EASY ELECTRICS

I’ve noticed over the years that ‘electrics’ seem to fill many people with dread. I write for motorhome and kit car magazines, and the recurring anxiety is always about the ‘electrics’.

“Modern vehicles are far too complicated,” and “I wouldn’t know where to start!” are common responses. But the reality is, the habitation area of most motorhomes is largely made by human beings. So it can be fixed by a human.

Base vehicle electrics

Now that I’ve said how easy modern vehicles are to work on, I’ll add a caveat. If your base vehicle was built in the past 10 years, it probably has some form of CANBUS wiring in it.

This clever invention pulses digital signals down the wiring loom, with one wire carrying multiple bits of information. It’s designed to pare back the loom, to reduce cost and weight.

In the case of the most modern base vehicles, the best advice is to leave it to your main dealer – rather than a local garage – as they will have all of the latest diagnostic equipment, which is regularly updated. They also receive technical service bulletins from the manufacturer, detailing revised procedures and recall information.

Even if you did want to tackle your base vehicle electrics yourself, the cost of investing in the test equipment makes it fairly pointless. So leave that to a main dealer.

However, before you contact the dealership, it is always worth checking the base vehicle battery voltage and that the alternator is working. Low voltage can sometimes throw up random error codes that lead you on a wild goose chase.

For example, my Fiat Panda daily driver had some of the dash warning lights suddenly come on, indicating a power-steering fault and an immobiliser issue, yet the steering felt fine and it started with no problem.

Testing the battery, I found a duff cell in it and once replaced, all the warning lights disappeared. I could have wasted a lot of time stripping down the power-assisted steering, had I not checked.

So, step one of any base vehicle electrical issue always starts