[Archived]

Thomas and Alice, Welcome to Prevost ownership. What you went through is not unlike what folks go through when they do not do a 100% inspection / training session before any money changes hands. If the dealer is taking care of the issues you are blessed and the dealer is to be commended.

Folks rarely get a second bite of the apple, but in this case you may have the opportunity. Do not, I repeat, do not take possession of the coach again until you have lived in it and been trained in it and have verified the operation of and learned every single device, switch, knob, and dial. Even if the dealer tells you a repair on something you find wrong is your responsibility you are way ahead of the game at least knowing you are trying to operate the device correctly, but that the device has malfuncted.

Before you try to re-engineer the coach learn it. Make sure everything is working as it is supposed to and that items have not been cobbled together to get the coach off the lot. Your converter put a lot of expertise into designing and manufacturing the coach and some very smart people designed the systems. Until you are up to speed on how your coach works rely on the fact your coach was well designed.

To give you an example, you talk about redundancy and tying components to both sides of the panel. Before you do that learn if your converter provided a way to by-pass a failed inverter. If so the job is already done. But another consideration is if you set something up to run via two different power sources (inverter #1 or 2) you run a substantial risk if inadvertantly both circuits should be powered at once. Are you a risk taker?

The good news is there are a lot of folks on this site that can offer converter specific advice and I suggest part of your training should be to ask a lot of questions.

[AL]

Thank you for your quick response. I hope I did not mislead you. While I was waiting for the financing which took several weeks I spent every chance I got with the coach learning everything I could and trying every switch and device I could find and asking an extreme amount of questions and checking everything from top to bottom. It was only the pdi that got cut short. The salesman was very accomodating and promised that everything would work or get fixed. I believe he will make good on that promise. The coach was a one owner coach and I have most of the maintenance records and it appears to have been well cared for. I agree with not makinig any changes until properly educated and then only in an appropriate way and only if needed. As a pilot I’m just used to more redundancy and as you pointed out I may have more than I realize and have just not been fully read in yet. I look forward to advice on the coach because while the salesman was quite knowledgeable I’m sure that there are those that are even more so that can help me get started on the right foot. I admit there is allot I don’t know yet about the gen and inverters in as much as this specific configuration and it’s operation but plan to quickly resolve that. I will say that we still stayed in it for three nights and did drive it and loved every minute of it. The first time I fueled it up I got drenched when it shut off so I learned another lesson there too. We are very excited as this is our first prevost and we are looking forward to making some trips in it and making new friends and having fun.

[Archived]

I completely understand your desire for redundancy as a former pilot myself. Your description of the failures however was breathtaking and indicated the salesman did not give you a proper checkout.

Vantare is somewhat unique in how they set up the electrical systems and it requires an understanding. Two owners on the site I know for sure would be valuable for you to communicate with. Sawdust and Seabyrd are two Vantare owners both of whom are very conversant in the inverters and programming of them, a key to enjoying your coach. I am hoping they are reading this and will respond to you.

These coaches are like planes in the respect that at some point everything will break, and when it does you will benfit from having a plan for dealing with the problem. I have done the “what-if” scenario on my coaches and I have plans for as many failures as I could imagine, and when I thought necessary I did install backups or alternate plans such as a second water pump or a means of doing an emergency slide retraction. But I have found that our converters have provided a degree of backup or redundancy for a lot of our systems.

As owners we all have to learn how to monitor our systems and to recognize failures or impending failures. Because your coach electrical system is set up as it is I would think in addition to understanding how Vantare set it up you should know and understand your batteries. As most of us have found out one bad battery can play with our brains in ways you cannot imagine. Include an understanding of how your house batteries are set up, what safety devices or circuit breakers are in the circuit, and how you can verify the health and condition of each battery. That knowledge combined with your understanding of programming the inverters for your needs will greatly increase your comfort level.

Think of this as getting a type rating.

[Larry & Diane]

Welcome Thomas and Alice, hang in there, it will get better..

You are about to find out the integrity of the Dealer you purchased from. Sounds like it was a dealer provided PDI and if so, those items should be taken care of without any issues. Did you have these problems during the test drive or did they just surface? With your inverter problems, sounds like you have battery problems and if so, let me know, I can help you with that if you get stuck with the expense.

You have so many things going on, you’ll have to take it one at a time to sort out the problems. You will get help here from the Vantare owners, so stand by.

[Kim]

Welcome Tom & Alice !!

Sorry to hear you have had problems with your Vantare, we have a Vantare H3 and we love it, the Vantare is quite different in the way it’s wired and set up so it’s VERY important to learn the system & I wouldn’t even entertain the idea of switching anything from one leg to the other without it being done by a Vantare expert.

Once you learn the setup, you will love all the things you can do to make any power situation workable for your current circumstances… it’s quite amazing!

Ben Cummins at Coachworx is an expert in that field and always willing to help… he knows the Vantare setup backwards.

Everything on your coach runs through the inverters and is well balanced… most people that experience problems have found that the problems stem from bad batteries or even one bad battery … these inverters rely on feedback from batteries… one bad battery can screw everything up… then you have to replace them all, you cannot replace just the bad battery, so don’t let anyone tell you that you can. Find out the age of your batteries.

My advice is to use NOTHING other than Lifeline AGM batteries that can be purchased and delivered to you from Tom Chilcote (TRUK4U) … best price and service anywhere, trust me on that !!

I can’t stress enough the importance of your battery condition… you will put yourself thru hell trying to save old batteries or use a different kind.

Your refrigerator and water pump will run without the inverter.

After you learn your inverters and coach you will love it… we have had ours for 3 years now and we are still learning.

Good luck & again welcome to PC,

Diane

[Archived]

Welcome to PC you have found “the” Prevost site. We have lots of great Prevost people here who can help you get this bus working smooth.

Agree with the advice from Jon, Truk4u, Seabyrd. I’ll add one more thing about batteries. This comes from my own experience.

Check the house batteries for all in the same mfg date code. In my case the mixed dates as a group (6) did not preform saisfactory as a solid source. You need a stable bank of house batteries for invertors to work properly. I had good ones and some not so good.

I finally bit the bullet and replaced all 6 house batteries with Lifeline AGM from Truk4u.

Best price, all delivered on skid from factory, all same date code, fresh 1 month previous build dates.

AL

[Archived]

Ditto on Ben Cummins of CoachWorx, now Parliment Coach, know his stuff on electrical systems.

At the end of the day an inverter is an inverter, some with pure sine wave, some without; some that can provide current augmentation of the commercial power (really cool but complex), most can not; some that can be phase ganged together; most can not; and some that can control autostart generators, and some that can not. They all serve a common purpose and that’s to provide AC power from a DC battery bank system. Vantare may be unique in how they chose to power the coach’s AC system by running everything through the inverters, which has nothing to do with how the inverters function.

You bring up a great point and one that I’ve pondered. How can I keep the refrigerator going with a catastrophic failure of the AC feed coming from or through the inverter it’s powered from. There are many options, but splitting the circuit across two different AC feeds and controlling the power through 2 circuit breakers is not one I would recommend. The easiest solution is to start with your approach. Have a circuit breaker served by each inverter dedicated to critical loads, in your case the refrigerator and water pump. This is the beginning of what you were considering. These 2 circuit breakers would go to a manual or automatic transfer switch and from the switch to the critical load. The transfer switch is the device that makes it impossible to have both inverter outputs attached to the critical load at the same time. This is something that’s on my todo list, but keeps suffering from not making it high enough on the priority list to do. I’ve looked at the wiring on my coach and if the AC power relay were to fail on my inverter, which is the single point of failure, I can easily move the refrigerator circuit to the adjacent power panel coming from the other inverter. I can also wire around my inverter pretty easily, although that doesn’t give me inverter power. Once you are well aquainted with your coach you can better decide if you want an easy back-up for your refrigerator and water pump.

[Archived]

Gil,

Did you see Diane’s post? The water pump and refrigerator will be capable of being powered without inverters.

While we all can do whatever we want to our coaches I have learned the folks who designed and put them together almost always covered all bases. I would especially be careful making changes to the electrical systems.

[Archived]

Jon,

I was addressing the specific question. If it’s a residential refrigerator then it only runs on AC. That AC comes throuogh the inverter. Unless they already have a transfer switch outside of the inverter many inverters have a single point of failure in them.

Like you adding a second water pump, they can decide how important it is to have a solution for a single point of failure. My 9post was simply to let them know it can be done.

I agree that the converters generally did a good for the year engineered. With that said I’ve seen coaches that only charged one of two house banks with the alterator, used a solar system autostart generator controller, didn’t have a charger for the chassis batteries, used the house bank to start the generator, and well you can see where I’m going.

I do suggest that a person knows what they are doing before making any changes.

[Archived]

Diane’s post is specific. She is very smart when it comes to Vantare coaches and the electrical system and inverters.

I am uncomfortable with the phrase that stuff is run through the inverters. When in the presence of 120 from shore or generator power that external power actually goes through a relay within the inverter direct to the panel and the inverter becomes a battery charger. So unless Vantare has different inverters than I have been accustomed to seeing power from 120 V sources is not used exclusively for battery charging so the inverters can convert the battery voltage back to 120 VAC.

I suspect in a Vantare when the inverter fails and is off line there is an external by-pass instead of reliance on one internal to the inverter.

We don’t disagree owners can do a lot of customization to their coach, but based on my understanding the water pump and refrigerator will be able to get power so providing for either inverter to be the power source is not necessarily as high a priority as having a second water pump for example.

As a pilot I expect our new member will be measuring the engine bay to get true redundancy unless his toad can be used in the event of an engine failure.

[Paul]

Vantare’s come with inverter by-pass switches so as long as you have shore or gen power, the inverters and dead batteries are not an issue.

Diane or Ed?

[Archived]

I’m impressed! To see a converter install an external inverter/charger by-pass relay when there is one in the inverter section of the inverter/charger is pretty impressive. That’s exactly what I was recommending. It looks like Vantare beat me to it 🙂 Is the bypass relay automatic or does it require the user to select its operation? Is there another converter that does the same? I think CC did a pretty good job with the electrical system and they only rely on the by-pass relay that is inside the Xantrex inverter/charger.

So, it sounds like Thomas is all set.

[AL]

We did not experience these issues during our test drive or pdi. We were told that the batteries are a year old. I’ll have to look through the maintenance records to verify and also physically check the dates on them. I don’t intend to use anything but agm as those have worked well for me im my street rods, boat, and previous rv as well as my plane. I stopped by the dealer today to get my plates and they had found that even though I had checked the breakers, the one on the genset was tripped explaining why the gen was not working. They had it running and it was workfing fine. I did ask them to let me shut it off and try to run 1 roof air on one inverter and they told me that to do that the key must be on and or the engine running in order to do that. That may also explain some of my troubles. When we did try that though the lights flckered and the inverter popped it’s circuit breaker. So based on these threads it is possible that I have a batter issue so I will need to thoroughly check the batteries out. I have 8 4d batteries so I hope they are ok. The dealer will check them for me to make sure as well. I do want to figure out how to properly check/test them myself as well. I was told that there is no bypass, if one inverter goes then every device on that circuit goes. I also found that if the inverter is shut off as this one was then the fridge was off. It is a large 110 only residential type fridge. I was told that the ac2 (gen) would get preference over ac1 (shore pwr) but that does not match what I read in the manuals, they say the opposite so I’ll need to do some testing to find out. As far as all the other issues they fixed those as well. It is supposed to be bad weather saturday so we will try another outing the following weekend. They wanted me to turn off the auto start feature but I suspect they just did not want the gen to start running while in storage. They are also my indoor storage as well as my dealer. I agreed but I think I will turn that back on in case thier power goes off my gen will keep my batteries up and will shut back off once they fix their power issue. This has already happened a couple of weeks ago so I think I’ll stick with that.

Thank you all for all your feedback. I look forward to more discussions and I will be asking lots of questions so can get as educated as possible so I hope I don’t wear yall out. Unfortunately I have to get on my work computer to respond as this interface won’t work on my home computer/browser. It posts but is blank ,everything I typed is gone. I suspect my older software is the issue. Probably some newer feature that won’t work on mine.

[Larry & Diane]

Just a quick note on generator auto start while inside your storage.

We own an RV storage building here in KC catering to only diesel pushers. I have lease rule that the auto start must be turned off.

The main reason is fire.

Our lease has an initial line that requires the lessee to acknowledge the auto start must be off while inside the building. There are just too many things that can go wrong while a generator runs in an enclosed compartment inside a secured enclosed stall.

With the inverter/chargers most battery systems will rebound once the power returns. Thus another reason to have a strong set of AGM’s.

[Archived]

Tom,

The age of the batteries is not going to tell you if they are bad. Any set of batteries that has not been maintained can be damaged. My previous good feelings about the dealer are beginning to erode so if I were in your shoes I would contact Amadas / Featherlite and get the true information about inverter bypass, what could be causing breakers to trip and the crap about the key has to be on to make an AC unit work. I don’t own a Vantare but I would wager serious money that if your coach is set up to run an AC through the inverters that is going to happen key on or off.

Be careful. Very careful.