Loose neutral in Air Conditioner circuit
I didn't find this one on a search of the forums, so I thought I'd post this as it's a rather important safety issue.
We are on a trip from Glacier NP back to Denver and hit some hot weather. Ran the air conditioner for several hours last night with no issues. Today after setting up at an RV park near Little Big Horn (@98 deg), we started up the air conditioner and about 20 minutes later started smelling something electrical. Tracked it down to melting neutral wires on the 20 amp circuits. Could have caused a fire if we hadn't caught it.
I cleaned up the wires and wrapped with electrical tape and reconnected to the neutral bar, making sure everything was really tight. Restarted the AC and have been watching the neutral to ground (holding At 0.5V to ground) and checking wire temps. Looks like at least the AC circuit had a loose neutral connection (wish I'd checked that before shutting off power and checking the wires). We will be checking this whenever the AC is on.
One more thing to check periodically to make sure now power wiring is loose. Not sure if this was a factory failure or just loosened while towing
|