Just replaced electric heating element in my 2012 year model Truma b14 hot water unit with an 850watt element and after 1hour 15minutes the water is barely warm. I would expect that it should be quite a bit hotter than that as the old element would heat it up in about 45 minutes. Is there anything that I may be overlooking as I'm new to a van with a hot water unit in it.
The old element would trip the circuit breaker as soon as I turned it on using 240 mains power but would not trip the generator circuit breaker if I plugged it directly into the generator bypassing the van circuit breaker. Even with the old heating element I felt that it should have provided a little more water before it went cold although I realize 14 ltrs of hot water isn't much.
I measured the ohms resistance on the old and the new elements when I had the old element out before I put the new one in. Old one was 64 ohms new one was 61 ohms.
The current draw on the new element should be, if my maths is correct, about 3.55 amps. I will measure it early next week when I have more time.
Pete
1. My van had a single 10 litre hot water storage unit, which I found didn't provide enough hot water on chilly mornings. I added a second 10 litre unit, inline. I haven't yet run out of water with 20 litres. I can isolate either unit so that, in the summer, I can revert to 10 litres.
2. A circuit breaker in the van, one of 3 (but 1 is exclusively for the air con) would randomly trip. No pattern to its tripping. Over time, I isolated each connected power outlet but couldn't determine why the circuit break was tripping. I replaced the circuit breaker itself and it has never again tripped.
Before you do anything else, turn off at wall power point, pull out electrical plug from wall, wait about ten minutes and then plug electrical cord back into power point and switch back on.
Worked for mine.
