We have a riddle for those who are inclined towards electricity and/or have torn up their Starcool III wiring before.
Yesterday we started investigating why when we’re plugged into shore power the Starcool doesn’t blow cold — everything starts up except for the 110v compressor under the van. Everything works great when we’re driving and on 12V. We’re not the first owners and had never known the AC to work on shore power, but we’re about to hit the tropics so solving this riddle is time sensitive.
We found the solenoid valve under the hood (next to the battery) and found that while it was grounded, it didn’t have anything connected to the positive lead. We found a floating yellow wire on the other side of the engine bay that matched the description of the yellow wire from the Starcool relay panel and reconnected it, but there was still no power running through it. (see
http://www.sportsmobileforum.com/for...tml#post233772)
Looking at the relay panel under the gaucho we found 3 disconnected wires — a blue one, a yellow one, and a black one. According to the starcool service manual the blue one is meant to go to terminal 2, and the yellow to terminal 1 (those terminals were conveniently missing connections) — but where does the black one go??
Just hooking up the blue and yellow wires did not have the desired effect of “everything just working” so we kept fiddling. We found that black wire when connected to the negative terminal of the large relay causes the compressor to kick on. The yellow wire which we thought led to the solenoid valve in the front shorts when positive voltage is applied and blows the fuses. Nothing happens when it’s connected to ground.
Our current solution is to ground the black wire to the relay, and connecting the solenoid valve to the battery via a manual switch which we can flip when we’re connected to shore power and want AC.
But… if you know of a way to actually rewire this correctly so we don’t have macgyver a new switch, please let me know!
In sum:
1. Does the yellow wire from the starcool relay panel on terminal 1 actually go all the way to the engine bay?
2. Where is the black wire supposed to be?