Dear Dave,
My RV’s slide-out room is stuck in the out position. I get 1 green light and 8 red blinks. I already changed the motor plugs around and am still getting Motor 1 issues. Could this be a faulty controller? The wire seems to be OK and is not pinched. —Rosemdo, 2014 Forest River Grey Wolf
Dear Rosemdo,
Since you have error codes, I would assume you have a Schwintek mechanism that has two motors located in the wall. The room sits on rollers in the slideout opening. The motors push and pull the room with gears and a rack on the side of the wall at the top and bottom.
The entire weight of the room is designed to sit on the rollers. There is no weight on the motor gears and rollers, as they just move the room in and out.
With the green and red blinking lights, you have found the controller and the one green blink starts the sequence, meaning it is Motor 1. The 8 red blinks indicates a “Hall Signal Is Not Present.” You should be able to see the fault codes on the controller.
Hall Signal Is Not Present can be overridden
A Hall Signal Is Not Present is the most common issue. It means either the wiring is pinched or broken between the controller and the motor, or the motor is faulty. You can manually override the system electronically with the following procedure.
On the controller, press the mode button six times and push and hold it for 5 seconds on the seventh push. The red and green light will flash indicating you are in the override mode. Press the retract on the interior switch and see if the room will come in.
Lippert does have a “test harness” that you can purchase to connect to the motors to verify if it is the wiring or the motor. Remove the wires from the Motor 1 connection on the control module. Disconnect the wiring harness at the motor and plug the other end of the test harness to the motor connection. If the error code goes away, the harness is bad. If the code is still present, swap the wires from Motor 2 with Motor 1. But if the code is still present, the motor is bad. If the error changes to the other motor, the controller is bad.
Manually retract the slide-out
You can manually retract the room by disconnecting the motors. From the inside, pull back the rubber seal and find the motor at the top and remove the retaining screw. The motor should pull up from this point. All these procedures can be found on Lippert’s website.
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Dave Solberg is a leading expert in the RV industry and the author of the “RV Handbook.”
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Son in law had an Imagine TT with the schwintec system that would extend ok but would hang up retracting. He enlisted me to help with the diagnostic as he was on the opposite side of the unit from the slide operating the controller. After several calls to customer service, buying a new motor, and several other attempts he got to talk to an engineer. He suggested buying a new wiring harness as he thought the harness may be compromised. Installing the new harness solved the problem. The original harness ran above the fresh water tank and must’ve been pinched during installation of the tank. The TT was the current year model but was used twice by the original own before being traded in, probably because of the problem the dealer couldn’t fix.