The great battery fiasco or “Duh”

Well my bragging about my new batteries and the watering system ended up biting me in the hiney.  Before I took the old batteries out I made a drawing on a sheet of paper showing the + and – poles and their locations on all four batteries.  I also drew how many cables were attached to each pole and put the battery number on each cable.  The cables were identified by color code with either red or black for the + or – poles.  Sounds good doesn’t it?  However I used masking tape to identify the cables and by the time the battery compartment was washed out some of the markings weren’t very clear.  Still no problem cause most of them were OK and I still had the red and black ends to make sure they went to the correct poles.  So what could go wrong?  I had been having trouble with the front furnace not working all the time.  Some time it worked and other times the blower would come on but the burner wouldn’t ignite and so the blower would time out and shut off.  I called a local RV repairman that several people had used and were happy with his services to look at the furnace and also to get the hot water heater working on electric.  We have been using the hot water heater on propane for about 18 months.  I knew it was the thermostat on the electric part of the heater but had never gotten around to fixing it.  Long story, short, the repairman came out, found a wire that wasn’t making a good connection on the furnace and installed the thermostat on the hot water heater.  $143 later and we were great, until the next morning when the furnace again wouldn’t come on.  He came out again, unplugged the plug in to the furnace control card and re-plugs it and it starts working.  $35 service call, problem solved.  WRONG!!!!  He comes back out that afternoon and I’ve got low voltage.  My battery bank is only reading about 12.30 volts.  For those that don’t know, a 12 volt system should actually be about 13.2 volts or higher.  We could run a direct line from the batteries to the furnace and it would work but running through the fuse box and then to the furnace it wouldn’t.  This had the repairman scratching his head.  He decides to run direct lines from the batteries to the furnace and did I mention that by now the refrigerator wouldn’t work without a direct line also.  We were going to put conduit under the motor home with inline fuses and just by pass the fuse box.  By now my batteries had dropped down to just a little over 12 volts so I said I thought we needed to see if there was a problem with the Xantrex charger/inverter system that is suppose to keep the house batteries charged.  This is only a $1200 to $1500 piece of equipment.  He agreed and called another RV guy who he said was really good at electrical problems.  I settled up with him for his time for another $150 and the other guy came out at 7:00pm yesterday evening.  Since you’re  probably tired of reading this I will cut to the chase.  After about 1 and 1/2 hours of checking everything he could think of, he finally discovered that although we had all the cables that were attached to the batteries in the right places there was one cable down behind the battery pack that wasn’t attached to anything.  It just happened to be the cable coming from the charger to the batteries.  It now appears the problem has magically gone away.  Isn’t it funny how things work better when they are hooked up correctly?  This visit cost me another $160 but that is a lot better than having a problem with the charger/inverter.  I hope this is all I have to say about this.