Fixed!
Well Kinda . . . Almost.
Well, our cooler weather has finally arrived. It made it up to a blistering 85 degrees today, and sunny with a light breeze. Couldn’t be much better. It’s supposed to stay like this for a few days before the temps creep back up into the low 90’s. Right now at midnight, it’s 60 degrees and I’ve got a long-sleeve shirt on. Nice.
Today’s count was 108, compared to yesterday’s 111, so maybe that’s what it will settle down to. Like I said yesterday, very doable.
I finally had a chance this morning to get back to my water heater problem, and finally got the access panel off so I could get to the electrical connections on the back.
The electrical side of the water heater died a couple of months ago, but with everything going on with the gate, I’m just now getting back on it. We’ve been using the propane side since then, but I didn’t want to have a problem running out.
The first thing I did was to turn off power to the unit using the switch on the side of the box. Well, I tried to, but the switch snapped and then went spongy with no more clicky-clicky. But I don’t think that was the initial problem.
So what I was pull the wires on the switch, and after cutting off the old spade lugs, I stripped the ends and joined them with a wire nut. So now I was finally ready to troubleshoot the real problem. And a couple of minutes with the ohmmeter told me what it was.
I used the ohmmeter to check the two thermostat units here, with one of them being the actual thermostat, and the other being the high-temp cutoff. The one on the left tested good with 0.0 ohms, but the right one showed open, or bad. They’re not marked, and I was hoping the bad one was the ECO cutoff, but after checking my Atwood manual, I found it was the thermostat.
Normally the power comes into the left unit, loops over the right unit, and then feeds power to the heating element.. So what I did was to move the wire going to the heating element over, bypassing the bad thermostat, so I could check the system.
At the lavatory I measured the hot water temp at 96 degrees. Then I turned on the wall switch for the heater, waited 20 minutes, and measured again. This time it was 132 degrees, so I knew the bad thermostat was my problem. But of course the problem won’t really be fixed until I replace the thermostat itself. I probably won’t replace the power switch
Checking, I found one on Amazon (of course) for $12 and it will be here Tuesday. But for right now we’ll just turn it on 20 minutes before our showers, and then turn it off when we’re done.
The other thing I fixed recently was the AC blower in our truck. The air flow just wasn’t what it should be, and it was a struggle to get the cab cool in hotter weather. Back before we left the Houston area, I replaced the blower resistor pak and that helped somewhat, but it just didn’t seem to be as strong as it used to be.
So after doing some checking I decided to go ahead and replace the blower motor itself. The reason I hesitated before is that changing one of these out can be a real pain in the rear. In some cases you almost have to disassemble the dashboard to replace it.
But this one was so easy it was almost ridiculous. Just reach under the dash, unclip the power connector, remove 3 – 8mm bolts, and the blower motor falls out in your hand. Then reverse the procedure and 5 minutes later your done. Easy Peezy.
And boy, did it make a difference. It’s back to cooling like it used to.
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Thought for the Day:
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