I was up early yesterday. I would say it was “dark thirty,” but I was surprised to find daylight at 5:30am. I drove Donna to the Flagstaff Pulliam airport and dropped her off for her flight to New York City at 6:00am. On the way home, I drove through McDonald’s and bought two egg and sausage breakfast burritos. I rarely eat food from McDonald’s and this wasn’t the best decision I made all day.

Back at the coach, I had another cup of coffee and ate breakfast. I was feeling tired. I didn’t sleep well the night before. We had strong wind gusts in the night that continued throughout the morning. The wind rocked the coach in the night and woke me several times. Why is it that any time I have to get up early to an alarm clock, I sleep fitfully?

I wrote a short blog post, then kicked back on the sofa read the book, Code Talkers, for awhile. I was thinking I could nap. I didn’t sleep. After a while, I was feeling a little restless so I took a walk around the RV park.

Sunday, an old coach pulled into a site near us. It looked like an old Newell to me. While I was out walking, I saw a guy working in the engine compartment. I stopped at his site and said, “Good morning.” I introduced myself and asked what he was up to. His name was Louis. He’s from Alberta, Canada. He had just bought the coach and was having troubles. He said he’s only covered about 400 miles in the last week since buying the coach because he has electrical problems. He needed to get back to Canada.

The coach turned out to be a 1993 Barth, not a Newell. I hadn’t heard of Barth before, but I learned a few things about them. Back in the day, they were a high-end motorhome manufacturer. This Barth was built on a Gillig bus chassis. The outer skin was all aluminum. In 1993, it was a very exclusive coach. Louis bought it from the original owner.

He told me his batteries weren’t holding a charge. After he bought the coach, he replaced the batteries. I asked if I could help. He wanted all the help he could get. He wasn’t sure if the two chassis batteries and the bank of coach batteries were supposed to charge at the same time. I looked at the chassis batteries in the engine compartment and tried to find a transfer switch. I told Louis how most coaches are wired and how it usually works. He said he had wiring diagrams. Now we were getting somewhere.

I checked the chassis batteries and they were fine. I asked where the coach (house) batteries were. He showed me a compartment with batteries on two levels – six 12-volt batteries in total! They were massive, the biggest 12-volt batteries I’ve seen. He told me that three of them were new and they were the only ones wired into the system. I could see the new Lifeline AGM batteries he’d installed. These are very expensive batteries – around $600 each.

I checked the voltage at these batteries. I asked Louis if he had them wired in parallel. He said he was sure they were. I was sure they weren’t wired correctly. One battery on the lower deck showed completely dead, only registering 1.44 volts. The other two were fully charged. This doesn’t make sense if they are wired in parallel.

The batteries were very large. To follow the cabling, I had to use a flashlight and reach my full arm’s length into the compartment. By following the cables, I found the issue. The cables from the dead battery in the lower compartment went through the bulkhead into the house. Presumably, they went to a fuse panel, buss bar or post to power the various household 12-volt items. However, the battery wasn’t connected in parallel to the other two batteries.

The other two batteries were wired in parallel. However, they didn’t connect to the house. They were connected to the inverter which charges the batteries. So, what he had was a battery powering his house, but not receiving a charge. He had two more batteries, not powering anything, but being maintained at full charge. No wonder he was losing power to everything inside.

As I was explaining this to him, another neighbor, Jerry, came over. Jerry has a Travel Supreme coach across from our site. We made some small talk and then Jerry said he was looking for an electrician. He said the plug on the end of his 50amp power cord was broken. The ground lug pulled out of the molded plastic plug and he couldn’t run his air conditioners. His wife wasn’t happy with no A/C. He had a new replacement plug, but thought he needed an electrician to wire it up.

I loaned a few tools to Louis to rewire his battery bank and told Jerry, “You don’t need to pay an electrician. Let’s get ‘er done.” I thought I could wire up the new connector in 20 or 30 minutes. It never seems to work out that way. Once I was into the project, Jerry told me that the plug came with instructions showing what length to cut each wire. Rather than walk back to my trailer and retrieve a tape measure from my toolbox, I used the TLAR method (That Looks About Right).

The heavy-gauge wire in a 50amp cable is very stiff. In hindsight, measuring first and cutting once would have been the way to go. I made three attempts at wiring the plug before I could get all of the wire to fit properly. An hour and half later, a 30-minute job was done.

I enjoyed helping the guys out. That’s RV life. With Donna away, I had nothing better to do.

The wind remained gusty all day. Today, they are calling for higher winds. I’ll hunker down and wait for Donna to return tonight.