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Old 09-07-2012, 09:25 AM   #1
NN5I
Carl, nn5i
 
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Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Tallahassee, FL
Posts: 1,441
Default Converter guts

My motor home came with a Magnetek 6345 "converter". This provides 12 vdc and charges the house battery when there's 120 vac available from shore power or the generator. When AC comes on, there's a big relay that clunks most of the motor home's DC circuits off the house battery and onto the converter's DC supply, which isn't filtered. It's just rectified AC, no filtering at all.

I never liked it because:

(1) When on shore power, most DC circuits in the motor home had unfiltered rectified AC, OK for lights and some motors but utterly unusable for anything electronic.

(2) When stopping the generator or unplugging from shore power, the lights would die momentarily while the big relay switched them back to the battery.

(3) It could supply 45 amperes of really bad DC for lights, but its battery charger was (apparently) capable of much less than that, and took long to recharge a dead house battery.

(4) Its battery charger was rather primitive; no "smart charger" there -- it constantly cooked the house batteries after they were fully charged. I'd have to check the water, and usually add some, monthly.

(5) Its cooling fan got noisy about monthly, and had to be lubricated to quiet it down.

So I did some research, and eventually ordered a Progressive Dynamics PD4655 replacement for the converter's guts. This replaces the whole internal works of the Magnetek, excepting only the AC circuit breaker panel which it leaves alone.

I ordered it from Amazon, $225 with free shipping, and had it in several days. It's now installed. I like it a lot, because:

(1) All DC circuits in the motor home are always on the house battery. Nice pure DC! I can put 12v radios wherever I want, and I just installed an APRS tracker (radio+TNC+GPS) on a DC lighting circuit in the bedroom, where nothing electronic would work before.

(2) Because the 12 vdc circuits in the MH are always on battery, there's no momentary outage while a relay is clunking. There is no relay. When I start/stop the generator or connect/disconnect shore power, the DC in the motor home continues serenely.

(3) Its 55 amperes of available 12 vdc, minus whatever the motor home is using, are fully available for charging the house battery. It brings it up fully in a couple hours instead of a day or more.

(4) It's a smart 55 ampere three-stage battery charger/maintainer. I'm no longer cooking my house batteries dry.

(5) The new DC distribution panel has little LEDs that light up when a fuse is out. No more pulling fuse after fuse to find the blown one.

(6) Its two cooling fans are modern, permanently-lubricated "muffin" fans. They run at variable speed and are very quiet.

(7) The old DC panel had nine separately-fused circuits. The new one has twelve. I can easily add new, separately fused, DC circuits for any purpose.

Installation took a couple hours, and everything fit perfectly; no prying on anything to get the screw holes to line up. I recommend taking photos of the old DC panel before starting, to make it easier to know which wire goes where. In my motor home, the #6 house-battery lead to the converter was white, and the ground wire was green; not standard at all. Confusion would have been easy. They were also too short for the new connections, and I had to splice about four additional inches on each. Splicing #6 wires in close quarters was no fun and added about 1/2 hour to the installation. In most motor homes this problem would not occur, but Damon saved 50 cents by making the wires as short as they possibly could when they built the motor home.

In sum, it wasn't very expensive at all, was an easy install, and (in my opinion) is incomparably superior to the old Magnetek.

Highly recommended!
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