RV Life!
Last week we got our dose of RV problems. First, the main TV is still in the shop and the repairs got complicated, then the water heater quit, and finally the toilet backed up ... fun on the road!
Ok why are we parked in the parking lot of the Molson's Hockey Arena in Barrie? Well, as I said the TV quit talking to us and so we took it out and took it to the authorized repair facility in Barrie in the trunk of the car. Fine. A week later after several phone calls to both the repair guys and the insurance company we came to a stalemate. The extended warrantee on the bus covers the TV but the repair person must personally verify the mileage on the Flying Scotsman. To keep from incurring an additional $75 service call to the bus 15 miles from the store, I agreed to meet the service dude in this parking lot with the RV, within sight of the electronic shop in the picture below. Emilio and I had our clandestine meeting in the parking lot, he looked at the odometer, and we parted ways ... gotta love insurance policies.
In theory the malfunctioning main board will be replaced for about 200CDN shortly and we will pick it up at the repair place ... Northern Electronic Repair ... very good folks and super patient with extended warrantee personnel.
As the Flying Scotsman was free of its tethers and it was a pretty day, I then ran it up to Midland, 24 miles to our north, to get fuel and propane ... closest propane to Barrie. We took on 44 gallons of diesel at $3.24 after conversions, not bad; and 18 gallons of propane at $2.59. Ready to roll!
Same day, new challenge. Jo-Anne went to take a shower and the water was lukewarm. Man! I tested it and it ran about 100 degrees ... not much more than a normal Texas summer day, eh.
I went through all the normal stuff like testing the element, etc. Even let it heat on gas instead of electric ... same result ... warm. I opened up the heater and let the water out just to make sure there was no sludge in the bottom of the tank ... clean ... but wait, the water in the tank roared out of the bottom at 140 degrees ... so the tank was working fine.
But why wasn't hot water getting to the sinks and shower? The culprit is in the photo below. Having run out of options I got on line and in a super YouTube video from a veteran RVer he explained what to watch for with the outside shower pictured below.
If you use this thing for many outside cleanup tasks like I do, make sure you turn off both faucet knobs at the top of the picture and don't use the simple turnoff switch on the shower head itself. For some reason if you just turn off the shower wand and leave the faucets open it allows cold water to mix through the valve assembly and you get cool water in the house. Wow. Thanks to YouTube and the Internet and it saved an expensive trip to the RV dealer.
And finally, just to make sure that my day wasn't challenging enough, the toilet backed up. This was more of a normal thing in Flying Scotsman I and yet this RV has been very free of this problem. Just too much stuff and not enough water going through the system to keep it flowing well. About an hour of vigorous pushing of an old hose through the pipe got us flowing again.
Hot shower, functional toilet, and maybe a functional TV ... what more do you need. Oh yeah, next week we run over to New York for Jo-Anne's monthly allergy shot.
