Heat/AC failure in rigs with inCommand

[LHaven]

We just went through a bit of an exercise with our new 26RBSWE to get a manufacturing defect fixed. If your rig has an inCommand system and you're experiencing problems where your furnace or AC goes through periods of refusing to function, it may help you to read this. The tough part was getting three vendors on the same page so that they all realized that they had already seen this problem reported by many owners and that they had a fix for it.

When we took our unit home last fall, we immediately experienced a failure of the air conditioner to turn on (uncomfortable, since the temps were 100°+). The dealer didn't take me seriously, blaming it on my 30A receptacle. A week or so later, the problem disappeared all by itself, so I let it slide.

Come December, and now the furnace refuses to turn on… but only at night.

Through experimentation, I determined that when the temperature inside the rig (we weren't occupying it) went above 100° or so, the AC would not turn on; and when it went below 50° or so, the furnace would not turn on… bizarre, but technically plausible.

The dealer flat out told me he would have no idea how to even start troubleshooting a problem like that. I understood his position, but I needed it fixed.

Figuring it was a control logic failure, I called the ASA (inCommand) folks, who kicked the ball around the infield a couple of times, then told me they'd seen this sort of thing caused by the manufacturer-supplied HVAC controller they had to interface with. Keystone had no idea what to recommend except for me to take it in to a dealer (I told them the dealer had already thrown up their hands). Finally, I spoke to a different person at ASA, who told me quite definitely that they had worked this exact problem before, many people had experienced it, they knew the cause for sure, it was a particular model of HVAC controller from Dometic, and they gave me the name of the Keystone employee they had worked it with. Armed with all that information, I was able to get Keystone to tell me they had a service bulletin out on the problem, the fix was to replace the controller with a different model, and they would send my dealer the information he needed to perform it. We had the fix applied three days ago.

Unfortunately, the fix was incomplete. Last night, the ambient was 47°, and when I tried to turn the furnace on, the control panel showed "on" for about five seconds, then flipped back to "off" without turning on the furnace (acknowledging the failure and flipping off was new behavior, but still a failure). It did the same thing for the fan. However, when I used the iPhone app to turn the furnace on, it went on successfully (very strange!). Once the furnace was on, the control panel now could not turn it off (same behavior, flipped back after five seconds), but the iPhone could. Now, all these control signals go through the inCommand module, and some work and some don't, so I kicked this back to the folks at ASA and I'm waiting for a reply.

I wanted to put this out there for anybody who is seeing the same behavior (and if you're not seeing it yet, and you're still under warranty, you may want to see if your unit has this fault so you can get it fixed before it's a problem).