Wiring help

[Jason Wood]

So I started making some good progress on the Red Dale. The floor is in and the front wall is back in place. Today I started to work on some wiring. The guy I bought it from said he couldn;t get the lights to work and just bought magnetic lights for the rear bumper. I got under the camper and took a good look at the wiring. I'm guessing that it is a faulty ground that's stopping the lights from working. I'm going to open a few up and test for continuity just to make sure.

What really has me stumped right now is the converter. It is much different from what I had in my Apache Pop up. This one has a fuse box with a 15amp breaker and then a separate converter/charger that houses the 12v fuses. From what I can tell...the shore power comes into the 110 breaker box and then goes through the breaker and feeds the 4 110 outlets in the camper. One of those outlets is right next to the converter and the converter is plugged into that outlet. I'm guessing that the converter is pulling power from the outlet and converting it to 12v and then going out to the 12v fixtures and back to the battery to charge it? 

The weird part is that I don;t have my battery connected at all right now and when I was connected to shore power today to test the front wall outlet the 12v fixtures worked even when my converter switch was switched to battery??? 

Does this mean there is something faulty with the converter wiring? Switch? Any help trying to understand this would be great. I posted pics from my phone into my album but can't post album pics in this post. Let me know what I can do to figure this out.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

[32rhnxf5d8lrx]

If I correctly understand what you are saying, I too would be confused.

I understand you have no shore power applied (no  AC power to the converter) and that when you measure the battery voltage it is increasing.  That is not typical, especially because you said you had the DC lights, fan, etc turned on.  A battery under load may hold at a level but I have never known one to increase without being in a charge mode.

With no shore power, the setup you describe has no ability to "charge".

When you say "did not have shore power connected" - does that mean the rig has no shore power or the converter has no shore power.

I'm thinking the rig was plugged in but the converter was not...and...the battery is receiving a trickle charge from a source that you are unaware of.

When you get wherever you are going this weekend, I would suggest you disconnect the battery and plug the rig into shore power.  This prevents the battery from being damaged and you yet still have full functionality of the rig since the converter is providing DC where needed.

In case of a power outage...well, with the battery disconnected everything should go dark but in your case I am not sure.

[Jimco_W001]

If you put a load on a battery its voltage will go down and when you remove a load the battery voltage will increase.

[Jason Wood]

So a year later and I figured out the problem...Seems that my multi-meter is not functioning correctly. I borrowed a much more expensive one from a guy at work and his read the voltage perfectly. I used mine and the voltage kept increasing. Seems that the multi-meter needs to be replaced.