Bounder Folks

Thought I'd share my experience with cranky Power Gear hydraulic levellers in our Bounder. We have the automatic system with the 500629 control panel. I think this is a common setup. It turns out there are three major components: the control panel on the dash, the tank and pump assembly, and the control module.

We were camping with friends for several days leading up to the Friday of a long weekend. Friday morning we packed up and were ready to go so I started the engine and went to push the retract all button and nothing. No lights, no bells or buzzers, just a Bounder up on jacks. I checked fuses and jiggled wires but there wasn't much else I could think of to do. I called Good Sam ERS. They found a mobile RV mechanic and covered the dispatch fee.

The mechanic checked the fuses and jiggled some wires and then hot-wired the hydraulic solenoids to the battery and up went the jacks. Clearly the problem was electrical so I had a starting point. Once back home the sleuthing began. Turns out it was the connector that joins the control panel to the wiring harness. There are only 4 wires in a push on connector so I went to an electronics supply place and got replacement parts and soldered them up. Presto!

Ah, but the saga doesn't end there. The next year, the jacks started acting up again but this time there was no power coming into the control panel. I crawled around following wires and found the control module and levelling sensor screwed to the 'ceiling' of the basement compartment over the propane tank in the front-most curb side compartment. This is where I store the outdoor carpet / mat but I never noticed it there before.

I got the wiring diagram from Power Gear and spent a few hours testing everything and came to the conclusion that the power pass-through relay was fried. Bypassing it let everything work - up and down. I simply soldered a jumper into the wires before they went into the module and everything now works as it should. And I didn't have to sent Power Gear many, many hundreds of $ to do it.

That was May 20, 2019 and we have used the jacks for 100 nights out since then so it looks like a permanent fix. Diagnosing problems and finding cost effective solutions is part of RVing with an older rig like ours. I like the satisfaction of doing it myself.

Thanks for posting this. Could be very helpful!

Well, I guess it was too good to last. Shortly after my last post the jacks became temperamental, deciding to not work at random times. I understand the system reasonably well and quickly determined it was the connection between the wiring harness and the keypad. Again. It really is a poor design. I resoldered things and used a hot glue gun to try and hold everything together. This repair lasted all of last camping season and then failed again on our last trip.
I decided to replace the keypad and connector/wiring harness. The best price I found was at NW RV Supply in Oregon. Very good to deal with and they were actually a few $ cheaper than Amazon so I ordered the improved design pad & wire harness from them. Installation should be simple and I'll post an update once it arrives and the snow has melted. We got another 8" last night. Sigh.

It appears I now have a permanent fix to my hydraulic jack woes.
When the new style keypad arrived and I tried to wire it in, the colour on the wires didn't match up with either the colours on the old style square connector nor the wire bundle that Fleetwood installed to connect the keypad to the controller located on the ceiling of the frontmost passenger side basement storage compartment, which also has the square connector.
I emailed Lippert customer service looking for some sort of wire colour conversion help and after a false start, began dealing with Luz Cruz, a customer service supervisor. Luz went above and beyond helping me with the wiring and to troubleshoot the system when it still didn't work. Naturally, I needed a new control board.
When the new box arrived, I noted that it too had the new rectangular style connector and the same wire colours as the new keypad. I know, that just makes sense. So after double checking that all of Fleetwood's wiring was still functioning properly, I connected red to red, yellow to yellow and so on.
I held my breath and started the engine. I was very happy to see the friendly self-check light show sequence on the keypad.
I ran all 4 jacks down in manual mode (the way I normally use them) then back up. Even the jacks down light went out for the first time ever.
Persistence pays off! We went out last week for our first trip of the year and the jacks worked as designed.
Woo Hoo!