Thread: Slides stopping
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Old 01-13-2013, 03:15 PM   #19
Art-n-Marge
Montana Master
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Murrieta
Posts: 5,816
M.O.C. #9257
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There are several issues with slideouts and here's the scoop, since I pretty much had all these problems at one time or another. Any of this will cause an intermittent start/stop of the breakers and if the breakers do this they will weaken and cause the problem once again. Monitor all these and you should be good.

1. Fluid level - when full the reservoir should be filled to 1/4" from the top. Use any Type A ATF fluid - any cheap Mercon, Dextron would fit the bill as these are replacements for the hard to find Type A. Do not use Type F.

2. Slides out of adjustment - 99.9% of the time this is NOT the problem if the slides eventually go all the way in or out. This is a tough job to fix yourself, but it has been a solution for some.

3. Slide maintenance - Properly maintained (dry lubed, whatever the manual recommends) helps prevent stress as the slides move in and out. I clean then lubricate the gearing and rollers with a dry silicon lubricant (sold at RV or hardware stores) periodically. In addition I also clean and treat the rubber surrounds for all four slides - stuff is sold for this too.

4. Unstable rig - my manual recommends that the rear stabilizers must be in place to minimize any extra movement from the slides being in operation. The extra movement might cause extra stress as the slide extends or retracts and cause the breakers to reset - they will reset and continue but remember that excessive autoresetting means you'll be changing these out as they weaken.

5. Weak Battery - this sounds like this might be a problem in your case especially since you mention that when connected to shore power, there is no problem. This implies when connected to shore power, the 12v converter in the rig is providing enough power to operate the slides and the battery(ies) are not strong enough to do this by themselves.

6. Weak autoresetting breakers - this turned out to be my major problem. After I started lubricating things regularly, and kept the reservoir filled as recommended, always stabilized and made sure the batteries were fully charged and maintained (mind need water level checking), the only problem left to solve was this one. There is documentation from Lippert (assuming you have lippert hardware) and how to fix it by REPLACING the autoresetting breakers to a higher rating, either 80 amps or as much as 100 amps. Ever since doing this I have had NO issues and I have passed on this recommendation to many others (via email or phone calls) and there has been 100% success for members who got this recommendation. If you do this fix and you still have problems when using only the coach batteries I would strongly suspect your batteries or whatever you use as a charging system for them.

There you have it. Eveything I've experienced, learned from the MOC, or from Lippert and resolved this issues as part of my maintenance to keep the slides operating correctly.
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