^^ X2

They are going to think your black wire in the battery compartment is your positive to the taped ends (which you don't have)
And THAT black wire, you have diagnosed, is going straight to the roof negative.
Your prewire will be all f#%*d up after their TSB procedure.
And guaerenteed no one will be smart enough to know what the heck you're talking about, because they are the professionals.

[klassic]

A little off topic. But I'm curious to know what else they have hooked to that 30a breaker in the TSB picture.
My breaker is dedicated solely to the roof solar.
What happens when the other item trips the breaker then it auto resets...then keeps tripping. You would think it's your roof solar, but it could be the other item.

[Onefastdaddy]

Originally Posted by klassic

^^^ X2

They are going to think your black wire in the battery compartment is your positive to the taped ends (which you don't have)
And THAT black wire, you have diagnosed, is going straight to the roof negative.
Your prewire will be all f#%*d up after their TSB procedure.
And guaerenteed no one will be smart enough to know what the heck you're talking about, because they are the professionals.

I was just about to post that, you beat me to it.

I will be there Thursday AM and point this out. I can bring my multimeter and I may have the panel mounted up there, disconnected, and can show him in a few minutes my tests.

I just read the remedy and I was going to do that same thing myself without reading any of this based on your comments. I just replace the battery sized ring connector for a smaller one that goes right on that breaker for the front wired connector so they share the same breaker. Seems that's all the details they mention. Which makes me laugh the dealer commented "The parts just came in"...what parts? The off the shelf connector and pliers/crimper?

I'm not at all trying to bash the dealer or anyone. My goal is encourage everyone to not feel dumb or incapable of verifying things themselves. I believe that your overall experience with things like this goes up this way. Knowing how to do it right helps you choose the right people to pay and keeps you from paying the wrong people to do things the wrong way.

klassic knows this and I am way farther ahead of my trailers issues now thanks to your inputs which I appreciate very much.

Also, I still am very fond of this trailer. It's a great trailer. This is just a small issue and it's not going to sour my experience in any way. It will get resolved by RV Sacramento or me. I hope it's them but as a backup I have me. My expectation is they will listen to me and it will be resolved quickly.

[Cdash]

Originally Posted by klassic

A little off topic. But I'm curious to know what else they have hooked to that 30a breaker in the TSB picture.
My breaker is dedicated solely to the roof solar.
What happens when the other item trips the breaker then it auto resets...then keeps tripping. You would think it's your roof solar, but it could be the other item.

I was wondering about that as well. I think that 30 amp breaker that they refer to is equivalent to your 50 amp breaker (you have a 50 amp electrical setup?)

A 30 amp auto set breaker costs, what? $10? Can't believe that isn't part of the repair, but then you'd need another wire too......

So, your solar wire (red) comes from the roof, goes to the 30 amp breaker and then goes where?

[klassic]

Daddy.. I love doing this stuff. I just wish I could get my grubby hands on your trailer with you and play back yard electrician.
Then get on your dirt bike and show you, at 50 years old, I can still do a 120' table top.

Isn't your front solar breaker a 20a? You'll need more for your 500watts

Cdash... Follow the wires on the top of the breaker. They keep skipping over to the last breaker beside the disconnect switch, that is the main 50a breaker that goes to the battery. There was never any need for the solar wire to go directly to the battery according to how my prewire was.
Thus part of my confusion as to why daddy was having trouble 30 thread pages ago.

[Cdash]

Originally Posted by Onefastdaddy

klassic knows this and I am way farther ahead of my trailers issues now thanks to your inputs which I appreciate very much.

If nothing else, I would think that you are very happy you found your roof leak as a result of all of this and got it resolved before damage set in. That is worth all of it by itself.

All of this is really making me want to go tear apart my hallway wall to see what is in behind it. That is where I am guessing that my wiring goes from Red & black to white and black.

I am guess that ultimately, what happened here, is that Go Power supplies an install kit to Jayco (roof top unit and wire). Those kits had a given length of wire that wasn't long enough. Jayco supplied and possibly spliced wire to it to get it where it needed to go (battery box area). Since Go-Power convinced them that the trailer interior, nowhere near the battery, was a good place for a converter, they may have left a wire un-spliced in this location for connection to the converter. That location is different based on floor plan. In my hallway wall and in/under/behind your cabinets/microwave/fridge.

I'll be curious to see what the dealer finds in yours.

I find it interesting that my trailer was built in February, probably one of the last units that was built before this was caught and corrected, and I do NOT have red coming down from the roof into the basement, even though they say that white/black is an "early build" condition.

[Subaru297]

I think if your dealer does not sort this out at this point I would do it myself. Grab a second set of hands and see if you can move the prewired positive that you have confirmed goes to the roof. If you can pull a new positive and negative wire from there to your roof and remove all the Jayco wiring that is useless or wired incorrectly.

Sounds like you are handy and would prefer that it is done correctly (by you) rather than let the dealer bodge it up even more.

I have a theory (speculation) not based in any fact that Go-Power or Zamp is paying Jayco to prewire units for solar so that the end user is inclined to by Go-Power or Zamp parts thinking it will be plug and play. I really doubt that Jayco did any engineering on the system and probably don't understand it well enough to help customers. Go Power just said install this on the roof and run two wires to here and put these stickers on it! Ok? Great. See ya later.

Jayco should just install a combiner box on the roof with a conduit that we can run our own wire through. Easy peasy and upgradeable & customizable for the end user.

[Onefastdaddy]

I'd really like to go riding. We sold our bikes before moving onto the boat in 2014 but I definitely have my eye on another.
Thanks for all the help, it would be great to have help here in person but I know it's a small world we will probably cross paths in person and share notes. I'm sure there's no shortage of projects in a trailer.

[Onefastdaddy]

Subaru, that's a good theory. My thought before you wrote that was that Jayco is paid an "incentive" to use the kits.

[Onefastdaddy]

Originally Posted by Cdash

If nothing else, I would think that you are very happy you found your roof leak as a result of all of this and got it resolved before damage set in. That is worth all of it by itself.

All of this is really making me want to go tear apart my hallway wall to see what is in behind it. That is where I am guessing that my wiring goes from Red & black to white and black.

I am guess that ultimately, what happened here, is that Go Power supplies an install kit to Jayco (roof top unit and wire). Those kits had a given length of wire that wasn't long enough. Jayco supplied and possibly spliced wire to it to get it where it needed to go (battery box area). Since Go-Power convinced them that the trailer interior, nowhere near the battery, was a good place for a converter, they may have left a wire un-spliced in this location for connection to the converter. That location is different based on floor plan. In my hallway wall and in/under/behind your cabinets/microwave/fridge.

I'll be curious to see what the dealer finds in yours.

I find it interesting that my trailer was built in February, probably one of the last units that was built before this was caught and corrected, and I do NOT have red coming down from the roof into the basement, even though they say that white/black is an "early build" condition.

Thank you for your reply, I will post my results for sure. FWIW Jayco replied to my eMail to them with my findings about the polarity being off with each of the locations. They were very polite and said have a dealer look at it.

Everything is on hold until Thursday. Well, I'll go ahead and mount the panel on the roof before then. I think I may only put 1 panel up there. This trailer has very modest power needs. One 250w panel and a single honda e2000i generator and the one 110A/hr battery maybe all we need for our initial tour of the Western US we have planned.

[klassic]

Does the HT have room in the battery compartment for 2 batteries?

[Cdash]

Kind of, not really.....

I measured and I can put two Trojan T-105's in the existing battery compartment if I orient them 90 degrees to how you'd normally out a battery in it, but no extra room for them to be mounted IN a box. There would be about ½" to spare before hitting the wall/door.

I'm am considering putting 2 batteries in and finding a storage box that I can cut up and put over the batteries too vent any gas. I'd place it on the batteries like a hood and connect the factory vent hose to it.

In my old 5er, I ran two group 27 "deep cells" (I use that term lightly as they were cheap batteries) that a dealer installed without any boxes. I now know that was wrong, but after 5 years of running it that way and not really caring for my batteries, nothing ever corroded or blew up. That experience makes me feel that this would be reasonable.

[klassic]

If it's possible to line the compartment with some thin sheet metal and silicone the corners to make it somewhat "air tight" ...then make a hole in the bottom floor to the outside and put a vent in the door, you would have something like the NorthPoint/pinnacle battery compartment.

[Flapper]

Originally Posted by klassic

Does the HT have room in the battery compartment for 2 batteries?

On my older RLS it sorta does. Can fit 2 Costco 6v. No battery box. Pieces of 2x4 and harder foam rubber to block them from sliding around. The compartment has big open areas to the outside, so no need for special vents.

[Onefastdaddy]

Ok, back from the dealer. Good and bad news. Bad first. Dealer didn't know either why the wires were crossed or where the coiled up red/black go from the roof. They would have had to run new wires as trying to find the unconnected wires would have required tearing things apart that may not go back together the same.
However, they gladly helped me out by doing a plan I had already. I have in hand one of these APS YC500A- microinverter one inverter for two solar panels. It's really cool. You plug in one, or even two panels directly to it. There's connectors for a panel on each side. 500W max total so 250w max panels into each side. Then output is 240v AC. They can also be connected together so put up two more panels by just adding one more of these YC500A. They can be bolted under the panel. 250.00 on Amazon.

So up on the roof I will do the DC to AC conversion and run romex right to the AC panel. When I looked up the AC panel (main controller) I saw it had open connectors for 120v there. So, the dealer (RV Sacramento) took no time at all to run the romex to the panel from the roof. I was surprised how well they knew this trailer and how they knew just where to run the cable. I would not have figured that out on my own.
I showed the technician/electrical guy the proposed wiring and he agreed, that will work. I was at the dealer less than an hour.

What RV Sacramento did extremely well was this:
1. They scheduled me quickly to get me in there quickly.
2. They were willing to listen to me and let me show them my situation with the reverse polarity from the roof connector.
3. They did the "recall" work in about 10min. Simple and it was just as klassic said. I had them leave the black wire and white wire unconnected in the battery area as clearly it was not wired right at Jayco when built. Who knows what's hidden inside still. Jayco won't talk about it. Nice huh? I can't fault the dealer how should they know when clearly the factory didn't put the cables where they are supposed to be. Catch 22, Jayco won't talk. Dealer doesn't know.
4. They were quick to work with me and ok'd the running of the romex for me. We found a compromise that worked out for both of us.

Win/Win. I have a single romex run from the main panel up to the roof via the refrigerator vent. Very clean. Very simple. We can go on our trip and deal with it later (the botched wired for solar roof connector/wiring).

I will post more about the wiring very soon. I really think this is the optimal way to wire up solar. The reason is because the trailer has a good DC charger for the batteries. By feeding the AC side I don't need to worry about that loop of running battery to AC then the charger in the main controller charging the battery from the AC from the battery.

So, I'm really unhappy at Jayco for completely screwing me on the solar ready wiring. I give the dealer high marks for working hard to mitigate that. They were willing to run new wires for me but it would take another visit and leaving it with them for some time. We want to hit the road. So leaving it completely as-is leaves that option open down the road during the warranty. Maybe in the meantime I can get a dealer to get Jayco to talk to them and tell them where the wires are hidden?

So, box is 250.00 and the cable was 75.00 (ouch). But this will feed my AC right off the panels via a single romex. Simple. I'll share how the wire was routed as well it's a simple run. But I'll probably do that elsewhere as it's off topic now. If I do find the wiring or Jayco talks I'll update this thread.

[Subaru297]

Interesting approach. I have never heard of that before. I guess that is probably how residential solar is run.

I think one of the biggest benefits of going solar is getting a good solar controller to charge your batteries. A programmable one can take much better care of your batteries and charge them more efficiently than the onboard converter. Unless you upgrade the converter to something programmable and upgrade the wiring to the battery so you actually get the power to them.

Let us know how it works out. Are you planning for a more traditional solar install after your trip?

[Onefastdaddy]

@all: One catch with that YC500A ... it senses if there is current on the line and won't turn on without it. I guess to prevent back feeding during a power outage. Found this out after hooking it all up and finding no power was coming out of the YC500A up top.

So, in my case since I want it to work when I'm not connected to shore power I need to feed the AC bus the YC500A is on inverted power from the batteries. At night though or cloudy days I don't want a feedback loop with the "Converter" that will try and charge the batteries.

I know people do this. How do you all get around the loop with the batteries and the charger and the inverter? I suppose I could simply trip the breaker on the converter/charger manually. Would be nicer to do it in an automated way. Maybe relays?

Anyone think differently? Anything I'm missing?

Here's some photos from today. The brackets I made from angle aluminum from Home Depot. Cut with a hacksaw. I'm old school. Too painful and cheap to spend eighty bucks to a few hundred for ready made brackets when I can make some for a few bucks.

There are three sheet metal screws holding the bracket to the panel and 3 wood screws holding the bracket to the roof. We put down a thick bead of Silicone first for it to hold and seal. Over that when the silicone is dry I will add a top layer of self leveling roof dicor sealant over it all.

[klassic]

Awesome picture Daddy!

[Onefastdaddy]

Just wanted to not leave my last couple of posts there without a warning. Utility Grid and Micro-Grid (battery made AC) should never meet. That's why the solar micro-inverter turns off when the grid is off. The solution I ultimately install will be one that keeps shore power completely separated from Solar or Battery made AC.

[klassic]

Just a transfer switch?