Still learning

Queens Birthday weekend meant a 3-day weekend. So we decided to go to Mapua for a couple of nights, as we wanted to go away without traveling a huge distance. I dropped Bernie off at the rig in the morning and drove to the Appleby River to give the dogs a run. Bernie sent me a text saying he was on his way – so we arrived at Mapua Leisure Park at the same time.

After confirming our registration, we chose a site close to power and water. For this stay we weren’t too concerned about having the sun as we wanted to try a few days of being hooked up to power. We had brought along a heater to use instead of our gas heater.

Setting up definitely seemed easier, I guess our confidence has grown. We parked up and unhitched without having to second-guess everything we did. I remember it only being a couple of months ago that this procedure seemed like an ordeal for us.

Once we were level and the slide outs were out, we switched the heater on. Then we started setting up the dog enclosure. I smelt something strange and mentioned it to Bernie. He smelt it as well. Only a week ago we had someone replace the circuit breakers (because our solar panel gauge indicated we weren’t getting any power). So we presumed the new breaker that has been installed must have been giving off a ‘new’ smell.  Ten minutes later the smell seemed stronger, plus it smelt electrical.When we looked around, we discovered smoke! 

Maybe having the heater on had overloaded the inverter? But shouldn't it have tripped the circuit breakers? Instead the wires had become so hot that they'd started smoking and had melted the wires and casing which came from the inverter. 
The scary part was, after all this heat and smoke, the circuit breakers had not tripped.

We were under the understanding that any electrical overloading within the rig would trip the circuit breakers.  

#whatelsecangowrong

You can see how hot the wires had got, the plastic casing had melted.

We put a smoke alarm beside the inverter so we could sleep without worrying.