Bladder Manifold Diagnostic

March 21, 2018, 12:06:50 pm

Greetings,
I have to be honest, I follow this forum religiously for the world of information you all provide, but have failed to post much info of my own. We are about a year into this commitment with our coach and for the most part it has been an enjoyable journey. The last year has been spent doing what I call "making it ours", lots and lots of tweeks and mods . Too many to list here. The point of my post today is a recent experience fixing a couple of slide out issues. First being the replacement of the air management filters that supply air from the aux. compressor. They had previously been ignored and were way past any service interval. They had failed to stop moisture from entering the bladder manifolds and caused havoc with the function of the process. Lots of head scratching and trying to figure out how this system works left me with a lot of questions. That's where HWH came in. I can't say enough about the support from the tech line. Here I am with an 11 year old coach, not a business, just an individual hunting and pecking on my own trying to save coachbucks, just like a lot of the rest of you. I wonder if I got lucky and got their best rep. or if they are all that way? I talked numerous times to a "Randy" and I had to share my appreciation for his patience. After a few conversations I had a greater understanding of the bladder inflate and vacuum process, ordered a couple of parts and decreased my fear of being stuck somewhere because I couldn't retract a slide. I don't have to tell you people it's all about confidence. So.....Thanks again to HWH and especially Randy.....and I'll try and post more.

Re: Bladder Manifold Diagnostic

Reply #1 – March 21, 2018, 06:56:31 pm

Larry,

If you can, post the backup procedure to pull the slides in. My coach is the same year and it would be great to have that info.

Thanks

Re: Bladder Manifold Diagnostic

Reply #2 – March 21, 2018, 08:09:07 pm

brrving
Not sure if it is a procedure as much as the confidence to trouble shoot and repair. The beauty of my system and probably yours is that it has a complete manifold system for each slide. So if anything fails (outside of the bladder itself) you can borrow a part off of one of the manifolds performing correctly. I don't want you to think I performed any miracles, I just developed a better understanding of the system. My issue began as an erratic cycle on my front pass. side slide. Some times it would cycle just fine and other times the light would never stop flashing. It haunted you the entire last day when you were camping. It ended up being a faulty vacuum switch on the manifold block. This NO switch senses when the bladder is pulled away from the slide, then triggers the yellow light to go steady and allows the hyd. pump to run when you press the extend/retract rocker switch.
Knowing this would let you either switch it with one of the others or jump across the plugin and bypass the switch. What I didn't realize was that in the delay between the yellow light going steady and you pressing the rocker switch is that the bladder relaxes back to an "ambient" position. I have one that seems to stay sucked back it the channel when the light goes steady and one that you can watch and it returns to ambient and just does come in contact with the slide. This was the problem I was trying to diagnose. What I discovered from HWH was that as soon as you trigger the rocker switch, the vacuum is reapplied to the bladder and the hyd. pump won't run (move the slide) until the bladder is pulled back and the vacuum switch is triggered again. So if you were standing right over it when it when to steady the slide would move immediately, but if you turned the key and were multitasking other things while packing up or unpacking, when you hit the rocker there would be a delay before the slide moved. I failed to connect those dots until I found out the vacuum switch has to be triggered again.
Keep your water traps and desiccant filters serviced. Foretravel installs three traps at the aux. compressor (one more that HWH recommends) This clued me to how sensitive this system is to dirt and moisture.
Please, anyone that finds issue with any of my discovery's correct me.
Hope this helps.

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