After an exciting morning purchasing and picking up our new RV, we arrived home. The batteries? Yeah, still dead. Despite driving home and charging them with the engine generator, once we arrived home and turned off the engine, the battery light on the disconnect switch dimmed and went out. So we dutifully plugged it in to power and went to bed for the night. Unrelated to this, but that night we emailed our salesman to thank him again for his help, to say that, yes, he was right, the ride was smooth, and that we would be mailing him the remote controls for the TV and DVD player that we had forgotten to leave in our Ranger which we had traded in. I could have saved that $6 postage had I known that I would be back to the dealer soon.
The next morning, we went out to the van to check on the batteries and found them again, dead. Charging all night had not yielded any power. We called our salesman to verify that the charging procedure we were following was correct – not complicated, just really make sure you turn on the battery disconnect switch to allow power to flow to the batteries. He verified we were doing everything correctly, but despite that, we still could not get the batteries to charge using either the engine generator or plugging it in to shore power. I attempted to call Roadtrek directly, to double check that I was doing everything correctly. I had to leave a message which to this day, has never been returned.
Batteries at only 3%
While looking around in the van, I also noticed that the solar controller was blinking. It’s a gray box in a cabinet with a few lights on it, and one of the lights had been blinking since our tour with our salesman. That seemed odd because upon inspection, it seemed that that light was a ‘Battery Overvoltage’ indicator, which made no sense because our batteries didn’t seem to be getting ANY voltage. While waiting for the vehicle to hopefully charge, I found the manual for the solar controller online. According to the manual, the settings on the controller were incorrect. The CS Adventurous eTrek package includes 8 AGM batteries, but the solar controller had been set to ‘Flooded Batteries’ which AGM batteries are not. The manual also ominously warned never to set the battery type incorrectly.
It was clear something was amiss – as nice as the Mercedes Benz van portion was, without power in the living quarters, it was useless as an RV. After 5 days of leaving the RV plugged in to power and praying for a sign of life in those batteries, I knew we were getting nowhere. On day 6, the service manager responded with an email offering to walk me through how to charge the vehicle. Not believing in miracles, (at least with this van) exactly one week after picking it up, I brought the RV back to the dealer for service on October 20th. The service technician saw immediately that the solar controller was programmed incorrectly, and the settings on the inverter which should have been handling charging my batteries was incorrect as well. I could have waited forever and those batteries were never going to charge. He adjusted those items, and did some quick tests on the batteries and determined that I was ‘missing a part’ and they would have to order a battery equalizer and install that once it arrived. This sounded familiar because I had previously read about another Roadtrek owner’s (LONG) problem with their eTrek system and an equalizer had been part of their solution.
I rented a car and headed home, figuring ‘how long could this take, a week?’
Yeah, no.
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