Saturday, Jul 05, 2014 at 19:37
We ordered the ESC fitted at the factory but despite a number of attempts we couldn't get any info as to how Jayco were going to wire it up. Going on the ALKO website info I chose to wire the car up for an Anderson Plug for the ESC feed. Reasons were to allow for disconnection of it alone and the ALKO requirement for a dedicated 30 Amp capable feed that I reasoned was rather high for the 12 pin plug pin sizes. I used 6 B&S twin core for the car side wiring and fed it from an auto resetting circuit breaker. I've since been told by an ESC trained person that it shouldn't be auto resetting or should just have a normal fuse (now changed to a plain circuit breaker). By the way, he also told me that the reason for the 2 LED's on the "A" frame ESC unit are just a case of redundancy. When we picked up the van from the Dealer we found that Jayco had wired it up to the 12 pin trailer connector and the Dealer wasn't interested in changing it to an Anderson Plug. Told us it was our problem basically. We drove off and I changed it in the Caravan Park to match our Anderson Plug. The factory wiring had also been through the small pins of the 12 pin plug, not the heavier duty one's.
Now back
home I've since changed it to a Redarc isolator in the engine bay so that when the engine isn't running then the ESC feed is isolated. This isolator also feeds
the tub mounted Redarc DC/DC unit and the dual battery. I did this because on leaving South on the way back
home we had a 3 hour stop with all still connected up and something flattened the main battery. It hasn't repeated itself but we no longer need to constantly disconnect the Anderson ESC, Anderson to fridge and 12 pin connector to ensure isolation. ALKO stated that the ESC feed at rest should only be a few milliamps so it shouldn't have done it. The other Anderson plug for the van fridge is fed from the dual battery so should have only flattened that one, which it didn't.
At all stops before leaving we checked that the green LED's were on for the ESC but somewhere in the last 110 km to
home this failed. The next time the car and van were connected up this was noticed and it took some time to track it down. A multi pin connector underneath the van had come apart and as the ESC and the Breaksafe are interconnected both were inactive. Not a nice feeling. The offending connector was up above a shield so I doubt that it was a case of
debris hitting it, just poorly assembled. An extra LED display on the car dash might be nice.
Phil
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