Fried Radio

[Wanda M.]

We installed a radio and it was wired from the front light wires. On battery the radio worked fine until we turned the Powertron converter over to the converter side and it melted the fuse and radio also. We had the trailer check out and was told that the converter is working as it should with the battery changer not working.

Would you wire the radio direct to the battery or should there be another fuse in the wiring from the front light? We have another radio but don't want to fry this one also so if someone could give us something, anything, it would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Chester Taje]

In my old previous Boler i wired my radio direct to battery and had a noise isolator installed in line and a fuse.

[Joe Z]

Seems something went wrong somewhere....... trailers are different than cars black is positive and white is ground....hope that's the way you hooked it up!
Try a smaller fuse next time....say a six amp. If you used twenty amp that's still way too high but even with that it should have blown the fuse before melting everything. Hopefully you just did the backwards wiring thing
Joe

[Ed Harris]

The first thing I would do is put a Voltmeter on the power wire you used for the Radio.
Measure the D.C. Voltage with the converter off and then on and see what the difference looks like.

I would try a purely resistive load like a lightbulb and see what happens also.
Somewhere the converter is NOT doing exactly what it should if turning it on killed the radio.
If the converter is said to work but will not charge the battery then maybe its regulated output is bad.
Lighting loads would tolerate this but more sophisticated loads like the radio might not.

Also maybe it was a coincidence? Try the radio alone straight from the battery and make sure it is fine before connecting it to the converter wiring or better yet,do run a seperate line from the battery,fuse it and connect directly to that.
Again though if the battery is still connected to the converter annd is getting a problematic unregulated charge current it may not be safe to run the radio even when connected to the battery.
Usually a battery will act as a "Filter" to smooth out problems from a converter but that will depend upon how bad the converter is and how good the battery is.

Also I am assuming when you say it was connected to the front lights that you mean the interior lights and not any running or turning signals???

Grounding circuits in these trailers is important and tricky too.You need to make sure that you have both a good 12volt positive annd negative connection or odd things can/may happen.

[Wanda M.]

When the radio was hooked up on the 12v side of the converter there was 12.4v on the wires but when we switched to converter it dropped to .02v.
Question is: would this be converter problem or bad ground problem???

It appears to me that the converter coil is not working properly and since we already did in a radio we will not be installing the fantastic fan until we have the power problems worked out.

We are looking at the Progressive Dynamics 9200 and trash the converter that's in there.

All the sugestions are great and if you could help with thses questions we would really appreciate it.

Thanks

[Ed Harris]

When the radio was hooked up on the 12v side of the converter there was 12.4v on the wires but when we switched to converter it dropped to .02v.
Question is: would this be converter problem or bad ground problem???

It appears to me that the converter coil is not working properly and since we already did in a radio we will not be installing the fantastic fan until we have the power problems worked out.

We are looking at the Progressive Dynamics 9200 and trash the converter that's in there.

All the sugestions are great and if you could help with thses questions we would really appreciate it.

Thanks

Wanda
I am afraid I do not really understand any of what you post above?

Fisrt of all,whomever said the converter worked as it should was wrong or you have it connected wrong or something has gone wrong since they looked at it.

Second,when you say"When the radio was hooked up on the 12v side of the converter there was 12.4v on the wires but when we switched to converter it dropped to .02v. "
I can not figure out what you mean here?

When the radio is on the 12volt side of the converter and it puts out 12.4volts is that not the same as the converter being turned on? If so what does "switching to the converter" mean?

Also if you are saying the converter output is .02volts,I would think that could do nothing at all to the radio and certainly not kill it.

It sounds like you have a converter or wiring problem but I am too confused now to say which.

[Wanda M.]

We are sorry for the confusion, as you can tell we are newbies and it seems we don't even know what we are talking about.

If you check the post called 'trashing powerton' we have decided to make the difficult simple.

I would really appreicate your wisdom on what we are thinking of doing?

Thanks for all you help.

[Joe MacDonald]

when I got my trillium, I found that someone had reversed the wires from the converter, so that the battery power was the right polarity, but converter power was reversed. Since my converter did not have a charge feature, this was never an issue for the previous owners. Since I was going to be installing some electronics, I'm glad I caught the mistake.
Joe

[Loren G. Hedahl]

Could be that somewhere along the line to the light the wires were switched. The light doesn't care which side is plus and the minus, but the radio does.

Your best bet is to run a separate pair of wires for your radio directly from the battery, as others have recommended previously. The battery does a good job of filtering out all the noise that may be coming in from your converter, fluorescent light, fan motors, etc.