There are two types of RVs: RVs with something not working correctly, or RVs that will soon have something not working correctly. When we take our RV out of winter hibernation, we need to check all systems to ensure we won’t find ourselves miles from home without heat, hot water, air-conditioning or electricity.

A few weeks ago, Joe turned on the RV’s 12 volt power switch and nothing happened. The lights and touch screen control system remained dark. Since it had only been a few weeks since Joe had taken the RV out for a drive, he assumed he had forgotten to turn the 12 volt power off and discharged the batteries. He thought he only needed to plug in and charge up the RV’s batteries.

One of the most handy RV purchases Joe has made is the adapter shown below. It allows a household extension cord to plug into the 30 amp shore power port on the side of the RV. Without this adapter he would have to pull out a heavy 30 amp cord and adapter to charge up the batteries. The Mightly cord RV power cord adapter is available from etrailer.

After Joe plugged in the RV to charge the batteries he reentered the vehicle and found that everything was running correctly and the batteries were almost fully charged. Something wasn’t right…only a few minutes earlier, there was no power and now everything was normal. Time for an email to Pleasure-Way.

What we didn’t appreciate when we purchased our Ontour 2.2 in 2020 is that we were not only purchasing an RV but also entering into a relationship with the company who built it. Being a family-owned company, Pleasure-Way prides itself on providing personal support to all of its owners. Within 20 minutes Joe had an email from Jay F. asking him to check on the firmware of the touch screen controls. He also looped in Ryan S. who serviced our Plateau XLTS while we were at the Pleasure-Way sponsored East and West Coast Connection Rally. We are extraordinarily grateful to Jay and Ryan for their continued support and service.

RVs have become more complex and contain multiple components that need to communicate with each other. Sometimes communication between components gets out of sync. We had to update the firmware of our control panel and then reset our charge systems or, in IT parlance, we had to “turn it off and on again”. If you haven’t watched The IT Crowd, we highly recommend you do.

First, we updated the firmware in our Spyder panel. These panels are small computers programed by Pleasure-Way to manage everything in the vehicle. They control the heating, air conditioning , hot water, room lights, generator operation, the inverter-charger system, water pressure and many other systems in our RV. This was a simple process of downloading the updated firmware onto a USB stick, inserting the USB stick into a port on the back of the Spyder panel, unplugging a communications cable and then reinserting the cable to initiate the update. Easy peasy!

In order to turn our system on and off again we had to reset the Trustate monitor by resetting the Battery Monitor Systems on both batteries simultaneously. The first step is turning off the two main charging systems.

Now, we had to access the batteries, which are under the passenger side ottoman.

All Joe needed to do was press the battery reset buttons for 10 seconds. The tricky part is to count out loud to time the process. Joe didn’t quite get that right.

It’s now two weeks later and our electrical systems are running well!

We are presently in a KOA in Myrtle Beach and are enjoying the warm weather after completing the de-winterization of our motorhome. We look forward to reaching North Port, Florida in a few days.