Today most people associate the name “Tesla” with the electric car company that alienated its entire consumer base because of its CEO’s political shenanigans, but the name actually belongs to the father of the modern electrical grid, Nikola Tesla.
Tesla famously duelled ideas of electricity with Thomas Edison: Tesla the champion of “Alternating Current (AC)” which is electricity traveling at high voltages in either direction of a line and being stepped down right before running into a consumer’s home, and Edison was the proponent of “Direct Current” which was low voltage electricity that went one direction straight to the user from the source. Each system is still in use today, perhaps most prominently in RVs.
Most cars generate 12-volt DC power from the alternator and batteries and feed it to all the electrical needs of said car. Pre-2000s this included the “cigarette outlet” which could both power special accessories, as well as my dad’s cigarette lighter. You pushed the lighter in, and it popped out when the coils were red hot and ready to light your favorite cowboy killer.
The RV is basically fed by DC. From the power post at the RV park, solar panels, tow vehicle cable to the battery, or bypassing the battery depending on the setup, and feeding the RV systems. Some lights, appliances, hydraulic systems, and pumps are all fed by current coming directly from tow vehicle, shore, or battery power. Most outlets, the refrigerator (in my RV, some fridges are DC or propane in other models), and some lights run off of AC power. How? The RV has what’s called an “inverter” which turns DC current into home-use friendly electricity. I have a pretty beefy inverter, and have a very hard time overloading it. It’s a practice I try to avoid when possible.
Immediately my RV showed electrical gremlins. In part because I didn’t completely understand which breakers needed to be shut off when it was stored, and in part because the shitty lead-acid battery was not being fed by the solar panels… but why? I was able to get by without this being a major show stopper because when it’s hooked up to shore power, or the Ram, it got enough electricity to run the systems I needed to in those situations, but independently it did not last long on battery. I have a very limited electrical background, mostly limited to replacing light fixtures and outlets in homes. That I can do with a high level of confidence, but my skills pretty much stop there. Saying, “Oh well, I don’t know, I’ll learn to live with it.” was not an option in this case, this was soon to be my entire life in a box.
On the final weekend voyage of the camper, we took it back to the same site in Ashford that we took our maiden voyage to. The time I didn’t spend on the mountain (I portered a Mount Rainier climb for the then-girlfriend) I was troubleshooting this system and doing much delayed upgrades I had sitting in shipping boxes in the RV’s basement (yes, that is an actual term for the underneath storage compartment).
What I found when installing an upgraded 320 hour lithium battery was that the beardos (many RVs are assembled by Amish people in northern Indiana) didn’t hook up the cables between the solar controller and the battery terminal posts in the battery compartment. I’m assuming this was part of their guerilla war against the English and our use of electricity (English is the term the Amish use to describe non-Amish people).
Once I completed the battery swap and hooked up the solar controller everything worked as it should have… except the fridge was no longer running. Fuck. Ok, obviously an inverter problem. Sure enough, it was. I had to trace a rat’s nest of electrical cable back to a hidden in-line fuse that must’ve thrown itself during the shenanigans I performed in the battery compartment. Flipped it back and everything performed as it should have. For now, I’d successfully solved all lingering electrical issues in the camper. It was a huge relief and I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment troubleshooting all of it on my own.
Next I took the back-up problem equation and tried to balance it by installing a camera on the back of the trailer. The neat little thing about the backup camera is that it only gets power when the lights are turned on. Not automatic: only on. That was a fun puzzle to solve and provided an interesting wrinkle on the long road trip to come.
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By this point things between me and the girlfriend were starting to come to a head. It became evident throughout the spring that this was going to be a long distance relationship if it was to continue, and there were a number of signs that we were not well-disposed to carry on a long distance relationship because of how we communicated, prioritized, and our general position in life.
I had known for some time that this relationship would not survive my PCS but I carried on anyway because we were so great together… when we were together. I didn’t want the ride to end. Was it selfish? I don’t know. Maybe? She was one of the absolute lights of my life and even though I saw our end on the horizon I didn’t want to leave the bar until the lights came on at 0200.
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The views and opinions presented herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of War or the U.S. Army.
