Tuesday 13 August 2013

How We $pent Our Summer Vacation; Part One

I really will fill this in, but we are turning the house and dogs over to the house sitters and their big dog (keeps Trekker in line). First away for a long weekend, then back for a day and off again for a couple of weeks. Seems that the house sitter spends more time here than we do!

First thing we needed was 6 new Michelins for the rig.

Then a new floor for the shower--they had to make one! Don't keep them in stock, just the mold! That plus the shipping, removing the old shower and reinstalling the new one, we probably could have had a custom made one! They found a bit of rot behind the wall which they cut out--previous leak it looked like. Tech said it was dry and looked to have happened a long time ago.

We also decided to redo the mounting for the flat screen. To make a long story short, the current TV won't work out--the back is not flat enough! So what's another $250.00 for a new LED 29" TV (a little bigger than the old one, a 26)? Now we have a flat screen for the bedroom but what to do the the old Picture Tube TV currently there?

Then we needed a new DVD. Cheap. And countless trips between the downstairs shop and the rig at the top of the drive.(Huff, puff, Oh forget that--take the van!)

Art had found that several fasteners securing the solar panels had pulled loose from the roof. He can't scrambled around there any more so another call to the tech. (Different tech than above--we thought we might have to pull the gray and/or black water tank and didn't want to do that in Chris' driveway--OR ours!)

Had them all taken off and the fastening redone--lots of rusty screws up there!!! Not a good thing. Since they were coming off any way Art and Chris came up with a simple mounting system that will allow 4 way tilting to take best advantage of the sunlight.

Now we're getting ready to set off Thursday for an FMCA Vancouver Islanders weekend, a couple of men arrive tomorrow (Wednesday) morning to wash and wax. Art turned the fridge on to start cooling it down and was not happy with the growling sound coming from the fridge! While investigating the source of the noise he found more rust than he is comfortable having on the coils of the cooling unit. The noise seems to be coming from the fans somewhere inside the fridge. Perhaps a bearing?

He took a few photos to post on RV.NET to see what the consensus of the experts is:

Overview, closeup of bottom left.



Tank




base of burner


Top of cooling unit coils.

More later. Maybe September?

Yup. September! Here we are at Pedder Bay RV Resort and Marina with our FMCA Chapter, the Vancouver Islanders. A beautiful sunny weekend so far.

Meanwhile, back to the cooling unit and the fridge:

On the Thursday morning, Art was ready to head out to the Cowichan Bay rally the fridge wouldn't light (or rather stay lit) on propane and wouldn't run at all on the AC!  Art called Gillian on her cell phone so she bought a new cooler and a few blocks of ice to get us through the weekend. Gillian had had a few things to do first, so Art set off in the motorhome then she and the dogs would drive up later in the Jeep.

Of course when we got there the fridge lit just fine on propane! Art ran the generator for a while but couldn't get the thing working on AC. So a call to Chris who agreed to come to the house on Monday, where he found a bad fuse on the control board. Hard to get at but done and working now. This was something Art could have done himself but he is trying to limit the amount of time he spends on his feet. Ah well, what's an hour's service call?!

As for the corrosion on the coils, the consensus is . . . . . who knows? The external rust itself isn't a problem, the corrosion of concern is what occurs inside the tubing! The fridge is working well and cooling down as it should. The fan noise went away. One suggestion was that it was harmonics created by the one of the two fans running a bit slower than the other. Maybe on  the way out but.. Here in Pedder Bay it's running normally, the fan noise is gone. We'll just cross our fingers and plan on replacing the fridge when it finally fails.













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