Daily Archives: October 23, 2009
Bad Weather and Cold Water…
Today started out cold and rainy, and although it cleared up later in the day, tomorrow is supposed to be worse, with a high of only 44 degrees.
About 10 am Nick Russell and I got together to talk about working on his new coach. We decided to wait until Monday to take his rig to the warehouse so we can work in a dry environment.
We did drive over to the warehouse to check out the bus inverter system to be sure the connecting cable and control boxes would swap out OK. It looks good to go.
Coming back Nick and I looked at another problem on his coach. His water heater wasn’t…heating, that is.
Most motorcoach water heaters work on either LP gas or electricity. When Nick got his coach a few weeks ago, he knew the electric heater didn’t work, so he and Terry had just been using the LP gas part. However, during the night, that quit too.
After looking it over Nick noticed a couple of wires had melted insulation on them. A little further testing showed that the thermal cutoff diode had blown, thus disabling the heater. It looks like what happened is that during the night the high winds we experienced momentarily sucked the flame out of the heater that melted the insulation and triggered the thermal cutoff.
Replacing the cutoff got his heater working again. We’ll look at the electric side of things later when we’re working on the coach inside. It should be pretty simple to fix. There’s not a lot to go wrong on the electric side. Just the heating element, a manual reset switch, and a thermostat.
We’ll see.
Around 1 pm Jan and I headed out for lunch and errands. Since we were going to the Sam’s Club in Mishawaka, we decided to eat at Hooters, one of our favorite wing places.
Leaving Hooters we stopped off at Sam’s Club. We did notice a long line of people getting flu shots while we were there.
Coming back home, Nick and I shot the breeze for a while at his coach before I headed back to our rig.
About 6pm we all headed out for dinner at a place Nick and Terry knew about called Lakeshore Grill. This was a great place to eat and we all enjoyed it.
We’ll go back.
More tomorrow…
