Well, this is a boring Alaska entry. But when you are spending almost four months in the state, not every day can have beautiful scenery, glaciers, bears, and whales.
The prognosticators were right. It rained all day.
We had some business to take care of in the morning regarding our rental property in Florida and our seminar schedule next winter.
We are doing the Grand Rapids RV Show again in January, and we just signed a contract to do RV shows in LaCrosse, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota in February. Also, we got a call from our usual show promoter to do some shows – we’re just waiting on him to send us his schedule.
After those preliminaries, I dropped our huge basket of laundry off at the RV park laundry, and I went into town to the library. The RV park Wi-Fi just wasn’t getting it done, and neither was our weak 3G cell signal.
Internet in Haines, we discovered, is not very good, and if a cruise ship is in town, all the passengers connect through the one cell tower, and it’s almost unusable for anything other than checking email. Also, many passengers that aren't doing an excursion in Haines, come to the library to use the free Wi-Fi, so it slows way down.
Linda got our four loads of laundry done at the RV park. It was expensive, but Linda said the facilities are the cleanest, best she's seen in an RV park in all of our years on the road. She made a point to go in and compliment the staff of Haines Hitch-Up RV Park.
I worked at the library until about 6:30, and during that time, the guy I met yesterday, Don, and I worked out a fishing charter for Thursday morning. So Linda & I will join him for a halibut fishing trip. .
On my way back to the campground, I stopped at both of the grocery stores in town to pick up some items Linda texted me to get.
When I got home, she started our pork belly dinner. It was just about complete, but just as she was finishing up crisping the fat with the air fryer function in her Ninja Foodi, the electricity went off.
We thought we just threw a breaker, and perhaps the RV park’s 30 amps wasn’t a good 30 amps since we simply didn't have much turned on. But the park breaker hadn’t been tripped, and our Progressive Industries electrical protection device wasn’t showing an error.
Still, I turned off the breaker, unplugged our power cord, plugged it back in, and turned the breaker back on. Hmm. Nothing.
I took our electric heater outside and plugged it into the campground pedestal - it worked fine.
Our internal breakers weren’t tripped either, but we still turned off the Main breaker and turned it back on. Still nothing.
I tried to reset the GFCI in the kitchen, but it wouldn’t re-set. Back outside, I smelled something, so I checked the park pedestal again and felt it to see if it was hot – nope.
I then opened our electrical compartment where our power cord connects to the RV. A little smoke rolled out and that was definitely where the smell was coming from. Not good.
I quickly concluded that our electrical transfer switch (aka Automatic Transfer Relay) had fried. That’s the device that prioritizes our power – we can either have generator power or electrical pedestal power, but not both, and the transfer relay chooses which one to use if they are both on. It "switches" between the power sources.
Back inside, we turned on our inverter, and some of our outlets were working. However, the circuit in the kitchen on the GFCI was still out of commission as were the two other GFCI circuits. Whatever happened, the GFCIs aren't happy.
I went back outside, unplugged the electrical cord, and struggled to pry off the cover of the transfer switch. It was supposed to be easy - it wasn't; but, eventually it succumbed to my swearing and anger. Sure enough that was clearly the problem as this photo shows.
The far left connection burned and melted. We’re lucky it didn’t cause a fire. We’ve seen this same thing happen to a few others over the years.
Now we don't know what caused this problem and if the circuit board is really fried. And it appeared that we could possibly still use our generator, but neither of us wanted to test that theory.
We'll just work with our batteries and inverter until we can get this fixed. The inverter doesn't go through that transfer switch. The good news is our batteries stay fully charged most of the time due to the amount of daylight we have every day.
Certainly, there was nothing we could do tonight, so we just enjoyed our dinner, discussed some scenarios for tomorrow, and then called it a night. Sheesh.
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