Daily Archives: March 28, 2016
No Cooling, No Cooling . . .
or Up On The Roof!
I was actually up a little early this morning, but was feeling a little ‘blah’ so we didn’t walk or sit outside. Just had our coffee and cereal in the rig.
Sometime during the night, our Direct TV DVR glitched and reset itself to no channels. I first tried powering the receiver off and on a couple of times, which has helped before, but not this time.
So I called and ask them to reset it from their end and they said they would. It seems like we have to do this every couple of years or so, Apparently the receiver gets a garbage code command from the satellite and goes into ‘dork’ mode (yes, that’s a technical term). But after a few minutes, still nothing. But I thought I’d wait a while before I called them back.
I checked in with Barbara about 11 to see if there had been any change in her refrigerator problem. She said ‘No’, but that her tech guy had finally called her back, and agreed with me about it probably being a blockage (great minds think alike), but didn’t think much of the idea of turning the unit upside down for awhile. I don’t either, because by the time you get it out, you might as well put a new residential unit in.
Around 2pm, feeling better after coffee, I drove over to Barbara’s to try another way to possibly clear the blockage. I had a foot long piece of dowel and a small hammer, and my idea was to use the dowel rod and the hammer to gently tap along the 8 ammonia tubes visible at the top of the access panel. There are 4 tubes in front, and then 4 more behind those and offset upwards. I figured there might be a chance that this would break the crystals loose and free things up.
But when I got there, Barbara said the unit had died completely sometime that morning, with no lights working at all, not even the one inside the unit. All this indicates a loss of 12vdc to the fridge so after checking the fuses on the control board, I tracked down and checked the fuse sending 12v to the unit from the rig, but it was good too.
Before I could go any further, Barbara said she was researching residential types to replace it. I did go ahead and use the rod and the hammer to lightly tap along all the visible ammonia tubing, in case I do get a chance to look at it further.
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The unit Barbara is trying to replace is a Dometic Royale RM3862, which is no longer made. But nothing on the residential side of things is showing up either.
The problem is the size. It’s 60” high, 24” wide, and 24” deep. Looking at the cabinet, she might be able to gain an inch or so on height and width, but unlike many installations where there is a drawer underneath, in her rig that’s where her heater lives.
I posted the question on RV.net and a couple of other forums asking for info, but haven’t heard anything back yet.
Finishing up at Barbara’s I drove down to the office to pay my 50 amp add-on fees, and get my car tag and gate codes.
Getting back to the rig I found I had a couple of problems of my own. One, Direct TV still wasn’t working, so I put in another call, and found out THEY have a problem. For some reason they cannot uplink any codes to a certain swath of receiver addresses.
Every receiver has its own individual address. That’s how they can send a pay per view movie to only your receiver, and not everyone else’s. It’s like your computer’s IP address, where your computer is the only one in the world with that particular address.
So now we wait.
But Two is the big problem. My almost new (6 months old) Coleman Mach 15 AC that I installed (with help from son Chris and son-in-law Lowell) back last August, is not cooling. It runs, but it just doesn’t cool.
My first thought was that it was maybe frozen up, so I ran just the fan for a while. I didn’t really think this was the problem, since the humidity is real low, and the fan is blowing strong air, but with sunset coming it was about all I could do.
So tomorrow it’s Up On The Roof to see what’s wrong with the compressor. Maybe just a bad capacitor. Well, I can hope, can’t it.
I’m assuming it’s still in warranty. I’ll check tomorrow.
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Thought for the Day:
They say “Never shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater.”
They never tell you what to do if it’s almost empty.
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