Newell Gurus

Today was my turn for a head scratcher. I could not get the HWH system to go into level mode. The travel solenoids would not energize. I set the ride heights manually with the leveling pad and drove for a while. At the rest stop I thought I would do a little troubleshooting while taking a break from driving. I checked every fuse I could find with none found open. Not really understanding the system, I thought maybe it was connected to the slide out not locking since my leveling light and emergency brake light has been on for a year. So I deployed the slide. BIG MISTAKE !!!!!!!!  There is a very good reason to only deploy in travel mode. The coach was torqued and it racked the slide. I couldn't get it back in without one upper corner being over an inch out of flush. 

I tried a couple of times to untorque the chassis with the manual leveling but no dice. 

So, I made a jumper wire with a switch and I hot wired one of the travel solenoids to 12V. They are all tied together so that forced the coach into travel mode kind of. When the coach was leveled, I cycled the slide several times and it squared itself. 

When we stopped for the evening. I went hunting for a miracle. Since I had the hot wire to the travel solenoids, I measured terminal 75 on the HWH board. It now has 12v, so that told me the problem was not downstream of the HWH brain box. There is a fuse on the back the leveling board that I has previously checked visually but with more time I thought I would ohm all the fuses. When I moved the board to access the fuse, the travel solenoids clicked on, and the LEDs for travel lit up. Hmmm, maybe a loose connection. 

Here are pics of what I found. A burned connection and a bad solder joint on the board for that particular connection. It is the 12v supply to the solenoids. I don't know which came first the bad connection which melted the solder joint, or vice versa.

Anyhoo, I resoldered the joint, and cleaned the connector. All seems to be good now. 

A blind pig occasionally finds an acorn. 

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you are da man.

tom

just so you dont think yourself as too daft for putting the slide out when not in travel mode.....a few days ago i was driving and for some reason i thought the bode air door wasnt closed. i didnt want to have problems with it so i pulled over to the side of the road. it was not very level putting it mildly. i opened the door and then closed it. the door was no where near closing but only because the coach was torqued. i panicked thinking the door was bent, but i pulled the coach back up on the road, open and closed it and all was well.

note to self. do not open door when on a steep shoulder....

tom

Richard that was too easy. You didn't get nearly dirty enough.

Good catch Richard. That could have been, to those who depend on a private mechanic for everything, a bill for 8+ hours of troubleshooting. Electrical gremlins are elusive. Only thing that would have been worse than a hidden bad solder joint is if it were intermittent.

Seems like a "Blind Pig" found a truffle !

One thing that help finding poor connections are the thermal IR guns - a bad connection will always be warmer than the surrounding ones.