Montana Owners Club - Keystone Montana 5th Wheel Forum - View Single Post - HELP -URGENT

rfdbrown32166 · 12-20-2015, 04:41 AM

Lol. Ok I'll tell you the location of the fuse. But it is somewhat embarrassing. I'm 60 years old now and my eye sight isn't what it used to be. I can't see dark writing on a black background. So ... I located my converted beside the furnace behind the removeable panel in the 'basement'. It was an IOTA DLS-55 but it didn't have the IQ4module. There were no fuses on the unit like it shows in the PDF manual I downloaded. I got to thinking thst ccouldn't be right, no fuse? So I traced the wires from the converter and they went through a hole in the wall right behind my breaker box. My breaker box in right a floor level on my entry stairwell, to look at the breakers I have to get down on my hands and knees. Not an easy task itself. Well I did that, on my hand and knees with a flash light and screw driver I removed the cover panel of the breaker box to see where the 12v wires went. They came into the box cavity then went up through the top of it. Now here is the old age bad eyesight embarrassing part. It was then that I realzed there is a 12v fuse panel in top of the braker panel but it is behind a snap in plastic cover and doesn't look like a removable thing. It is clearly marked but it has a brown lettering on black plastic. So it was totally invisible to me until I got right up close to it, took off my glasses (I wear trifocals and they don't work worth a damn in those kind of situatiobs) and shined my flashlight on it. So I popped off the panel and lo and behold there were all my 12v fuse and the one 30amp fuse marked Main was blown. After a few innapropriate expletives I replaced the fuse and now everything is fine.

So the ordeal which took me two days to resolve and a lot of crawling around in the basement could have been resolved in just 5 minutes if I'd had better eyesight or a bloidy users manual which wasn't a generic RV users guide.

Oh well, on the positive side I discovered how mice have been getting in, I replaced the battery which had a defective cell which led to the 30amp fuse blowing and I am once again much more knowledgable about my Montana thanks the great help I get from the users here and my crawling around in the basement. It sonewhat reminds me of a movie I saw in my youth ... Farenhight 451. Books were banned so the collective knowledge of the world was preserved by a group of people that lived in the forest, each of them had remembered a book word for word. lol.

And after researching the converter online I think I will switch this one out for a unit with the IQ4 modual, the smart charge system. It maintains a constant voltage of 13.4v unless it detects the battery is discharging then it switches to 14.2v to quick charge the battery. The unit I have installed doesn't work that way. The system it has is laughable to say the least. On the top of the converter is taped a plug that you can plug into what looks like a phone jack on the front of the converter so that the converter will switch over to 14.2v. Right ... not going to happen in this old mans lifetime. So I going to get an IOTA DLS-55 w/IQ4 which does all of that automatically.

Again, thanks again to everybody for all your help and when you quit laughing ... have a rum and eggnog on me. lol

Here endeth the epistle of Richard the poor sighted.

12-20-2015, 04:41 AM	#19
rfdbrown32166 Established Member Join Date: Mar 2015 Location: Erickson Posts: 43 M.O.C. #17238	Lol. Ok I'll tell you the location of the fuse. But it is somewhat embarrassing. I'm 60 years old now and my eye sight isn't what it used to be. I can't see dark writing on a black background. So ... I located my converted beside the furnace behind the removeable panel in the 'basement'. It was an IOTA DLS-55 but it didn't have the IQ4module. There were no fuses on the unit like it shows in the PDF manual I downloaded. I got to thinking thst ccouldn't be right, no fuse? So I traced the wires from the converter and they went through a hole in the wall right behind my breaker box. My breaker box in right a floor level on my entry stairwell, to look at the breakers I have to get down on my hands and knees. Not an easy task itself. Well I did that, on my hand and knees with a flash light and screw driver I removed the cover panel of the breaker box to see where the 12v wires went. They came into the box cavity then went up through the top of it. Now here is the old age bad eyesight embarrassing part. It was then that I realzed there is a 12v fuse panel in top of the braker panel but it is behind a snap in plastic cover and doesn't look like a removable thing. It is clearly marked but it has a brown lettering on black plastic. So it was totally invisible to me until I got right up close to it, took off my glasses (I wear trifocals and they don't work worth a damn in those kind of situatiobs) and shined my flashlight on it. So I popped off the panel and lo and behold there were all my 12v fuse and the one 30amp fuse marked Main was blown. After a few innapropriate expletives I replaced the fuse and now everything is fine. So the ordeal which took me two days to resolve and a lot of crawling around in the basement could have been resolved in just 5 minutes if I'd had better eyesight or a bloidy users manual which wasn't a generic RV users guide. Oh well, on the positive side I discovered how mice have been getting in, I replaced the battery which had a defective cell which led to the 30amp fuse blowing and I am once again much more knowledgable about my Montana thanks the great help I get from the users here and my crawling around in the basement. It sonewhat reminds me of a movie I saw in my youth ... Farenhight 451. Books were banned so the collective knowledge of the world was preserved by a group of people that lived in the forest, each of them had remembered a book word for word. lol. And after researching the converter online I think I will switch this one out for a unit with the IQ4 modual, the smart charge system. It maintains a constant voltage of 13.4v unless it detects the battery is discharging then it switches to 14.2v to quick charge the battery. The unit I have installed doesn't work that way. The system it has is laughable to say the least. On the top of the converter is taped a plug that you can plug into what looks like a phone jack on the front of the converter so that the converter will switch over to 14.2v. Right ... not going to happen in this old mans lifetime. So I going to get an IOTA DLS-55 w/IQ4 which does all of that automatically. Again, thanks again to everybody for all your help and when you quit laughing ... have a rum and eggnog on me. lol Here endeth the epistle of Richard the poor sighted.