Hello fellow podders! Quite happy this morning after a successful repair of my failed power converter. First notice I had that it went bad was a dead battery that was only a few months old. Converter was not charging the battery while on shore power. Eventually, nothing worked except outlets that were directly connected to shore power.
I was able to pull the converter from under the power center and saw that the bottom of the enclosure was partially broken, the converter was not screwed into the enclosure, and the 15amp breaker to the converter was quite loose.
One, or all, of the following restored functionality:
- Pull the breaker and pinch together the copper connectors of the breaker which hold onto the tab in the socket. This tightened up and improved the contact.
- Supported the floor of the enclosure to eliminate what must have been drastic shaking that damaged the converter. I used wine corks cut to proper lengths and wood glued to the frame under the bottom of the enclosure. I was not able to repair the plastic enclosure since I didn’t want to remove the whole thing. I think it’s abs plastic, which can be welded or solvent-welded.
- Repaired the solder on the backside of the circuit board that had broken loose from the excessive shaking. These solder points are relatively large pins and heavy solder, so this was not a difficult operation. Below is a photo of a new converter which I’ll be returning after this successful repair. I circled the 4 connections where I reinforced the solder on the back side of the circuit board.
- Secured the circuit board to the base of the converter unit with all screws to posts on the base (2 of 5 were missing) and secured the the converter base to the enclosure (0 of 2 screws were in place previously)
Reconnected all wires in the power center and plugged into shore power, fan came on and multimeter verified charging output! Yay!
Sorry for lack of progress photos on this write up, but I wasn’t sure it would work.