Video Transcript for Review and Installation Coleman Mach-C Everest Variable Speed RV Air Conditioner System

Hey there, neighbors, it's Kevin here with etrailer, and today we're gonna be taking a closer look at Coleman-Mach's Everest RV air conditioning system. They have that 18,000 BTU rating so it can drastically cool down your trailer in just a limited amount of time. It comes with a variable speed compressor, so it intelligently monitors cabin temperature and adjusts the speed to prevent aggressive cycling on and off so that way we're not, you know, pulling a ton of power all at once and kicking on and off, and just, you know, really kind of draining the power grid there as, you know, maybe we have some other things going on, or maybe there's other people at the campground that also has theirs coming on, which can kind of put a big drain on it. Now this is also gonna have Soft Star technology in it that's going to drastically reduce that startup surge. So that's where it's gonna store up some power and make that kick on just a little bit lower of a wattage so that way you aren't having that big draw where you'd probably see your lights flicker inside of your camper and maybe some other things don't wanna run, maybe you have a circuit breaker pop or something like that just because too many things have kicked on at once, and maybe the campground power really isn't up to snuff for the demand. Now this is going to have a couple other key features, it has obviously a newer design to it that's gonna look a lot more modern.

So you can kind of upgrade that look on maybe your older camper or keep up with those newer campers that do look a lot nicer. And then it's gonna come with hydrophobic-coated coils; and what that's gonna do is help shed off water off of the coils quicker and prevent those freeze-ups that you might have, especially on those really humid days where then now your AC's down and you gotta wait for it to thaw out before it'll actually kick back on again, which now means we're waiting even longer to cool down our camper, and potentially making it a much longer process to get it to where we're at a comfortable temperature if we're just now getting down to the campsite and then having to exhaust all that hot air out. Along with that, they've kind of upgraded the shroud to where it has a little bit more protection and better spacing, so that way maybe you're sitting out in a hailstorm and it's bumping up against the shroud here, it's not gonna ding up your coils as much because it's got a little bit more spacing and protection in there to help prevent that. Now a shroud's gonna come in either black or white, depending on which kit you choose, and with the ceiling assembly set up, this is one where you can use it in both a ducted or ductless setup. So it's gonna make that buying process a whole lot simpler, you're not gonna have to sit there and kind of filter through different things to try and figure out, "Hey, am I getting the right ceiling assembly" So why don't we go down, take a look at that as well.

Now we just bought this tool, this is a thermal imager, this, I kind of wanted to do just to give you a better idea of like what you're getting with this. So you can see we've got that blue spot where the air is coming out, and that's reading, you know, low 60s, which is exactly what we have it at. So that's telling us we are getting proper airflow through here. and it's actually cooling how it's supposed to be. But that's something you can also check with some temperature gauges as well, but you can kind of see all around it, it's somewhat warmer versus that spot where we got that cold air coming through.

Now I just turned the fan up to max speed, still pretty quiet compared to a lot of the ACs that are out in the market, especially some of these older units. I kind of have my voice at just a normal setting, obviously, you're gonna hear me a little bit better just because I have a microphone, but this is something where even standing directly under it, I could have a conversation with someone and wouldn't really have to talk super loud; whereas a lot of the other ACs on the market, you're probably gonna have to kind of really speak up because that decibel level starts getting higher and higher as you raise that fan. Now when we drop the fan back down, get it back to low speed, once this kicks down, it's even quieter. So if you aren't really super hot, not running it as hard, once this does kick down, it's almost whisper-quiet. (unit whirring faintly) All right, so it took probably 30 seconds, and now it's cycled down to just that low fan speed; and you can clearly hear me plain as day.

Definitely a lot quieter, and it's gonna be something that's gonna make it a little bit more peaceful inside of your RV. Well, here is our ceiling assembly, it's gonna be a lot more modern, you don't have some of that older yellow-looking plastic on here, you got a nice, clean, white, like I said, more modern look with it. Now there's gonna be vents that are gonna come out here, so you are gonna have some airflow kind of coming out through here, even though this is set up for ducted, which I can show you in just one sec by popping out our assembly here. Oh, am I hitting the right side It's this side. There we go. So once you pull off your cover, you're gonna see this mesh liner on here. So this is your air filter, this is something you definitely want to clean out, just kind of rinse it off, you don't wanna get any kind of harsh chemicals or soaps on here, so rinse it, get all the dust off of that every once in a while, and then let it air-dry before you put it back up, that's gonna help keep your air nice and clean as it's going through your whole RV's system here, so that way you're not breathing anything gross. You got access to your wiring up at the front here, and you can kind of see that tubing that they have where it's blowing the air out from that side, you can't really see it as much from over back here. But pretty simple to operate, you've got two little shutters on the sides that you can open or close depending on how much airflow you want in here. And then like I said, it's just that simple little cover, which is gonna pop in with just two little prongs, and then it'll have these little connectors on the end which grip it and then kind of push in like a button, kind of. You'll have little nubs on each side, so it might wanna fight you on getting in, but that's just to make sure that it stays up into the ceiling assembly. So you'll just push past those, (tab clicking) and then I just clicked it in with that, so that'll hold it up. Let's go on over, we can check out our thermostat as well. Now the thermostat's gonna be super simple to operate. You've got your On/Off mode button here, which is gonna cycle through your fan, your cooling, fan and cooling, heat, and then you've got a couple different modes on here as well. When you're on the fan setting, you can also adjust your fan speed. Let's go ahead and swap to that. You can see just by tapping the fan, we're getting those extra lines showing up there showing that it's increasing that speed; we can bring that back down. And then from there, we've also got our cooling, so we can set our temperature, and this is also gonna be the same for heat as well. You can set that temperature whatever you desire, and then it'll switch over to that. We'll put this back on fan and cooling. Now there's also the Eco mode and the Turbo mode. Eco mode is gonna have a little bit less of a draw, but you're obviously not gonna get as cool as you would with it being on Standard or Turbo mode. That's gonna be for those of you who want a boondock and still have some cool air in your trailer, but not fully, you know, run out your batteries in a short amount of time. Now the Turbo mode's gonna be a little bit different, that one's gonna be the exact opposite, that's where we have a real hot trailer and we wanna quickly run through and get all that hot, stale air out and get it cooled down. Now we're gonna be going over each of the components when we talk about the install itself. This is gonna be a complete replacement, parts for ACs aren't interchangeable anymore, especially since the refrigerant changed, so you will need to make sure that you're replacing the rooftop unit, your thermostat, and then also your ceiling assembly inside of your trailer. Now it is a little bit of a challenge to get that rooftop unit up onto the top of the RV. So if that's the case for you, and you can't do it, or maybe the wiring side of this is just a little bit more complicated than what you are accustomed to, then definitely feel free to check out our Installer Locator and you can enter in your ZIP code to find a shop near you and get it professionally installed. If you are wanting to do this yourself though, stick around, and I'll help walk you through the process. Now to begin our installation, we're typically gonna be removing our old AC unit, but in our case today, we were mid-roof replacement and decided, "Eh, why don't we go ahead and just swap the AC out as well." So, unfortunately, I don't have all the footage of me removing the old AC unit, but the steps are pretty simple, and, honestly, you might not have the same exact AC unit as me, so some of these minor steps you might not even have to do on your own. Now just to kind of walk you through it, you'll have your plenum cover up on there, usually, you'll have a couple of visible screws, maybe some that are kind of hidden behind some kind of cover that you might need a screwdriver or pick to kind of pop out so that you can gain access to those screws. Then once you get all those screws removed, there's gonna be four bolts, one in each corner here that are gonna be mounting the actual metal framing here up into that rooftop unit, and that's what's actually pulling it down and securing it to the roof, so you'll want to remove that as well. Once you have all that removed, then your air distribution box, which is that metal framing, is going to kind of start to fall down on you, but you're gonna have all of your wiring still kind of connected to it. And I have the control box right here, this is something that would be mounted up on that framing, and inside of this is where we make our 110 connections. Now, I've already removed that at this point, but there are also some 12-volt connections, our furnace, and then also our thermostat. So it's really important that you take a look at what you have, figure out which each one of these wires are, and kind of know what their function is, so that way we can easily swap it over to the new unit. Now, one other thing I like to check is also gonna be our thermostat. Now in our case, we have this. Or, no, this one right here, which has four wires coming through; we've got white, red, blue, and green, which is gonna be good because we have a four-wire harness that is gonna be replacing this current one. Now I'm gonna go ahead and just reuse the wiring that we already have, just because it's gonna be a lot easier than me trying to fish all this through the wall and then down this cabinet that's over here. But why don't we go ahead and take a look at the thermostat so you can kind of get a better picture of what I'm talking about. Now, right here in this cabinet, here's where our thermostat wire comes out. I could potentially tape on my new wire harness to the end that's up in the ceiling and then pull that through the wall. But there's a good chance it's not gonna make it through, there might be some other things in the way, things that that connector can get caught on, and I don't have the time to kind of completely pull apart this whole cabinet just to make it work. So, like I said, we're just gonna reuse these wires. I will have to strip back our casing here a little bit more. They did snip off that fourth wire pretty short, so I will have to kind of adjust for that as well. But your thermostat will typically be just mounted up with a couple screws with the face of it just kind of popped on; usually, they don't have any screws into the face of these, it's usually just some kind of simple connector. So if you look at it just like that, it's already popped on. Typically on the bottom, you'll see kind of an indentation where you can pop it off, and then pull the whole face off, get those screws out, and then gain access to the wiring. So on here, we'll need to get a really, really small screwdriver so we can loosen up those set screws on there and then pop out each one of our wires, and then we'll kind of be at a base-level here where all we have to do now is just get our rooftop unit up. All right, now, I've gotten this mostly lined up, at least from what I can see, definitely a lot easier if you have a second person down below that can kind of help guide you so you can kind of shift it around and get everything to where you have those four bolts lined up to the corners, so that way it's a little bit easier, you're not having to kind of try and shove it or move it around from below. Right, now, so here's our air distribution box, and we are going to kind of just hold it up and take a measurement. Now this isn't gonna be a exact measurement because as we start to tighten down those four bolts, it's gonna suck the rooftop unit down a little bit as it's closing in on that gasket. So this is kind of a generalization that we're gonna go for, essentially. What I'm trying to do is figure out how much I need to cut off of my divider. So biggest thing with AC units is making sure that you're not allowing air to pass through between the intake and the exhaust, we don't want to just keep sucking cold air right back up into the unit 'cause that'll cause it to freeze up. So we have these dividers, and then you can also get some HVAC tape, they also include a roll of foam that you can stick on and kind of run on here. I like taking a lot of the HVAC tape and then also kind of sealing up any openings in our roof cavity here because if any air is slipping out into the ceiling, that means it's not going through your duct work and then it's not actually cooling you down, it's just being wasted. So, I'm gonna shove all the wiring through so I can get this measurement real quick, get it pushed into place. I'll get my tape measure, and we are getting about six and a quarter from the bottom here. Let me show you. So we're getting about six and a quarter from this bottom edge up to the rooftop unit. Now, I'm gonna expect this to kind of shrink about a quarter of an inch, so I'm gonna go six inches with my divider, and then anything else I need to kind of cover up, I'll just do with the foam and the tape. Now the top of this that's gonna go up against our rooftop unit has the foam, so we're gonna be removing from the pieces down below. So let's see what we got. This is five inches, so, actually, we don't have to cut anything off of this, we're just gonna need to secure it so that it's sitting six inches above. Now, there is some 3M tape on here, we're gonna pull back the little backing on there so that way we can have that ready. And we'll come down here, we'll get a little bit of room to work. Not too far off, right there. So I'll stick that on nice and snug, and then like I said, I'm gonna go over it with the foam on this side, which I set right here. We can put on our foam. I'm a little off, but it's not a big deal. Like I said, I'm gonna seal this all up with some extra tape afterwards. Grab yourself a three-eighth socket, and I'm gonna use my ratchet to kind of run down the four bolts, but you're also gonna wanna have a torque wrench, pretty small one, it's gonna be one you typically see for like a bike or something like that where you can get down real, real low in newton-meters because this is gonna be under like five foot-pounds, so that's kind of hard to do with most standard torque wrenches. All right, now when we're putting this in, we wanna make sure that we have this box in our control box facing towards the front of the trailer, it's also gonna line up with our wiring on here. So, put that through one more time. I like to get one and then go diagonal from it to get the other side and then have it kind of hold itself up. There we go. Now I can grab my ratchet, (power tool whirring) and get this kind of sucked more back up to the ceiling. (power tool whirring) (power tool whirring) (power tool whirring) Oh. All right. Now in the instructions, they tell you to shrink the gasket down to about three-quarters of an inch. I will still do that, but I still like to go with essentially what every single other manufacturer says for the torque specs, just 'cause it's pretty general between each one. So that's what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna grab that real quick, and I'm gonna sit here, and this takes a bit of time to kind of go through it. So make sure you're doing it evenly though, you don't wanna go too much on one bolt and then have it kind of getting too sunk in on one side and not enough on the other, and then it kind of gets kind of crooked on you. I'm gonna come back with my torque wrench. Now in the instructions, they do say just shrink it to about three quarters of an inch for that gasket, but I'm still gonna go ahead and use a torque wrench because most AC units, or all, kind of have essentially the same torque spec for it. So I've done this enough times to know; it's gonna be okay to just go to that. Now, I do wanna kind of mix up which bolts I'm working on here. So I'll go a little bit on this one, I'll come across, we wanna get a nice, even pressure on here. We don't wanna have one kind of sunk in more than the other, and then it's all kind of cattywampous and it doesn't wanna line up properly when we go to put on the plenum cover. (ratchet clicking) Next thing is gonna be getting our wiring in place here. Now I've got my 110 coming through, it's a little snug here, luckily, we got a decent amount of wire on the AC side here to kind of help make up for that. Now I'm just gonna use some wire nuts and some electrical tape to secure these in place, but I wanted to go over the colors. So on here, we have our black casing coming from our 110, we got white casing, and then a bare wire. The bare wire's gonna be our ground, the white's gonna be our neutral, black is going to be our hot lead. On our AC side, the yellow and green wire here is gonna be our ground, black will be our hot, white will be our neutral. Make sure you give it a little tug and make sure it's not loose. There you go. On your kit, you're gonna find a little plate like this where it's gonna have a lip on it, that lip needs to kind of go up and curve over, that's gonna go on this edge right here. There's also gonna be a small bag of screws in there, there'll be really, really tiny screws, that's gonna be one of the ones we're gonna be using right here. So I'll move my capped part into place, it's kind of a tight fit on here, too. There we go. And then you'll just need a Phillips-head bit in order to tighten that down, (power tool whirring) and that will secure our 110 out of the way, so that way we're staying safe. Now, we've got a couple other wires we need to connect here. So if we look at it, we've got one that says Down-load cable, one that says Power 12-volt, that's red, we've got a black one that says Ground, so that's also gonna be our 12-volt, which we know our 12-volt in this case is gonna be. Yellow is our 12-volt power, white over here is our ground. So I can undo these connectors and then pop those in there. And then we also have our thermostat wire. Now, like I said earlier, I'm gonna be reusing the wiring that we already have here just to avoid having to route all of this through the ceiling, and then down through this cabinet because I don't know if I'm gonna be able to without having to fully pull some of these walls down. So it's gonna be super important that I am keeping track of which one of these colors is what, making sure that we are matching it up with the wiring that we're running over there, and then putting these in the correct order when we connect to our thermostat. So I'm gonna start with the 12-volt power and ground, this is gonna be the easiest one here. I need to grab my crimps. 12-volt power, same thing, I'm just gonna use a wire nut. We'll cap that with some electrical tape in a bit. Let's do our grounds. (cutter clacking) (plastic clacking) I'm gonna start disconnecting my thermostat wires, figuring out how I wanna connect those. I'll probably just use some butt connectors for that. One other thing I'm gonna do real quick before I hop onto the thermostat wiring is put on this panel. So since we have a ducted system, we don't want the air blowing straight down. This panel is gonna come in handy because this is now gonna block this area to force all that air through the duct that we have here and over on this side as well, so that way it blows through each one of our ducts, which you can see we got two over there, one right here, so there's quite a few in this room, and then there's more throughout the trailer as well. But these are gonna be those same real tiny Phillips-head screws that we used on that little cover right there for our 110 service. And this is gonna go with the more rectangle side facing towards the front and then the cutout for the screw, or the lag bolts here, to have towards the back. So make sure you have the foam facing up, and then it's just simply lining up with your mounting holes. (power tool whirring) Grab my little snips and kind of strip back some of this casing a little bit more to give myself a little more room to work with. I've got red for red here, I'm gonna try yellow for white, and then I've got black and blue, and green and green. Try to kind of keep this somewhat similar so it's easier later on when we are connecting up our thermostat. All right, now for the furnace wire, our system before has a positive and a negative on here. So we have two wires, but now we're only going down to one with our new system. So we need to figure out which wire we're gonna connect to that. Now, there's a couple ways to do that. First, we're gonna be double-checking, seeing which one has power, which one doesn't. So we take our multimeter, which I've got right here, and then we can put our wire up to it. So right now, I have my hot lead going to the white wire, my ground lead or neutral lead going to the red wire on here. And we're getting 12-volts, which tells me that the white wire is hot, the red wire is not. Now, since we know that touching these two wires turns it on, we wanna go to the wire that does not have power going to it, which, since we already checked it with our multi-meter, we know it's this red one right here. So, what we can do is switch those up together, I'm gonna throw a wire nut on there as well, get that nice and snug down. I'll cap that off with my electrical tape. All right, now this white wire, since it has 12-volt power going to it, I'm gonna cut off the end so that way I don't have bare wire on there, and then I'm just gonna cap it off with a little bit of electrical tape. We're not gonna be using this wire, so we can secure it out of the way. And now at this point, we can go over to our thermostat, and we're gonna make our connections over there so that way we can hook up to our thermostat actually and then be able to test it out. I don't want to put on our plenum until we've actually tested it though, just in case you might have a couple of issues you might need to work out, or if you need to come back and double-check your wire colors, 'cause like, in my case, where I cut off that connector, and I don't have matching colors, I need to make sure that I'm making all of these connections correctly. Now to save time, I've already gone ahead and installed the thermostat. Now I took off the harness that was on here previously because we weren't gonna reuse, or actually use the harness that came with it, because I wanted to just reuse the thermostat wire that was in here. So I made sure that I properly put each one of my wires in based on what I connected it to up at the ceiling assembly. And if you want to do that as well, you can look at the post here and then look up at what it is labeled as. So that first one is gonna be B, second one's A, then we have VCC, which is gonna be your power, and then COM is your common, which means ground. So you'll have ground there, power, A, and B. So pretty simple. Now getting the plate on, you'll wanna make sure that you have the backing plate put on through the wiring first, that way you don't have to take it back off. And then you just got two screws, they'll come in your kit, you can pop those in. And then once we have that how we want it, we will then just press on the front of this and it just clips right into place. Now if you're having any issues, it's gonna be really simple to pop this back off and take a look at it. You'll squeeze down below, and up top, it has these three prongs right here, you can kind of pinch in on it 'cause this plastic is a little flexible, and then that'll be able to pop it right off for you. Now here's our plenum, we're gonna go ahead and put that on. On one side, you'll hear it kind of click, and then it's gonna have some little points that'll poke into these holes right here. So we wanna make sure that we properly pop that out, and then that's gonna give us access to our mounting holes, which are these four holes here, which are gonna line up with some of the holes up in the ceiling assembly like I talked about when we we inchesre previously installing our divider here to switch this into ducted mode. So these inner four holes right next to the mounting bolts, it actually run up into our rooftop unit. Now this is only gonna go on one way, you'll notice there's kind of a cutout in the center here, and that's for this space right here. So even though this is designed to work with a ducted system, you can still get some airflow straight down in the area that you have this in, because airflow is gonna pop out through this little hole right here, go through this little box right here, and kind of come out on this end. And then there's also another little hole right here to allow some airflow through. Now if you don't want that, it's still really simple to handle, there's gonna be these little vent covers here that you can open or close in order to kind of either dampen that airflow or allow it to come through. So we're gonna go ahead and pop this on just like so. That lined up properly. I'll get one of my screws, and you just need a Phillips-head screwdriver for this. And it looks like you still are gonna get some airflow through here too as well anyway. Once you get one of the screws in, it'll be a little bit easier having it hold itself up, and then you can kind of get the rest. All right. Now, we're gonna go ahead, we'll put the little cover in, once you get those popped into place. And I must not have it fully in. There we go. And then click that in, a little bit of a tight fit here. There we go. And now we can test out our AC. So now we're gonna turn on our AC unit. Let's hit the Power button. Now right now it's already on Fan and Cool. If we wanna change our fan speed, which you can see right now, there's little two dashes next to the fan signal. We'll hit Mode till we get to the fan, then you can hit the Fan button that's right above it and increase that fan speed. Now most RV manufacturers, or AC manufacturers, I should have said, are going to recommend just running that fan constantly, even if you aren't running the cooling, just so that way it's cycling air through the whole trailer. That'll kind of help once you are using the cooling as well. Now there are a couple other things here. So we'll put just our cool on, but the fan's obviously gonna need to run as well. Heat is also an option on here. So we have our furnace hooked up, it's gonna kick the furnace on. Now it's a little bit warmer here, so that's not gonna be an option for us today to have it run unless we really set it up high. And then, from here, we'll go back, I got my fan and my cooling going, and if I wanted to change the temperature, which you can see I just set it to 61, I'll move it back up to 63. This will kick on in just a second here, once it sends that command up to it. But I did wanna talk about these other two options here. So we also have an Eco mode and a Turbo mode. Turbo mode's gonna pull more power, but that's gonna quickly cool down your RV so that way when you hit that campsite, maybe your camper's been sitting out at the storage, light all day, just got a ton of hot, stale air inside of it, and you wanna quickly exhaust that out, that's gonna be an option for you. Now Eco mode is gonna be different, that's going to be less of a draw, it's gonna be a lower power where you're not drawing as much. So for those of you who are boondocking, now you can kind of mitigate some of that power usage and kind of drop it down while still getting some of that cool air throughout your trailer. But let's turn this back on, get it running here. Well, that's gonna do it for our closer look at Coleman-Mach's Everest RV AC system. My name's Kevin; and if you still have some questions, definitely feel free to reach out to us via out Ask The Experts link, a comment on this video, or a phone call to our Customer Service department and we'd be happy to help you out in your journey.