Well this weekend was one of those moments.
When we left our moorings on Friday evening the battery charger was working fine, after a weekend away from shore power, when we plug it back in again on Sunday evening, well it refuses to work!
We checked all of the obvious modes of failure, have we got shore power?, yes we have. Is the power lead plugged in properly?, yes it is. Is the cable in the charger properly?, yes it was. Have the fuses blown in the plug?, no they had not. Had the external charger fuses blown?, no they were fine. Is the electrical socket working?, yes it ran the kettle fine.
So a bit late in the day on Sunday we resigned ourselves to the fact it wouldn't be a quick fix and we would have to remove it next weekend to dismantle it and take a look inside, unfortunately Liam didn't have the right tools he needed to remove it on Sunday. So for the first time since we have owned Naughty-Cal, when we left on Monday morning, we turned off the fridge, (actually I did this on Sunday evening so as not to waste battery power), turned off the isolator switches and unplugged the shore power cable. Naughty-Cal is fully switched off!
Thankfully the batteries were showing a healthy voltage when we left at 12.7v, so they should in theory be fine this week. We will take the boat for a good run this weekend to make sure we leave them well topped up as they will be left for another week with no charger whilst Liam takes a look at what is wrong with the Newmar. If he can't find any obvious fault we will simply buy a replacement Sterling charger and install that.
All of this comes of course just a few weeks before our next big adventure on board, we have just two weekends to fix it or we will be heading out with no working battery charger, which in itself shouldn't really cause us much of a problem. We can easily manage without, but it is nice to have the option of fully recharging the batteries should shore power become available.
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