An unexpected event.

This is a real-time post. I am three posts behind with regards to our adventures. I’ll catch up eventually. But this is today’s unexpected “adventure.”

Today we are in Truro, Nova Scotia and were about to take off for Cape Breton Island. The RV was all buttoned up, so let’s hit the road! James went to crank over the engine on the RV and….nothing. What the heck?

James checked the chassis battery output. It was only 8 volts instead of the customary 13.8 volts. Again, what the heck? And why??? We obviously needed a jump and we had jumper cables. But you can’t jump a semi-truck with 4 batteries from an ordinary car. Fortunately, we happen to have two BIG lithium batteries to run the house part of the RV, i.e. the “coach.”

James turned the engine over again.

So, we decided to wait for a bit and let the coach batteries trickle charge the chassis batteries a bit. In the meantime, I was checking for a mobile truck service. Yes, we have been through this before and knew what to do…but have not had to do it in a long time.

Fortunately, after 45 minutes or so of trickle charging, James was able to crank the engine and get the RV started. We were planning on stopping for fuel just up the road and, conveniently, there was a truck repair shop in the same place. Once the we fueled up, we pulled over to truck repair. Help!

Truck repair places don’t like to hear the words “motor home.” They think of a Class A diesel pusher where the engine is under the bed in the rear of the RV. We are a Super C built on a truck chassis. Once they understand that, they are willing to work on the RV. We are basically a semi-truck with a house on the back.

The service manager came out and immediately smelled sulfur in our battery compartment. I had smelled the same thing and thought it was sewer gas from our black tank…unusual but not unheard of. One of the four batteries was hot. Yup, we had a bad battery that was overcharging. Guess what we we were about to buy? Four new batteries! If you are replacing one, you might as well replace all four.

While the RV was being worked on, I got the wifi password from the service department and got caught up on some computer work AND started on this blog post.

They had to go and pick up the new batteries. Then it was lunch time. So we sat and sat. All the power to the RV was off…thank goodness for a decent battery in my laptop.

Once lunch was over, the new batteries were installed with the hour. The guy only put on battery in backwards once. 🙄 It was time to power everything back up. There was a slight hiccup with the new batteries not being fully charged. But once that was straighten out, we were outta there.

So, only 5 hours and $750 later, we are on the road again. Seriously, we are grateful this happened in a fairly large town and not in the middle of nowhere (which is where we are heading).

We’ll get to tonight’s campground five hours later than anticipated. But we’ll take that. There is also something be said for having been through situations like this before. We didn’t panic, we just pulled out the charge card and found a place to deal with the problem.