Our RV Adventures

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It just gets better and better. Today our 10 hour gate, nee our 12 hour gate, became our 8 hour gate, with the Company Man the last one out at around 2:30.

Now exactly why couldn’t they have started this months ago, instead of our last few days on the gate?

In fact, between when I came out about 1pm, and when the CM left, I only had two vehicles come in. All the rest of the traffic was just heading out. But this worked out good for me, since it gave me plenty of time to work on my ‘Leaving the Gate’ list.

After our storm damage this past Tuesday when the squall line with 50 – 60mph gusts came through, it left us with this,

I was able to pop the frame back into shape, although now reinforced with some tie-wraps.

At first I had thought about just going ahead and taking the canopy down for this year and doing without it for our last few days, sitting out in the hot sun with no shade quickly disabused us of that idea. So I came up with this.

Rather than try to patch together the old main canopy, I just put the small tarp back up, along with the solar screens. That will work fine for our last few days, and won’t be as involved in taking down.

Ok, so I’m a little hypocritical. Today being Friday, and apparently officially now Whataburger day for us, I drove into Carthage to pick up lunch. Now all the other 10 times or so we’ve gotten food from here, it’s always been the same thing.

For Jan:

#6 Whataburger Jr. With Cheese – Large Combo

With only:
Ketchup
Mustard
Tomatoes
Grilled Onions
And For Me:

#6 Whataburger Jr. With Cheese

With only:
Bacon
Tomatoes
Pickles
Raw Onions
Mayo on both buns

Large Drink

And it would have been the same order for me again, except for the fact that the guy in front of me was picking up 6 Grilled Chicken Cranberry-Apple Salads to go. And I got an instant craving to graze on one.

As it turns out, it was as good as it looks.

I think one reason for that was the fact that I watched them make the salad. Not just the Grilled Chicken part, but the salad itself. Most fast food places assemble the salads ahead of time, if you’re lucky, that morning, or if you’re not, the day or night before. But they put together this one right then, so it was really fresh.

You have a choice of a number of different dressings, including a couple of vinaigrettes, but I went with the Jalapeno Ranch.

So yeah, after I chastised someone for ordering a Chicken Fajita Taco at Whataburger, I get a salad there, possibly an even bigger blasphemy. But what can I say, I succumbed to temptation, and strayed from the path of burger righteousness.

mea culpa, mea culpa,
mea máxima culpa

But at least I didn’t have to keep telling cashier, “No, I don’t want any lettuce.”

While we’re on the subject of food, I wanted to post a photo of the delicious Prime Rib I had last night at Longhorn Grille.

Thursday night is Prime Rib Night, which is served as a complete meal, including a piece of their great Strawberry Cheesecake, which we split. A really great meal.

We’ll miss this place.

While we were eating lunch, we had something come through our gate that we haven’t seen this year.

A load of drill pipe for the workover rig. Just one truckload, apparently.

I remember our first year gate guarding in south Texas, we might get 20 loads of pipe in at a time, lined up all way out to the highway. Because of limited space on the pad, we could only let 4 trucks go in at a time. Then when they unloaded, one at a time, and came back out, 4 more could go in.

Well, some of the drivers would get impatient and try to break ranks, or just drive by all the other trucks and come to the front of the line.

But they didn’t figure on my Jan, standing in the middle of the road, hands on her hips, mad as hell, yelling at them to get back in line and wait their turn like everyone else.

Now there was no way for them to turn around, so they’d have to slowly back all the way up along the long line of other trucks, with the drivers pointing and laughing at them, for being run off by a girl.

The rest of the afternoon was spent putting away everything that we wouldn’t really need again before we leave here on Sunday. I went ahead and topped off the big 500 gallon water tank for our replacements, and then disconnected and stowed away all our hoses, leaving us running on rig water for the next couple of days. Tomorrow I’ll go ahead and dump the waste tanks, disconnect us from the sewer system and put away that hose too.

Since we’re not expecting any wind for the next couple of days, I went ahead and dumped the water out the buckets we use to help hold down the canopy, and then rinsed and stowed them away too.

My goal is to get everything finished up tomorrow so that Sunday morning we’ll only need to unhook shore power and pull off onto the side road. This will allow our replacements to just pull into our spot and hook up.

At that point we’ll be able to just hook up the toad and we’ll be ready to roll.

At least that’s the plan. But you know what they say about plans.

___________________________________________________

Thought for the Day:

as

is just a coincidence.

First up, a correction.

Yesterday I talked about the Power Tank Tire Inflator that I use, and I gave you an Amazon link and picture.. But blog reader Len Coffelt pointed out that that one probably wasn’t the one I was thinking about. And he’s right. That one now only goes to 60psi, not exactly useful for large RV tires.

The funny thing is that listing came directly from my past orders list on Amazon. And my Power Tank Inflator is labeled an TI-8200.

So I guess that sometime since 2009 when I bought mine, Power Tank changed the specifications on the 8200.

The one that you probably want is this one.

Power Tank TIG-8170 Tire Inflator

This one, like my old 8200, goes to 160psi. and should do the job.

Sorry about that.

The last couple of days we’ve had an invasion of the Asian Ladybugs, or Lady Beetles as they’re also called. And unlike our native species, the Asian ones bite.

And the other way to tell the difference is that the Asian ones are not just red, but a lot of different colors. And the Asian one s have more spots.

It’s been a real pain keeping them out of the rig when they’re swarming everywhere.

The next thing up on my chore list this morning was swap out my old, defective transfer switch for the new one I just received a few days ago. I didn’t expect it to be a big hassle, and it wasn’t.

It was an uber-hassle.

Over the surface it looked simple, and it was. Turn off the rig power at the 50 amp breaker on the generator and unplug the shore power cable, remove the 9 color-coded power wires and the 3 bare ground wires, pick up the old unit, put the new one in its place and reverse the wiring procedure.

Then came the test.

Regular readers will remember that my problem was that my transfer switch would only switch over to the rig’s generator as long as we were still running on shore power. But if we wanted to use the generator on the road, then I had to start the generator, go back and lift the bed, remove the compartment cover, and then use a large screwdriver to push down on the contactor until it locks in.

A real pain in the rear if you’re doing this on the side of the road because you decided you wanted run the house AC’s.

So after I got everything swapped out, the next thing was to start up the rig generator and see if it works. And it did.

Twenty seconds after I started it up, the new transfer switch clunked, and we had AC power in the rig.

The green LED shows that the switch is in generator mode.

Thinking the problem was fixed, I shut off the rig generator and went outside to plug back in and flip the breaker on. Note that I don’t depend on just the breaker to protect me.

I came back in the rig expecting power to be on, but had nothing. And back at the transfer switch with my voltmeter, I had nothing coming in there either. So at least it wasn’t another bad switch.

Back outside, there’s no way to measure or see the voltage at the generator while you’re plugged into it, so I again flipped the breaker, unplugged the power cable, flipped the breaker back on, and checked the voltage at the socket.

I had 122 volts on both legs. So plugging back in, I went over to my electrical bay and checked my Progressive EMS.

Aha!

I had 122 volts on L1 and 15 volts on L2. And with that low a voltage on L2, my EMS was not letting power into the coach.

Cycling the breaker again, I watch the EMS display as it went through its testing before putting power to the rig, and saw L1 at 122V and L2 at 122V

But as soon as the EMS tried to put power to the rig, it dropped right back out, showing 15 volts on L2.

WTH?

At this point the first I thought was that something was wrong in the coach, and it was pulling the L2 voltage down. But then everything was fine in the coach because the rig generator didn’t have any problems.

Again, WTH?

So turning the breaker back off, I unplugged the output of the EMS system from the coach at the main power feed.

And powering up, the EMS still showed L2 at 15volts.

So now it was a generator problem.

3 years ago when we were gate guarding down in south Texas, we had generator do something similar where one leg dropped to 75 volts. But it stayed at 75 volts. But here we were seeing 122 volts until we put a load on it, and then it dropped to 15 volts.

And that indicates a bad connection somewhere.

I put a call into Todd, our GGS service guy, and he said it was probably the 50 amp breaker, and that he’d already replaced two others this week. He said he was the other side of Bryan/College Station and it would between 7 and 8 pm before he could get here.

I told him no problem, and that we’d just run our rig generator if we needed.

Especially now that our transfer switch works.

We found out this afternoon that we don’t have a 12 hour gate. We have a 10 hour gate, with everyone coming in between 6:30 and 7am, and they’re all gone by 4:30pm. In fact they couldn’t work at night if they wanted to, because they no longer have any light towers. They took them all out today, I guess to save money on the rentals.

So Jan and I headed out about 5pm for one last steak dinner at Longhorn Grille, and it was as good as last time.

Todd showed up about 7:45pm and 15 minutes later we were back on shore power.

Great job, Todd.

This lesson here is that it’s easy to get led down the wrong path when you’re troubleshooting something. Most of the time it’s the last thing you fooled with that’s causing your new problem, but then other times, just enough to keep you on your toes, it’s just a coincidence.

Thought for the Day:

with Thanks to my Great-Niece Stahlie

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