Electrical Help

[Dutch23]

Installed a Victron Orion-Tr Smart Isolated DC/DC charger and am having trouble getting the running lights on the camper to turn on. Lots of ideas rolling around my head, biggest issue I see is how I’m using an isolated DC/DC charger and how the lights are using a positive wire from the truck yet the lights are all grounded to the camper. I feel like I could ramble on about ideas and solutions but I’m just curious what others might have done to work around this issue.

 

[Vic Harder]

Did your lights work before when the camper was not mounted on the truck?

 

[Dutch23]

Did your lights work before when the camper was not mounted on the truck?

Yup they worked just fine before.

Got it all sorted out now, I think. For my set up I think I should have just gone for a non isolated charger. I was getting hung up on keeping it isolated when I don’t think that is going to be possible. So for now I just connected all the grounds before the charger. Charger still functions, I believe it’s just running as a nonisolated charger now.

 

[Vic Harder]

Yup they worked just fine before.

Got it all sorted out now, I think. For my set up I think I should have just gone for a non isolated charger.

Agreed. isolated are for boats, me thinks..

 

[Jon R]

Someone mentioned that the lights on a FWC use the aluminum frame as the common return. If that's the case, it seems like it would be difficult to isolate the camper electrical ground from the truck ground due to the connections through the turnbuckles. Given that ground connection, is it potentially problematic to have another ground connection at the DC to DC charger, possibly causing corrosion issues or other problems due to a ground loop?

 

[Dutch23]

I don’t think the turnbuckle attachments are tied into the aluminum frame at any point, just plywood. Otherwise I probably would have never had this issue in the first place due to the camper and truck sharing a common ground through the turnbuckles.

 

[Vic Harder]

corrosion has been an issue for some folks. Using the camper structure as a ground seems problematic to me. So when I redid the wiring on my two campers I eliminated those (as much as possible!) grounds. That said, neither manufacturer seems to have changed this practice, so I can not imagine that there really is a problem that they are ignoring.