Sudden Change of Plans

 

Wesley Chapel, Florida (high 81, low 60)

We got up early yesterday morning preparing for our trip south.  We actually made pretty good progress and were going to be able to leave a bit earlier than normal.

However…..

When we went to retract the living room slide and there was nothing.  No power, no movement,  nothing.  We checked everything we knew to check and then our neighbor Ken came over and helped Al check a few more things.  Apparently, there is no power at the main switch inside, but there is power in the side compartments by the batteries.

The slide is made by Power Gear.  I emailed their tech support (which was very prompt and helpful).  In case any of you have the same slide manufacturer, you might want to make note of their email address for their tech support.  It is “info@powergearus.com.

They also have some videos that offer some help as well.  Evidently Power Gear makes other motor home components as well, so you may have their equipment somewhere on your Rv.

Here is the link for some diagnostic videos.  I haven’t had a chance to watch any of them yet, so I can’t vouch for them, but it’s a place to start.

The first thing we did was go to Lazy Days and get a couple fuses and a new relay module.  The old ones we had appeared to be okay, but we decided to go ahead and get new ones, just in case.  Then we would also have a spare for later.  Unfortunately, that didn’t help, but that was all we knew to do.

After a trip to Lazy Days and Cracker Barrel (we needed comfort food)  I started e-mailing Power Gear asking for guidance.  They responded almost immediately asking me questions.  I would have preferred a phone conversation, but they go the e-mail route.

By the time we got to this point, the campground internet was slow, slow, slow and all it did was frustrate me more. 

We didn’t get anywhere, except to understand we need to first find the slide control module that has 6 pins.  We thought we found it, but it turns out it was only the slide control board and was not made by Power Gear.

I did some research on a few Rv forums and discovered the slide control module can be hidden almost anywhere in the coaches and they are often difficult to locate.

We plan on contacting Monaco this morning to see if they can offer some guidance as to the location of the slide control module.

In the meantime, we had a call out to our mobile Rv tech.  He finally returned our call last night about 7:30  (I was sweating there) and he will come later this afternoon.  That made us feel a little better.

We are a bit frustrated about not being able to head down to the Keys, but on the plus side, we are safe and sound in our “home base” campground and we have the options of a mobile tech or Lazy Days nearby.  It would have been so much worse if we had made it down to Jonathan Dickinson State Park and had to get out of our site after the first night.  Also, on the bright side, they had some pretty good rain down south last night and more coming today.  We might have had a bad travel day to the Keys.

So, we’re looking on the bright side and are hopeful this will be an easy fix and won’t cost too much, or at least be a warranty item.

We understand you can hook up a battery to the wires on the slide motor.  That will tell you if the motor is bad.  The fact that we have no power coming to the interior switch may make that unlikely. That would probably be an easy fix, so hopefully that’s the problem.  That would also be a covered repair, where wiring issues would not.  Wish us luck.

Another example of plans made in jello!