PowerMax 30A AC Wireless Power Center - 35A DC Output - 12V

Video Transcript for Talking RV Power Converters with PowerMax

Hey there neighbors, Kevin here with etrailer and today we have our friends from PowerMax. We have Graham here today and he's going to be giving us a bit of a rundown on their electrical components and what those can do to enhance your camping experience. So why don't you give us a little bit of a background on PowerMax Yeah, certainly. Certainly appreciate it. Thanks. Again, my name's Graham.

I'm a vice president of sales at PowerMax. We've been around since 2010 based in Florida. And we manufacture high quality electrical products for the RV industry primarily. Ranges from converters, inverters generators, water pumps, anything kind of tied into 110 and 12 volt products is kind of our kind of core business and core products that we do. I'll start off with our main item which is a converter and for a lot of your neighbors they may or may not know what they are, but it's probably one of the most important products in their trailer, an RV.

The converter takes the 110 volt from the outlet like you would have at home obviously in your RV and then charges the battery and provides that 12 volt power. Now, 12 volt power you're talking about lights, water pumps and your thermostat control. Even though your air conditioner is 110 volt power, the little thermostat on the wall. So if your converter's not working, you will have no lights, no running water and no heat or air. So for what can be a few hundred dollars is probably one of the most important products you're going to find in your RV and sometimes that kind of joke it's almost as important as the steering wheel or the tires you're actually running on.

Without this, you're effectively towing a cargo trailer or driving a box van. If it's the summer, you're going to have no shower, air conditioning and then no lights at night. So it's kind of one of our core products. We do have our latest model here too which is we just released earlier this year and etrailer was our first company to carry this product. And again, so this is going to take from the wall outlet down to 12 volt power.

This is lithium compatible. There's a few selections on the side there that can make that adjustment from either your lead acid, your lithium, or you can actually even use this as a general direct power source when there's no battery in line to run an actual piece of equipment. That's nice that you got the adjuster on there too. Yes. A lot of times you're usually buying one that's specifically lithium or specifically lead acid. Exactly. Yeah. We found that a lot of our customers like the fact of knowing what setting it is on. If you are going to switch from lead acid to lithium, you're pretty much not going to go back. So there's no need to worry about something that's automatically checking things back and forth. You move a switch, the light changes color, you know where you're at and it's ultimately set ready to go. And this will, in the different stages it will bulk and/or float the lithium battery correctly when it's on that lithium mode. And ultimately even go back into a rebulk mode which is pretty crucial because some of the other products out there in the industry once they're in a certain float mode, they won't come back on and recharge it. And lithium as we know, or you may not know but you really need to be charging that upwards of the 14 volt plus range. If it's not charging in that range it's pretty much keeping it standard, well whatever level it's at at that point in time. Yeah you're not getting the most out of it. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And we have two options when it comes to converters. We have this what they call a deck mount plugs into the wall outlet and then there's a couple of terminals on the back where you do that connection. And then the other type that we offer is what's called a lower tray replacement. It's also referred to as an MBA, main board assembly. This is something that hardwires into a larger power sensor as it's called. And that's kind of the heart of the RV. It's kind of like you fuse and breaker box in the garage in your house. This is the heart of the RV and this particular product fits in underneath on the base to do the conversion and it hardwires into a breaker and then hardwires the DC board, unlike the plug in the terminals on the other unit. Yeah. So this one would be one where we would be most likely swapping out a older non-working or- Yes. One that doesn't switch over to lithium as well. Exactly. Yeah. That has the lithium feature on it as well as your lead acid profile too. And that's a very common replacement because like I mentioned before, the actual power center itself takes care of all the power. I mean this is effectively the heart of the power in your RV or trailer. There's two different styles there. And today we've got this 30 amp service and this is the import from like the pedestal for example. And then there's 50 amp. And that's typically when somebody's gonna have two air conditioners on a larger, maybe toy hauler, or fifth wheel. And all this basically does is, gives you more power in there. There's more breaker options, obviously for the additional power that's needed for the air conditioner. And and then more DC breakers too for lighting and all that type of thing. Kevin All those extra toys you want to add in. Yeah, all the extra toys too, yeah. One thing too that we've done to try to set ourselves apart from the competition, we've actually put Bluetooth technology in a version of ours as well so you can buy it with or without Bluetooth. And the nice thing about that is you can kind of upgrade maybe a slightly older trailer and through an app on your phone now you can control various lighting features. Depending on if it's a 30 or a 50 obviously the 50 gives you access to more of those. But you can turn lights on and off. Awning lights, bedroom lights. You could even if you want, potentially wire the thermostat controller or the water pump so you can actively turn those items on and off too. Just give you some nice features to do there. So that way if I'm sitting out at the camp or at the fire pit and I want to flip a light on, I can usually do it from my phone. Yes. Or if you need to turn them off or whatever else. But on top of just turning lights on and off, we also give you access to moving and using the slide outs and the awnings. On the 30 amp model, that gives you access to three reversing circuses are known. So an awning, a slide out and maybe the tongue jacks if they're powered. You can move them up and down as well. You're just holding the, opening the app, touching the screen, keep your finger on it and it's moving. And the nice feature about that is when you pull into a campsite maybe a bit late at night, when you're setting up possibly and you park maybe a little close to a tree you haven't realized or a low hanging branch, you can be outside now and physically see the awning of the slide out going and you can stop before you hear the crunch. Yeah, I'm usually the one that's walking in and out of the trailer five times making sure- Pushing the button or your partner or whatever is shouting inside, "Stop" and you don't hear and next thing there's a crunch and well there's a $2,000 expense. The 50 amp unit gives you access to six of those reversing circuits as well. So you can actually, on those larger ones there's a couple of awnings, maybe three and four awnings sometimes. So again, you can do that, open it, set it up. Or alternatively if the stars are out and you've had the awning and you want to see more, you can pull it back in. Pull it back up Yeah. Yeah. Again, super straightforward. And it's all pre-wired. There's a lot of wiring going on at the back of this unit. Definitely have somebody take care on the install side for you on this, but all the wirings, is pre-wired at the back. There's way go connect this so it makes it a nice, cleaner and simpler install. And again, this has got everything even including tying into the physical light switches that are already in the coach. So you can effectively use the app to turn the light on and then use a physical light switch to turn it off and maybe back on again. A bit like in your own home when you may be going upstairs and you're turning the light on and off upstairs and then back downstairs again. So we try to think of everything there and- Make it a lot easier. Yes, yes. And then the one other part that kind of ties in well with these depending on the particular coach or travel trailer is, we do actually have the distribution panel as a separate component. And this is good for both the 30 and the 50 amp options that we have. And this will deal with just the breakers and the DC circuits. Again as you can see, it's pre-wired out the back too with the way goes and everything else so it makes it for just an easier and quicker installation. This would typically be teamed up with the deck mount converter which will be located elsewhere in the coach so you effectively have this type of set up as you can see for these where it's in the base. I usually see a lot of these in like an enclosed trailer where they start building it up, they want to have a shop in it or car hauler or something like that and then they need to get all that power in there and be able to manage it so. Yeah, exactly. And this gives you the option to, if you're already going this route and space is a little bit tight in maybe where you're going to put this because ideally you'd like to mount this in an area where you can see it because one of the features we have is the the little plexi screen there too. So if you have a fuse that fails, maybe a light bulb surges out and cuts a circuit. There's a little indicator light there so you can see that. This can be mounted somewhere else under a cupboard in a cargo bay. Well those kind of, this is kind of our core power set up for the heart of the RV and like I say, a lot of people you probably don't realize you have a converter in there. You certainly realize when it fails. We've even got to the point of suggesting, it probably doesn't hurt to have a spare because this can potentially ruin your weekend vacation. Especially if you arrive there and suddenly the lights go and your air conditioning is not working and of course you're not having to shower and if you- Especially if you got your slides out and then all of a sudden you got to get out of there and you can't put the slides back in. Yes, exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of function there and if, again, if that's a a holiday weekend- You might not get a tech out there. You might not get a tech out there or you might be paying a high price for that, especially if you're in a remote, national park or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well I think that does it for our look at your guys' electrical components and the breakdown kind of giving you guys at home a little bit better about an idea of how each one of these is going to function inside of your RV. So I want to thank you for your time. Oh, appreciate it, Kevin. It's great having you in Graham. Thank you for the lesson. Thanks. No problem at all. Hope it helps you neighbors out at home as well.