The View from behind the wheel. Joe’s blogging today!
As you’ve heard we’ve been dealing with cold showers for 10 days straight since our on-demand water heater stopped working in New Orleans. New Mexico was extremely challenging as the temperatures dropped to below freezing. Even doing dishes was painful with ice cold water much less showering. Jenn said that it was eye opening and refreshing in the morning but, I much preferred the heated campground showers over the last week.
Then to add insult to injury we suddenly started having problems with our heating systems. The heat pumps on our HVAC units where shutting off in the middle of the night and the temperatures in our Rig hit 49 degrees one evening. The backup propane furnace was only blowing out a little heat and that combined with the fireplace electric heater was only getting the Rig up to 59 degrees. The best part was that once it warmed up above 40 degrees everything would start working again. We laughed that our haters were afraid of the cold.
Well, today we had the repair crew show up with spare parts and some education for us newbie RV’ers. It turns out that HVAC heat pumps aren’t supposed to work below 40 degrees. The compressor coils freeze and they shut off the prevent damage. It also turns out that we have 2 furnaces in our Rig and only one was working. The other furnace had 2 issues, the circuit board fried and one of the sensors was defective. It took about 3 hours and a parts run for the new circuit board but, we now have both furnaces running and the Rig is toasty again.
The hot water heater also had a defective circuit board. I did a bunch of troubleshooting when the unit failed so this was no surprise but, getting the new board installed today and feeling the hot water running from the faucets again, made us gitty. I’m always working on fixing “this thing or that” while we are on the road and it’s always hard when you run across a couple of major issues that you just can’t fix without replacement parts. I am so happy that is behind us.
After the repair crew finished up and all was good in the world again, we headed back out in our Jeep to spend our last night in Phoenix exploring new places. In Phoenix they have a really cool healthy chain of cafes that also offers Juiced drinks and smoothies called The Chop Shop. We grabbed a little something for everyone at the Chop Shop on our way home and ate a meal prepared by someone else for a change. Sometimes Mom and Dad need a break.
Luke's Journey Across The USA 