Chirp Chirp At 4:30 AM

This past Sunday morning at 4:30am Gerry heard a sound coming from the middle of the motor home.  She woke me up so I could help trace down the sound.  Now I don't function very well that early in the morning and my hearing isn't that great so I wasn't optimistic we could find the source of the sounds.

At first I thought it might be the water heater and somehow the cutoff valve malfunctioned and the burner was heating the water too hot.  I turned off the water heater and drained the hot water.  That didn't have any effect on the noise so we were back to square one.

I went outside to try and track down the noise and found it was coming from one of the bins.  How could that be?  I opened the bin door and the noise became louder.  That was when I noticed the Xantrex RS-3000 inverter attached to the top of the bin.  It was making the chirping noise.  Oh Oh!!  We still had 12V and 120V power so that was good but the noise wasn't a good sign.  I couldn't do anything about the problem and by this time it was 7:00am.

Now what?  No sense in going back to bed so we put on a pot of coffee and stayed up. Around 9:00am I called a certified Xantrex dealer/repair shop and left a message.  They called us back later and set up a service call for Monday.  

Monday was a busy day for us with a lot of paperwork to fill out for change of address and such.  Then we had to have all the paperwork verified by a Notary Public and get back before the service man arrived.  Of course the Notary had to read the forms about 5 times and couldn't figure out where to place her seal and sign the papers.  Gerry used to be a Notary and tried to help the lady out but wasn't getting anywhere with her.  Finally, she decided to place the seal where we had told her and got that finished.  What should have been a 5 minute task took almost 30 minutes.  We managed to get the paperwork in the mail and then hurried back to the park.

By this time the repairman had arrived and was waiting in front of the motorhome.  Once he found out it was a Xantrex RS-3000 he said it wasn't repairable if that was the problem.  It seems Xantrex made the unit so it couldn't be repaired.  Great!   He took out the unit and said it was a fan inside the center and almost impossible to get to and they couldn't get another fan.  He wired the motorhome so we have power and hooked up a trickle charger for the batteries and said he would be back in 3-4 days with a new inverter that can be repaired.   I always heard good things about Xantrex but they sure didn't live up to the hype with this unit.

In addition, the remote box on the wall that looks exactly like it's replacement will not work with the new inverter.  Then to make matters worse, our Extended Warranty on the motorhome says the remote is an upgrade and won't cover the cost of it.  They do cover the rest of the repair so it could have been worse.  For those who don't know much about inverters, ours is a very large one that supplies all the electrical power to our all-electric motorhome and costs anywhere from $1500 to $2500 plus installation.  

So, now we wait for the new Xantrex unit to come in and have it installed.  I am very happy that we included the extended warranty when we bought the coach and with all the repairs so far we have almost broken even.  As they say, it is the cost of doing business.  Meanwhile, as long as we stay hooked up to shore power everything is fine.  Hopefully, we won't have to find a huge extension cord when we are ready to leave.

Just another day on the road.