August 26-27th - Issues with Homer After Winter Storage

When we got Homer home yesterday my first task was to look around inside. In the bathroom I found two mice on a sticky pad. That makes three - one under the hood and two here. Hopefully there are no more. After disposing of them I moved to the next project which was reinstalling the house batteries.

The house batteries are quite heavy and I have only about a quarter of an inch of clearance to get them in and out. The reason the battery compartment is so tight is that it was designed for one smaller 12 volt deep cycle battery. I replaced that single battery with two larger 6 volt golf car batteries because they hold a larger charge.  The batteries have been in the garage all winter on a charger/maintainer. I have to wheel the batteries out of the garage to the battery compartment. The two batteries are wired together to make 12 volts so I have to raise them together unto a plastic milk crate at the compartment door. The milk crate is a little lower than the battery compartment door but I can manage. In the past I have fought getting them in and out because of the limited clearance and the fact that the battery ground wire was shorter than the hot wire. The shorter ground wire did not allow me enough room to hook the batteries up while on the milk crate. I had to balance them on the compartment frame while I connected them. A real pain. To improve the situation I rode my scooter to O'Reilly's and bought a 12 inch long ground cable. I then bolted it to the chassis ground wire in the compartment. Here is a picture of the battery extension connection installed.

I wrapped the entire connection with two layers of electrical tape and then taped over all of that with gaffer's tape. This extension made it easy to connect the batteries on the milk crate. Once connected the batteries were then wiggled into place.

A couple of years ago I made plastic covers from milk jug handles to cover the exposed terminals because one time installing them an exposed terminal accidentally touched the compartment frame while wiggling the batteries in and IK got a big spark.  Here is a picture with an arrow pointing to one of the four homemade terminal covers held in place with wire ties.

Here is a picture of the batteries showing how close everything is once they are installed. The arrow points to the black ground wire which is the amount of  space between the batteries and ceiling of the compartment.

Here is a picture with an arrow pointing at the top of the compartment frame. The frame is actually lower than the top of the compartment so the batteries have to be pushed in on an upward angle.

The small red and black wires hanging out are for me to use to put a voltmeter on the batteries to check them more accurately than the analog meter inside and for connection to my small solar panel charger. The only way to check the water in the batteries is to pull them out. As you can image, a major pain.

The battery installation being completed I fired up the generator to exercise it. She started right up and after warming up was able to handle the air-conditioner.  I then turned on the furnace. It fired up perfectly, as did the hot water heater, and the refrigerator - both on electric and gas.

I next turned to the issue of the non-working backup camera. The monitor came on with "AV1" on a dark screen. This meant the monitor is working. The problem could only be two other things - the camera or the wire running to the camera from the dash monitor. I quit for the night and did some inquiring on the internet. Basically I read that the cameras rarely go bad but this one is pretty old so it was possible. The first thing to check was all connections.

This morning, after getting tested for Covid-19, I dug into the backup camera problem. I unplugged the monitor and plugged it back in, no picture. The wire to the camera runs from the dash monitor, through a hole in the dash and over to the right side of the cab where it is runs down to the floor, across the door, then back up to the ceiling cabinets where were it runs all the way to the back of the RV.

The next connection is behind the right kick panel. I took it apart and checked the connection. It was fine. I saw no damage to the wire in that area.  I then went back and to the camera, unscrewed it from its mount, and disconnected it from the cord running from the front dash area. I then took the camera to the cab, plugged the camera into the wire from the monitor, turned the monitor on, and I had a picture.  That meant that there was a problem with the wire running from the front to the back. I suspected mouse damage because I found this when we first purchased Homer in 2014. I had to purchase a new wire and fish it through all the cabinets.

I started looking through all the cabinets for damage and upon pulling the wire in one front cabinet I found this.

For whatever reason a mouse ate through the wire where it ran through this hole in the cabinet. The hole was plenty big enough for him to get through, he didn't need to do that and cause me all this grief.

As I recalled the cable I purchased in 2014 which runs from front to back was fairly expensive. I wondered if this time I could fix the damage this little bugger did. What did I have to lose? I cut the cable. Inside there are four very tiny wires wrapped with a metal mesh like in a TV cable. I had plenty of slack in the cable so I pulled the cable down out of the cabinet where I could work on it. I stripped the wires back. Here is a picture of the two ends.

The entire cable is less than a quarter of an inch in diameter so you can imagine how small the wires are to work with. They are so small my wire stripper would not strip them. I was going to attempt to solder them but decided to try crimp connectors because it would be hard to tape these tiny wires once soldered. The crimps worked and here is a picture of the cable wrapped in electrical tape after all the wires were crimp connected.

In the picture you can see the mouse turds and cabinet debris they left behind. I checked the camera for proper operation before securing the cable in place. It worked fine. I decided to move the cable up higher in the cabinet so the new connection wasn't laying on the floor of the cabinet where it could be subject to getting damaged when things were put in there. Here is a picture of the repaired cable mounted on the inside cabinet wall.

I then reinstalled the backup camera in its holder, plugged it in, and secured the extra cable in the back wardrobe. I checked it for operation again. It worked as it should.

Next winter I'm going to put a sticky trap in this cabinet area and hopefully catch any bugger before he or she does damage again. Mice are the bane of all RVers because the rigs often sit for long periods of time during the winter. I have to balance whether to take a chance on getting mice in the rig or letting Homer sit outside in the weather all winter. The last four years when we have been in Florida in the winter Homer has been in the large storage building we rent which is not out in the country. We didn't have any mice issues there.

My next project was checking the drawers for mice activity. I found some activity in all three kitchen drawers so we pulled everything out. Kelly washed everything while I washed the drawers with bleach and we reloaded everything. (A good time to eliminate some things we don't use.)

I still need to check all the air in the tires and the air in the air bags. Maybe tomorrow if it doesn't rain. I don't want to get that dirty today.