Electrical Question

[egaito]

The new Newmar power converter for the gauges came in, and has a different wiring scheme than the old one.

The old had three terminals, input positive, output positive, and a shared negative, which is grounded to every gauge, including the 32volt voltage gauge.

The new converter has a ground for each side. Looking at the schematic, there appears to be a run from the output negative to the input negative, but it doesn't work out that way. I don't get a reading between the -12v terminal and the +32v terminal, so there's something keeping them isolated.

My question is, can I tie the two negatives together to get my ground back? I can always call Newmar Monday AM, but it stinks being this close to "done" with the lower helm and not able to finish.

On a side note, the new Nemar is a very nice device. It came with rubber isolation mounts, and is fused on both the input and output sides. The older unit only had the input side fused.

 

[TedZ]

I went to the Newmar site and they sell Standard or Isolated DC to DC converters. The object it appears is to allow positive ground connections.

As i see it the negatives can be connected if you are converting one negative ground power supply to another. I could not find a wiring diagram on their site but i can't imagine, from the literature that connecting the negatives could cause a problem.

This is not a situation where you will get a melt down as long as you have negative ground systems which, on a Hatteras, you should have.

Ted

 

[egaito]

For anyone it may help in the future, jumping the two negative posts on the power converter indeed got things working, and didn't let the smoke out of anything.