Smoking Motorhome! Power Issue?

[country350]

Okay I am in need of some help. I have a 2006 Itasca Elipse 40FD. I went to plug in the 30amp shore power plug I have at home and it started smoking! There was smoke coming from the passenger side rear area of the motorhome. It appeared to be coming from the right side rear grill area. I quickly unplugged it but it did trip the breaker inside my house (but not the motorhome breakers). I have noticed that when I plugged it in before this happened that the Powerline EMS dispaly was not lighting; with shorepower and generator power. I also noticed that it is making more of a humming noise than normal. It sounds like it's drawing more current than usual; kind of like when you hook up a battery charger to a battery that is completely dead. Do you think maybe one of the relays for the basement air is stuck? I have the furnace and a/c complelty turned off. I shutdown all the inside breakers in the coach and it's still doing this....I'm a bit perplexed on this issue. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can give me!!

[bdpreece]

You may be on to something with the battery charger thought. Try removing the negative cable from your house batteries to eliminate the possibility of a shorted battery.

[country350]

Good idea on the battery. I'll try that. I will mention that I did replace all the bateries in the motorhome. They were working okay for a while but I wonder if I got a defective one or one with some bad cells...

[wa8yxm]

I would start by trying to find the source of the smoke.

As you may or may not know, electronics (Like Converters and such) run on magic smoke... You can tell this because if you let the magic smoke escape (And you know it's magic smoke cause it has a very powerful aroma) the device no longer functions properly.

(In another post I mentioned studying Electronics (Actually I have a certification as an electronics technician) ... The above is what you get for a College Education )

[Stevegd007]

If it smokes....its toast!

[RickO]

Ouch. I've got the same coach so I'm going to follow this thread closely.

I assume that your 30 amp connection at one time worked properly?

Did connecting to it EVER result in your EMS display working properly?

What is the status of everything now while running on generator power?
Does EMS display gen set?
Does basement air work on both compressors?


I'd also do the battery check... at least a specific gravity check which should show you if you have a shorted cell.

Good luck...

rick