Raising the Roof

After a week of boon-docking in the Deschutes NF, we arrived in Portland area for a couple days of full hook-ups. When we got here, we went through our normal routine and proceeded to raise the top half. Immediately it made an awful high-pitched noise and rose very slowly. Everything worked fine in three previous moves. Batteries fully charged. Anyone ever experience something like that? Also, don't know if it's related but the electric hitch motor was also straining to get the hitch high enough to disconnect from the TV.

Frank

I would suspect the battery. Check for dirty or loose terminals first, not just on the battery, check the other connections in the front. Next, have the battery tested, it may be charging up but it may not be holding a charge. Also, did you have the fridge turned on in 12 volt mode during your trip or when raising the top? You may have run the battery down on the way, this could be from insufficient power from the TV.

I hope you find the gremlin.

Rich

Follow what Rich posted and make sure you clean your ground connections. Your problem was caused by low voltage from the battery. May be a bad battery, bad connections or the battery not charging while traveling. Check to see that you are getting the charging voltage from the TV. If your battery was low when you tried to raise the top previously you may have blown the fuse in the TV. This has been a problem with many owners including me. There are many post here on the forum about this problem. Another cause of this problem has been the wires in the TV charging circuit being too small including the ground wire. I am going to put a post in another area on the forum about wires feeding the refrigerator power being too small. Checkout the many post here on the forum about this problem.

I should have added that you can't raise the top with only shore power, the battery must have enough charge to handle the heavy draw of the pump. So if you leave the unit charge for a while, then you may be able to raise the top. If not, start checking things.

Once again, thanks for the helpful info and the quick response. All the battery connections and terminals were in good order as I just did maintenance before leaving. After reading your posts, I suspect the battery never fully recovered from our dry camping week, even though the monitor panel showed the batteries to be fully charged. I checked the electric hitch yesterday and it operated normally; also the batteries cells' electrolyte levels tested fully charged, too. I'll be checking the TV fuse this morning. My guess now is that since we're only having short driving days, the batteries didn't have time to recover after eight days of dry camping. We'll see how it works when we arrive at our new location today.

As always, your quick responses were much appreciated.

frank

I'm glad to hear that things appear to be okay. I would suspect that the TV time didn't provide much charge. Unless you have super TV wiring and a good alternator bringing batteries back up while going down the road it doesn't work very well. I have never figured out why vehicles with tow packages can't provide proper gauge wiring to the hitch. $$$

Hooking up to shore power or an external charger is the most efficient way to get the batteries back to full charge, and it takes a while to get them there. When we dry camp I hook the little Yamaha generator up now and then and let it run for a couple of hours. It really takes a good overnight charge to do a proper job if the batteries are appreciably discharged.

After dry camping four more days, we made the decision to buy two new batteries, at Wal-Mart. Our decision was reinforced when we had difficulty in raising the trailer, to replace the batteries.
When we reached our new location, the trailer went up effortlessly. Such a relief to know that the problem was an easy fix, rather than something being wrong with the hydraulic lift.
Thanks so much to all who answered our post!
Carol