Broke Our Main Inverter (Again)

When you dry camp (camp without hookups) and rely on solar or a generator for your electricity the batteries do not give power to the outlets.  To use anything you have to plug in you need an inverter connected to your batteries.  The inverter has outlets on it, and you hook in power strips to run your computers, TV, satellite receiver, charge phones, and power a wi-fi hotspot.

We dry camp 80% of the time.  Like right now, when we're parked in someone's yard.  Anyway, on to the story...

We're still in Pahrump waiting for my mother's X-Ray results to come back.  We have a handyman friend, who we've known for years, come over yesterday to fix a bunch of stuff.  This is still a 'brand new' RV, but fulltime living for 8 months caused the following:

• The bottom fell out of a bedroom drawer
• The piston arm that opens the storage under my mom's bed snapped off where it was screwed in on the bottom.  (Probably a repair I could make myself, if not for having to hold a heavy bed open at the same time).
• Three drawers no longer latched.
• The thing I put on our shower to allow us to turn the flow on and off leaked.
• The table I have in my 'office' kept sliding around and needed to be screwed in place.  (The original table attached to the wall broke within weeks of buying the RV).

I also had him fix my office chair buy cutting part of the armrest so I could get in and out of my office easier.  He used an electric saw for this.  Like an idiot I let him hook this to our inverter.  Our inverter is 1000 Watts and the thing was less than that.  I unhooked everything else.

He cut the armrest and then grinded down the sharp edges.  There were no problems.  Then an hour after he left it screamed with a continuous beep and the red light of death was on.  :Sigh:  I looked over the manual but fixing it is beyond me.  I keep checking it to see if it will magically work again.  Even with the batteries fully charged it's red and screaming.  There's no reset button.

This really annoys me because this was suppose to protect against a short of up to 2000 watts.  Whatever.  Inverters never work how they're supposed to.  They're fragile pains in the asses.  (Especially when I'm too cheap to splurge for a good one.)

I express ordered a 2000 watt inverter for Monday.  In the meantime I got a quickie back up 410 Watt inverter from Walmart.  Just laptops, phones, and wifi is hooked in.  We'll unhook everything to run the TV and satellite tomorrow for the Walking Dead.

Lesson:  Don't hook powertools to an inverter.