Our RV Adventures

I woke up this morning, again kind of ‘blah’. I think it’s from the doctor changing one of my prescriptions, and if it’s like in the past, it’ll take a while to adjust to it. Blah!

After getting some coffee in me, I started to dig into the rig AC. But before I get up on the roof I wanted to take a look up at the inside part. After taking the cover off, I realized I needed the stepstool to get up in the unit, while I was out at the truck for the stepstool, I went ahead and got the ladder out, since I know I’m going to need it eventually.

About this time, Jim Dean dropped to see if there was any progress on Barbara Spade’s refrigerator problem.Told him she was looking for a residential replacement, but not having a lot of luck due to the size constraints.

Then, as if my day wasn’t screwed up enough, a client down in Clear Lake called with a request, so about 1:45 I headed down that way, sans Jan, who just wanted to stay at the rig.

So much for AC repair.

Along the way our friend Chris Yust, of C and C RV Insurance fame, called with some questions about a Thousand Trails membership she and Charles are thinking about buying. Sound like she looking at one just about identical to ours, 63 parks, 14 days in, and park to park. I assume she would also have 210 days in advance reservations, but I didn’t ask.

Chris, check this too.

Of course, when I got down to Clear Lake about 3:30, the client had decided he didn’t want to do what he thought he wanted to do. So, after getting gas, I headed back for Columbus a little after 4pm, not getting to the rig until about 6:45, due to having to come home through Houston Rush Hour Traffic (pat. pending).

After a delicious dinner of Dennis Hill Smoked Pork BBQ sandwiches on King Hawaiian Bread, Jan’s Funeral Potatoes, and Kroger’s Cranberry Nut Salad, I called Jim Dean to help him set up his new Silverleaf VMSpc computer virtual dashboard.

Mine looks like this, running on a laptop along with my Delorme Street Atlas GPS program. It sits on a shelf to the right of my chair, making it easy to keep an eye on things.

Looking at this graphic, it’s been a while since I screenshotted (screenshat?) this. The number under the yellow header that says Miles Since 1/6/08 and reads 44118.2, now reads over 71,000. And 1/6/08 is the day we picked up the rig at the dealers in New Braunfels and drove it back to La Marque, TX. And a month later, on 2/6/08, we headed for Alaska.

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Of course that was via Yuma, San Diego, Long Beach, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Colorado Springs, Billings, Cle Elum, Coeur d’Alene, and Bellingham, finally ending up in Fairbanks, AK on April 26, 2008.

Getting back to Jim Dean, we discovered that the Serial to USB converter cable he had does not like Win10. So he’ll have to pick up another one tomorrow  before we can proceed.

Later I did some inside checks on the AC hoping it would be something simple like a bad freeze-up sensor. This is a thermistor that sits on the evaporator coil and if it detects that the coil is icing over, it turns the compressor off for a while, leaving the fan running until the ice is gone. Then it turns the compressor back on. So if this is bad, it won’t cool at all.

But unfortunately it wasn’t the sensor. But as I told Nick, it’s only the simple thing when you don’t check that first.

I think I might try this diet.

Yesterday I was buying 2 large bags of Purina dog chow at Wal-Mart for my dogs Shadow and Lady.

I was about to check out when a woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

What did she think, that I had an elephant?

Since I had little else to do, on impulse, I told her that No, I didn’t have a dog – that I was starting the Purina Diet again, although I probably shouldn’t because last time I ended up in the hospital.

On the bright side though, I’d lost 50 pounds before I woke up in intensive care with tubes coming out of every hole in my body and IVs in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is you load your pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry and the food is nutritionally complete, so I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was enthralled with my story by now.)

Horrified, She asked : “Did you end up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned you?”

I said: No not at all; I stopped in the middle of the parking lot to bark at another dog and a car hit me.

The guy behind her was laughing so hard, I thought he was going to have a heart attack!

Wal-Mart won’t let me shop there anymore.

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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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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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