The buzzing from the audio was very quickly diagnosed - I could see daylight through the driver’s door speaker so with a little fettling, and some 3D printed spacers, a new pair of speakers were installed. It would have been a good idea to turn the volume down before testing though, the bass response is fantastic.
I also fitted a new DAB aerial as it’s been showing No Signal for quite a while, unfortunately this hasn’t fixed the problem. I’m disappointed, especially as it took a couple of hours, but there’s not much I can do about it.
The coolbox problems proved a lot more complicated!
Back in 2021 I found the coolbox wouldn’t run off the battery overnight, but was OK during the day when the solar panel is charging. No real problem, I’m normally on hookup anyway but I diagnosed a dying leisure battery, probably from lockdown. Move on to 2022 and I installed a new battery prior to a weekend away without hookup, all worked perfectly, problem solved, except it wasn’t. A few weeks later I had a few days camping followed by a few days in a hotel, during the latter I found the coolbox wasn’t staying down to temp again. The compressor would fire up, run a short while then cut out, with no error showing.
Possible issues were the wiring to the coolbox socket, another dodgy battery or the battery wiring. The first I tested by wiring in a direct feed from the solar panel controller. All seemed ok briefly but then the coolbox started cutting out. The useful thing was that having it on the controller I could see the voltage pulling down to 11.9 volts, sufficiently low for the battery protection to kick in. That eliminated one bit of wiring but strongly suggested the battery was faulty. Now you do occasionally get a duff battery but it’s unusual so my worry at this point was it had been “cooked” and I had a charging system fault.
The next test was to remove the battery, which was showing fully charged, and test it off the ‘van. The green indicator was showing, a good sign, and a quick check showed no shortage of fluid, which suggested it hadn’t been overcharged. After a minor bit of faff I hooked the coolbox up directly to the battery with a multimeter attached and it all behaved. The battery voltage steadily dropped to 12.4v with the coolbox running, 12.6v without which is about perfect. It came down to temperature as well.
That left me with the battery wiring. I’d used the original wiring from the ‘van conversion so rather than try and fault find it I decided to just replace it. I had some of the 4mm2 cable left over from the solar panel installation so I used that and kept the runs as short as possible. I decided to take the battery feeds directly to the solar controller and then feed from the controller’s Load output to the lights, etc. There was a minor hiccup in that having bought new battery clamps they’ve got M8 screws, and I didn’t have terminals that large, so I had to use the old ones temporarily. With everything reconnected I tested it all, first without the solar connected, and bingo, it was all fine with no noticeable voltage drop. The final job was to wire a new feed to the tap and water pump as that was tapped of the redundant battery feed, a quick 15 minute job.
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