Problems, problems. So many problems! Pretty much every system on this bus has issues that we’ve slowly been unwrapping like so many unwanted birthday presents.
Tank sensor hookup
We knew this hadn’t been hooked up yet when we bought the bus. The fresh water and gray water tanks need to have sensors attached to them so that you can tell when the tank is full, 2/3, 1/3 or nearing empty. The bus came with a little panel (not wired up), some weird-looking bolts, and a few handfuls of colored wires – but no instructions, and nothing that looked like a “sensor” to our inexperienced eyes. It turns out that KiB is NOTORIOUSLY TIGHT-LIPPED when it comes to telling its customers how to hook up their sensor panels – why, I have no idea! Searching the internet produced many other unhappy people who also have no instructions with their RV water sensor kit. Eventually, we !gured out that the “sensors” are actually just the weird bolts (“probes”) screwed into the sides of the plastic water/gray tanks – there’s a ground probe at the bottom, and the water level is indicated by which of the probes makes a current. We also finally sorted out the mystery of the wire colors after discovering this YouTube video – BLESS YOU, SIR.
In short, here is how it goes (our sensor has hookups for full, 2/3, 1/3 and empty):
The sensor panel itself has multiple colored wires coming out of it, depending on how many items it can sense. Our had wires for fresh water (blue), gray water (gray), black water (black or brown) and galley (black or brown). Galley is for RVs that have an extra outdoor kitchenette. As we have neither a black tank nor a galley, I don’t know which is black and which is brown. The final wire is red, and that is what you attach to 9V power.
- Drill little holes in the water tank and screw in the 4 probes: one near the top, one about halfway down the tank, and two at a similar level near the bottom. If the water level is above the top probe, the tank is considered Full; if above the middle, 2/3 Full; if between the middle & bottom, 1/3 Full; if below the bottom, Empty.
- Attach the orange wire to the top probe, the green to the middle probe, the yellow to the bottom probe, and the white (ground) to the other bottom probe.
- Attach the other end of the white (ground) wire to, well, ground. Bus chassis or something like.
- Attach the red wire to the appropriately colored wire on the panel. (You will probably need to
supplement with your own wire as it’s unlikely your tank is right next to to the sensor panel.) - We don’t have a black tank or a galley so we left those wires dangling.
Leaky plumbing
After installing the sensors and hooking up the pump, we turned the whole thing on and discovered that the connections leaked considerably Given that all connections (and the 100 gallon freshwater tank) are
located under the queen bed, and given that we are trying to get out of an existing moldy environment, this was really bad news. Zanj !gured out that the hose clamps were too wide and not clamping properly, and since Home Depot was out of the right size clamps and we were too impatient to order the right size, he simply bought a braided faucet connecter and thus eliminated a whole bunch of leaky elbow joints. BRILLIANT. I love Zanj.
Bad batteries & charging
The bus came with 3 deep cycle batteries, hooked up in parallel and connected to a complicated electronics control panel that allows them to be charged up by shore power, a gas generator, or the bus’s own alternator when the bus is being driven. The deep cycle batteries had been let to run dry (as a matter of fact, the starter battery had also been allowed to die – more on that later!) and our attempted reconditioning of them didn’t work very well. For sanity & boondocking, we are going to need to buy new batteries, ugh! None of the charging was working properly either – the alternator was not charging up the batteries as advertised on our long drive back from NorCal. At a rest stop, Zanj switched around how alternator was hooked up so that the batteries charged as they should, but we later realized that the hookup for successful battery charging when driving results in the starter battery being drained when the bus is off. We’re not sure what the wiring mix-up is as yet.
We just ordered a 200W folding solar panel from Renogy and are going to have to figure out how to hook that up to charge the batteries as well.
Leaky propane connections
The stove/oven, water heater, and bus heater are all propane. The bus came with a horizontal propane tank and all internal connections hooked up – it was only lacking a kind of harness/hammock for mounting the tank securely in one of the under-bus luggage compartments. Zanj quickly built a harness, hooked up the propane, and went around with a squirt bottle of soapy water, checking the connections. No surprises, they all leaked.
Zanj fixed as many of the connections as he could (I ran around sniffng different areas of the bus) and finally we tested out the stove to see if all worked as it should. I smelled gas, and when we dismantled the stove top it turned out that there was also a leak beneath and that consequently one of the wires underneath had burned through. Whoops, ugh.
Incompetent fridge
The bus came with a brand new Magic Chef 4.4 cu ft. fridge. We quickly realized that it does not work properly.
Reading the manual states very clearly that:
- It is NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN RVs (i.e. not intended to be used with an inverter.)
- The freezer compartment is a “chiller compartment” not a freezer. I really wish I’d known that before I bought all those Klondike bars…
Szplug!
After much hunting around we ordered a slightly larger RV fridge from RecPro. This one has the same width and depth, runs o” 12V (hooray), has vibration dampening technology (hooray), and has a separate proper freezer compartment (hooray). Because it is 9 inches taller, it will not !t under counter like the current one does, but given it is just 43 inches high we can keep that counter space, just a bit higher up. Still, cutting up and refitting the counter is going to be a pain in the butt!
Reversed Shower
We were confused by the fact that every time we turned on the shower a little bit all the lights started flickering. On closer inspection, it turned out that every time we turned on the shower just a trickle, the on-demand heater immediately triggered. Why, you ask? It turns out that somehow the shower has been hooked up backwards with Cold meaning Hot and Hot meaning Cold. This sucks for two reasons:
- The on-demand heater gets triggered as soon as you turn in on, which is a waste of energy when you’re just wanting cold water
- The water coming out after a few moments is broiling hot, which is an unhappy surprise for little kid toes (or anyone’s toes, really)
The shower also causes the water pump to spasm in a peculiar way, but we think that is due to the flow limiting shower head. I’ma gonna rip that sucker apart. I don’t plan on taking showers often, but the women in my family have hair. Our hair does not agree with flow-limiting shower heads.
At this point we have the discouraging feeling that we’ve been taken for a bit of a ride (no pun intended!) – but we’re learning an awful lot. Well, Zanj is, anyway. I am busy packing boxes.