I thought I was done with all of my New Aire delivery problems. During the last two months I have throughly exercised all of the systems but this one slipped through.
We finally have some cool temperatures in the La Quinta, so I have spent some time going through all of the heating scenarios in the NA. The tile heating system in the New Aire has three zones: bedroom, kitchen and living room. When I looked at these settings before on SilverLeaf I just looked at the screen and seeing the heating symbol I figured all was good. Not true.
When I turned on all three zones and let them run I discovered the living room zone was not heating the tiles.
I look at an RV warranty as just catostrophic insurance. If something breaks of high value or I just can't figure out how to fix it, I will take it to the dealer. In most cases I prefer to just fix these problems myself. This is a special challenge in the Nemar coaches for electrical problems since the company will not give us schematic diagrams for the electrical systems.
So step one when trying to fix an electrical problem in a Newmar is to "reverse engineer" the electrical system and draw your own schematic diagram. Looking through the posts on this forum I could not find many posts troubleshooting the tile heating system with SilverLeaf.
Figured I would document my discoveries for anyone else who might need to trouble shoot this system with SilverLeaf.
In the NA there is dedicated 20 amp CB for the tile heat located in the closet panel in the rear of the coach. From the CB the cable for tile heat then loops through a GFI located next to the fuse panel in the closet. See image below:
From there the 120 volt wire appears to loop through three interface boxes: one in the closet just below CB panel (can be seen in image above just below CB panel) serving the bedroom circuit, a second box is located in the bathroom for the kitchen zone and there is a junction box located in the basement electrical area under the driver seat for the living room zone. See image below.
The three junction boxes for each zone is where SilverLeaf switching happens. To control the 3 zones you use the SilverLeaf control panel. Settings in the control panel are then sent via the RV-C network to the TM-229 Tile Heat Controller located in the front overhead switch panel in the New Aire.
As you can see in the image above the controller can handle 4 zones but in the NA only 3 zones are wired. The wires from the controller go to the corresponding junction boxes shown above for the 3 zones.
After I figured out the topography for the tile head system I started to troubleshoot my living room zone to find out why the tiles were not heating.
First step was to see if Silver Leaf was sending the command to turn on the heat. Inside each zone junction box is a relay. The yellow wires coming into the bottom of the box are the two leads from the TM229 controller for that zone that is plugged into a relay in the box. The relay is controlling a 120 volt switch on the hot lead going to the tile system.
I pulled the relay out of the box and unplugged the SilverLeaf lead. Testing the two wire on the SilverLeaf lead confirmed that when the living room zone was turned on in the SilverLeaf panel, 12 volts was tested across the two leads. So SilverLeaf was working.
With SilverLeaf on for the living room zone I pulled the heating CB then plugged the SilverLeaf cable back into relay. The relay immediately began to chatter as I moved the seated plug around while connected to the relay. Not right.
Next step was to pull the relay and take it apart.
And here is what I found. Both solder joints holding the SilverLeaf plug to the relay had broken out of their seats. Most likely happened during an overly aggressive plug insertion during assembly. I re-soldered the two pins on the relay but it back together and now I have tile heat in the living room. Hope this helps should someone else need to troubleshoot the SilverLeaf Tile Heating System.
Linear Mode
