Bob Nodine

In the case of the Ford Cmax I don't think it has anything to do capability. The Cmax does not even do a decent job of charging a cellphone unless you are driving. I believe it all stems around the software that is programmed to conserve battery power. My wife often complains about the car not charging her cellphone. I am assuming that if no one is seated in the vehicle and the air conditioner is operating the software overrides the commanded temperature and reduces the fan speed to conserve battery charge.

Up a little early there Bill. Of course who am I to talk since we are only one hour ahead of you.🙂

Ray, I think handles are in my future but they are in my waist area!🙂.

Ray, We carry an extra key for our GM vehicles and leave the vehicle running with the key in the ignition. You lock the doors but when you close the driver's door it will unlock so we use the extra key to lock it and then unlock it when we return. On the Ford vehicles we have owned you just leave the engine running and close the doors. Then press the two bottom buttons on the keypad at the same time and all the doors lock. When returning to the vehicle we used the combination to unlock it. I don't like the push button start and avoided it when we purchased the Chevy Sonic. My wife's Ford Cmax does not have a key or keypad and has the push button start. On her car you leave the engine running and close the door. If no one is in the driver's seat it blows the horn but will still let you lock the doors with the FOB or the sensor on the door handle. It does not work well for keeping the dogs cool when idling because it is a hybrid. That is why we never set it up to tow behind the coach.

We have a white Christmas this morning and it is 18 degrees. I shoveled the upper driveway last night before it froze solid but it snowed some more after I finished. Just my luck.

Great job Scotty, this site is orders of magnitude better than the old site and unlike sites such as irv2 has the main goal of helping owners of Monaco products. Plus there is no advertisement. Kudos to you, David, Larry, Tom, and Frank.

Reminds me of an age old phenomenon. A hard working individual starts a company and grows it into a very prosperous business and as long as that individual stays alive the company grows and stays prosperous. That individual did not start the company with making money as the main goal and has blood, sweat, tears, and many long hours invested. When that individual dies or steps down and the company goes to someone else, even children, the company usually goes into decline. The company will most definitely not be customer friendly anymore if the company goes public because the most important people will be the stockholders. The CEO and board of directors will bend over backwards to make profit for the stockholders. Just my opinion and observations.

Thanks Doug, I just downloaded it.

Ray, I loved to watch the Little Rascals when I was young. It was a regular program on one of the three channels in our area. Of course all three channels were black and white. My parents did not get a color television until after I graduated from high school. I remember going to a friends house so we could watch Bonanza in color. Color broadcasts were limited and Bonanza was one of them. In 1957 my uncle was the first person in Asheville, NC that knew how to work on a color television and only rich folks had them. I spent a few summers staying with my uncle and would go on service calls with him. Once we went to the home of the family that owned a trucking company and found the problem with their television was that the maid had unplugged it and forgot to plug it back in. My uncle was the inspiration for me to make a career out of electronics. He was also an avid Ham Radio hobbyist and had a basement full of surplus military electronics equipment. I spent hours down there. Yes I do.

In March I ordered an oscilloscope that obviously was coming from China and it took over 4 months to arrive. COVID I guess.

Ivan, From childhood I was exposed to a long line of hoarders. It was a long journey to any kind of merchant for my grandparents and they had a tendency to save everything. I remember my grandfather even had a large can of bent nails. I guess if he needed a nail and new ones were not on hand he would straighten the bent ones. They never discarded an empty container of any type. I sometimes wonder how they would react today at all the containers we just throw in the trash. This hoarding behavior transferred to my Dad and naturally to me. As I have aged and moved into a smaller house I have developed a few rules. If I don't know what something is I throw it away because how could I use it if I don't know what it is. Granted it may be valuable and maybe I just forgot. Also if I can't remember the last time I wore a shirt then I assume I don't like it and will never wear it again and take it to goodwill. My advice to you is throw that crap away or take it to the scrap metal yard.

Sure Doug, never hurts to have a document on hand just in case one needs it. Steve, The diagnostic port of the Allison on our coach is in the front run bay mounted on the right hand side. It has a cover over it and is rectangular in shape. I just happen to have a photo.

Thanks Scotty. Yes I noticed the windshield washer reservoir but thought it must be a mistake. So you have not found the ABS board either?

Steven, I did not explain myself very well, I meant in addition to the second ceiling light fixture. Maybe there is something else connected besides the two light fixtures. I am just trying to understand the larger than expected current draw.

Things are a little slow around the house so thought I would seek some answers to things that have stumped me for years. First let me say that we do not presently have any problems with the engine or ABS and are just trying to satisfy our curiosity. First Mystery: What does the Eng Diag switch do. See photo. The owner's manual simply says "Checks engine functions" with no other explanation. It is located near the diagnostic port on the left of the steering column so we thought it might be used in conjunction with a device plugged into that port. We have owned this coach for 13 years and for 12 of those years the SilverLeaf has been plugged into that port. There is a port in the FRB and one in the engine compartment. A few years ago Bill Groves connected his laptop with Insight to the one in the engine compartment and the switch in question was not used. Second Mystery: The user's manual says we have an ABS diagnostics center with a switch and indicator for troubleshooting the ABS system. For years I have looked for this module and have never found it. The manual says it is in the FRB but it is not there. The manual also gives instructions on how to use the ABS diagnostics center. There is a diagnostic port near the area where the manual says this diagnostics center should be located but I suspect it is just a third engine diagnostic port. I have attached photos of the manual pages and the port in the front run bay. If anyone who owns a 2006 Diplomat can help with these questions I would appreciate.

Steven, You might investigate if the previous owner connected something else to the same circuit.

Agree with everyone about the drop being excessive. For that kind of drop you would expect the current to be higher than what two LED fixtures would draw. Are you sure that the 12 VDC ballasts have been removed from both fixtures? Remove the cover between the tubes and completely remove the ballast circuit and wiring.

We purchased and RVi3 in June and love it.

David and Rick, Yes, that is correct and that is how I started out but somehow on the last two vehicles got it reversed. In thinking about it I assume the fronts swap sides first is because on most vehicles the heal/toe wear is caused by the toe on the steer tires and those are the first tires that should have their direction reversed. I will have to mend my ways. Although we did have a Honda CRV that would develop an unbearable noise from heal/toe wear on the rears only. On that vehicle we swapped sides on the rear tires only every 3000 miles. If we did not do that we were soon buying new tires. I even had a shop change the rear end toe alignment form OEM but it only helped slightly. We were told that heal/toe wear on the rear of the CRV was caused by towing it behind the motorhome. That is also the vehicle I learned the hard way about putting new tires at one axle only on a vehicle with stability control. I was thinking about how the vehicle can know which tire position a pressure reading is from yesterday and came to the same conclusion that Rick did. If the range of the sensor is designed to around 2 feet and there is a pickup antenna for each wheel position the system would be able to know where the pressure reading emanates from. Also if the sensor in the wheel used a piezoelectricity device that generated current from wheel rotation the sensor would not require a battery. These are just guesses on my part and maybe someone who knows how these systems are designed will chime in.

This is not correct. I have the BMK and the shunt is mounted between the house battery bank and ground. The BMK monitors all current into and out of the battery bank and uses that information to calculate the SOC (state of charge). The display actually shows if the current is negative or positive but we keep ours in the SOC mode most of the time. This is far better than looking at the battery voltage to determine the state of charge. We also have the AGS (automatic generator start) set to work on the SOC as opposed to the battery voltage. To use the SOC for the AGS requires an updated Magnum remote display from the OEM unit installed in our 2006 Diplomat.

Modern radial tires can be moved to the opposite side of the vehicle and rotated in the reverse direction. By using the modified X pattern each tire will spend time at each wheel position of the vehicle and eliminate the heal/toe wear pattern. We are talking about passenger and light truck tires here. I don't know about the heavy duty tires and never rotate tire on the motorhome.

I rotate my own tires on our vehicles and wonder how the system knows the tire position. Just the other day when I got the two low pressure alarms the display matched the position with the lowest PSI. It is possible on the truck that I had landed all four tires back to the original OEM position but I have only rotated the tires once on the Sonic so not possible there. I rotate using the modified X method and the front tires move to the rear on the same side and the rears move to the front reversing sides. Over the years we have been plagued with tires making a noise after 7 or 8 thousand miles because they develop a scallop. Once this happens no amount of rotating with stop the noise and the only solution is to purchase new tires. For that reason I rotate tires every 5000 miles. Another hard lesson learned is that on vehicles with stability control - which is almost every vehicle sold now- you must replace all four tires at the same time. Any difference in diameter between the front and back tires will drive the control system crazy.

Well ED, I don't know, in fact there is a lot I don't know as I am finding out. All I can tell you is that my three vehicles have built in tire pressure monitoring from the factory. The readings display through the information system built into the instrument panel. Both my CMax and Sliverado have had tire replacements and if they replaced batteries when putting on new tires they did not mention it to me or charge me for them. I purchased a 2007 Ford SportTrac new that I gave to one of the daughters about two years ago. It has a built in tire pressure monitoring system that still works at over 200,000 miles. That vehicle has had a number of tire replacements and after each tire change you would have to drive it for a few hundreds yards to clear out the low pressure alarms. My motorhome has an aftermarket tire pressure monitoring system and we also attach sensors to the toad when we use it behind the motorhome.

I have not followed this closely but after reading Van's post it would seem you just replaced all the batteries with new batteries and now have a problem that you did not have with the old batteries. That sets a flag for me. I have learned many things the hard way and one lesson I learned years ago was that when you do something and now there is a problem then go back and double check what you did. In your case I would take a very close look at the batteries and the battery cables. Is there a battery in backwards? Is there a bad cable. You can't tell the condition of a cable by looking at it. Most cable problems are where the terminal mates to the cable. Van mentions the BMK and that reminded me of an experience I had when I first installed the BMK. It was intermittent from the start. I checked all the connections many times and unplugged and reinserted the RG-11 connector that fed back to the remote until I was blue in the face. I decided the BMK module must be bad and ordered a new one. When I installed the new one the results were the same. I was truly scratching my head by now. I then decided to do something that I should have done from the very beginning and got the voltmeter out and measured the voltage at the input to the BMK module. To my surprise it was not 12 volts but about 7 volts. This is a twisted pair cable with terminal lugs that connects directly to the battery posts. I did not make this cable and it came with the BMK. I measured directly at the terminal lugs on the battery posts and 12 volts was there. Turns out that whoever made that cable did not strip the insulation off the wire before crimping on the terminal lug. You could not see this because the terminal had insulation over the crimp area. So if I were you I would get the old voltmeter out and turn on the microwave with a bowl of water. That will draw enough current from the batteries that you should be able to detect a bad connection in the cables by measuring voltage drop.

Weather turned cold here a few days ago, 18 degrees at the house. We have three vehicles, all garaged, a 2013 Chevy Silverado Z71 CrewCab, a 2015 Ford CMax Hybrid, and a 2020 Chevy Sonic. Took the Sonic out Wednesday morning and soon got the low pressure alarm and the display told me the air pressure in each of the four tires. Keep in mind this is a vehicle that cost less than $20K. Took the truck out yesterday morning and got the same low pressure alarm and the vehicle shows me the air pressure in each of the four ties. Of course this was because of the large drop in temp from the garage to the outside. But it got me to wondering about my motorhome. I spend a lot of time keeping the TMPS on the motrorhome working by replacing batteries, etc. My three vehicles never give me any trouble and don't need battery replacement. Our coach is 15 years old and maybe this is not the case with new coaches, but why don't Class A motorhomes come from the factory with a built in TPMS like my other vehicles. I know you are going to say because the house and coach are built by different manufactures but surely they could solve that problem. From a safety stand point I think Class A coaches should have the TPMS built in just like my other vehicles.