Hi everyone.
I'm the other half of this partnership. I'm pretty happy with the outcome of this fixing project.
Here's the text of my letter to Caravan World. Maybe they will publish it.
My wife and I have been very happily living in our 2007 Jayco Stirling van fulltime now for years. We work the tourist season in the NT and roam in the southern summer. A lot of our travel and off grid camping is therefore in the very hot weather. Unfortunately our new generator wouldn't run the air-con despite it being well within specifications to do so. On hot nights we were forced into caravan parks.
An electrician friend suggested installing a soft start unit to control the start up current draw. The air-conditioner manufacturer wasn't much help, didn't supply soft starts and stated that the air-conditioning was only meant for 240v mains supply. Yet we saw many campers running their cooling on a generator.
Finally this month after a bit of online searching I found a company which supplies soft starters. Hyper Engineering. They supply a product called 'Sure-start 6'. I contacted them. A very helpful team. I gave them the specs of my air-conditioning unit and they supplied me the right part. It comes with an excellent install sheet. ( If in doubt get an electrician to install it.) The result after a cost of 150 dollars is that we can now efficiently run our air-con from our 3000 watt generator with plenty of power to spare. A useful outcome as we are about to set of from the NT on our summer holidays and the temperatures are in the high 30s.
Cheers Kevin
The Other Ferg on the Move
Note from Sue
Actually he salvaged this second hand soft start off one of the old air-conditioners in the "to be repaired pile" here at the Homestead. It is too "big" for our little unit so he got busy on the internet to find one for us. Ordered, shipped and arrived inside a week.... a miracle for the postal service here. Installed and working in half a day.... pretty normal for Mr Fix It.
