Category Archives: Enhancements

Smartplug upgrade

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Our shore power connector is a 50amp twist lock connector.  The 50amp cord is heavy and unwieldy, especially in cold weather. I also have a 30amp cord that uses a specific twist lock connector that goes from 50amp on the trailer to 30amp on the cord connector.  This twist lock setup is difficult for Roxie to use and getting harder for me.  I have also heard of bad connection issues with twist locks.  Time to look for another.

I have seen the Smartplug series of plugs and adapters for a while.  Having some potential problems with our connectors made it seem more plausible to upgrade.  A friend of mine, Bruce, recently upgraded also and I tend to trust him about electrical issues as he was a power lineman.  Time to upgrade.  I purchased a 50amp combo kit in Stainless Steel (from Amazon).  I also purchased an additional 50amp connector to upgrade a second power cord, but there was a twist on this one.

Let’s look at the process via photo captions.

The old twist lock connector almost at its’ end of life.

The connector disconnected. Wires of this gauge are beasts!  This took a large effort and hurt my thumb.

The wires cut to their appropriate lengths.

Now they are stripped to the required lengths.

Wires get inserted into the corresponding color slot and tightened down.

Screw the strain relief together around the cable.

Completed 50amp cord connector.

The next cord was my 30amp cord.  This is where it gets interesting.  SmartPlug does not have a 50amp to 30amp converter as I did with the old twist lock. The solution was to use the SmartPlug 50amp connector but wire it to accept 3-wire 30amp from the pedestal and deliver 4-wire “50amp” to the plug.  Here is how I did it.

The old 30amp connector has met its’ fate!

Wires cut a bit long as I have to use a portion of one as a jumper.

Here the wires are stripped with the jumper wire ready to go.

These images show the external strain relief that are not a standard part of this connector.

Here is the jumper that brings in 3 legs (only 1 hot) and puts out 4 (two of them hot – red and black).

All wired up and ready to close.

Completed 30amp cord with 50amp connector.

The final step is the connector on the trailer.  I was hoping this would not take too long.

The old twist lock connector.

Remove the screws, pull it out of the trailer and release the internal wiring.

The bare wires ready for installation. There is not much give on these wires, very tight!

Insert the wires and tighten them down.

The completed project.

Everything appears to be working and the project was very easy.  Since I was doing my non-standard 30amp to 50amp cable I contacted SmartPlug for some reassurance.  Terry responded telling me that I should use a different cable strain relief for the 30amp.  In the spirit of full disclosure he did send me those parts in exchange for installation pictures.  None of this was an issue since I planned on blogging about it AND I had already purchased the other parts.

All in all I am glad I have done this now.  It should also make this easier for Roxie to plug the electric in now.

Toy-hauler flavor

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One of the trade-offs we had to do with our solar install was to remove our front battery compartments from the trailer to give us more room under that couch for our 4 batteries and electronics.  However, I could not remove the doors for the batteries (not enough time) and had to caulk them sealed.  It was not pretty, in fact, it was so ugly I never took photos of it.  Time to do something about it!  I decided to cover up the holes but try to make it look nice.

I decided to take a page from the toy-haulers.  I ordered some diamond plate.  Now that the trailer is back (after 43 days) I can work on it.  The first step is taking off the old doors.  I guess you get to see the old ugly one in this sequence.

Above you can see the original door, the door opened, the door removed, caulking around the edge, a piece of aluminum to cover the hole, and the cover riveted.

The next step is preparing and installing the diamond plate.  With guidance from Vinnie Lamica of Vinnie’s Northbay Airstream Repair.  He concurred with my plan of using 3M VHB tape for securing the diamond plate.  I know that many solar companies use the same VHB to mount the solar panel brackets to roofs.  Vinnie also recommended that I apply a bead of Trempro 635 around the edge to protect the tape.  I also put on some finished edges to make the diamond plate look nicer.

This is the diamond plate, reversed and cut.  I have markings for my orientation.

This is after placing the VHB tape and finished edges but prior to the bead of Trempro:

The installation was easy to do alone.  Once one part of the VHB grabbed on it was just a matter of pushing on the panel where the tape was and it was done.

Here are some shots:

I am very pleased with the results.  My son said to me, “It looks surprisingly professional”.  Not sure how I should take that…

A quick trailer repair update.  We got our trailer back on 2/9 after 43 days in the shop.  We are glad to have it back and ready to get moving again.