The Progressive Industries surge and voltage protector arrived via UPS today. I brought the box to the trailer this evening and while Val finished cooking dinner, I looked underneath the floor from the basement to see if I was going to need to crawl through that area. Fortunately, not, as the breaker panel is right in the living room next to the fireplace. Pulling the entire panel out revealed a large enough space to mount the unit behind the panel.

We made a quick trip to Lowes to grab some 6 gauge wire instead of trying to splice the unit inline with the cable that was already there. It made the job so much easier. After returning from the shopping run and retrieving my tools from the basement, I turned on several lights in the living room area (nice thing about the lights being on the 12V circuit), turned off the outside breaker and pulled the power plug from the post. Then it was off to disassembly. Val took a picture of the job in progress. You can see the breaker panel location next to the fireplace. There is a door that I removed that covers that area.

Things went smoothly and after about an hour I was nearly done and starting to button things back up. Here you see the last two wires to hook up (ground and neutral). Within a few minutes I had power back on and nothing blew up.

Not shown here, but there is a remote unit that indicates status of the unit such as voltage and current draw on each leg, frequency, error codes, etc. I just mounted it inside the same cabinet as the breaker panel and 12V fuse panel. No picture of the completed project, however.

The two vent covers I ordered should be here tomorrow. Might be Saturday before I tackle those, though.

Also, got disappointing news from work that no vacations can be taken prior to Christmas due to a tight development schedule, so our camping trip to the beach for Thanksgiving is a no-go. Also, I’ll have to move the truck’s transmission rebuild on into January.