What a little switch, what a "power"-ful impact!

While I was cleaning the litter pans (as blogged about yesterday), Dwayne was vacuuming in the rig. He does a MUCH more thorough job than I do... which can cause challenges....

I was outside the bus when he opened the door and said, "The 12V lights are all off."

I came in and asked him what he was doing and he said that he turned around and noticed that the light in the bathroom was off. He went to turn it on, and it wouldn't come on. We also noticed that the center A/C (which we had had running) was off (which meant the rig was getting warm... and probably contributed to our lack of understanding what was going on...).

Unrelated tidbit: When we first arrived on Tuesday, I had reached in to the control panel right by the passenger seat to unlock the compartment doors. I got a mild electric shock, which I told Dwayne about, but we couldn't reproduce it, so we hadn't done anything more about it. That panel is a 12V panel and sure enough, none of its controls were working now either.

Dwayne started looking into the big box of manuals that we have with wiring diagrams to see if he could find a fuse that might be associated with that panel, thinking that it had taken the rest of the 12V system down. I started searching the Wanderlodge Owners Group (WOG) online to see if I could get any clues.

To some extent, the fact that *none* of the 12V was working made me think that it had to be "simple" - a fuse would probably only take out one area of 12V, not all of it. The fact that the air conditioner wasn't running was a bit troubling as the air conditioners are on 110V, and everything on shore power seemed to be working okay. We checked the display for the inverters and they looked okay, and we also checked the inverters in the bay and their lights indicated that all was well with them. So, no massive battery failure, we guessed.

While reading on the WOG, I noticed a mention of an A/T switch on the dash. I mentioned it to Dwayne and he remembered seeing it. He went to check for it and looked and looked and didn't see the switch. There are a LOT of switches and gauges on our dash...

Lower left

Lower right

Upper left

Upper right

Did *you* see the A/T switch?

This picture might show it a little more clearly...

In reading the manual, it seems that "A/T" stands for "Anti Theft" and that the coach won't start with this switch turned off.... I'm glad that God allowed us to learn about this switch through the 12V power system being turned off, and that we weren't trying to start the coach at the time!!!

By the way, as you probably have guessed, Dwayne's very effective vacuuming accidentally turned the switch off... but we have a VERY clean dash area at this point!