Hot Springs, Hot RV

But first, the Photo of the Week . . .

Dog Shoes. Wear ’em when it’s hot!

HOT SPRINGS

We took a road trip the last week of May to a geothermal site near Mammoth Lakes . . . just up Highway 395 from Bishop.

Hot Springs Trip (click on photo to enlarge)

We learned about the hot springs from a recent edition of the Escapees magazine. Just Jan and I went because we didn’t want our Golden Retriever around really really hot water.

Anyway, some photos from our day trip . . .

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And a short movie . . .

HOT RV

Why do air conditioners always break in Summer and not in Winter? Riddle me that.

A few days ago while the Bishop temperatures hovered in the mid-90s, our front 6-year-old Dometic Penguin II AC started behaving badly. Its compressor would stay on for 6 minutes, then go off for 4 minutes . . . over and over like clockwork. Although the AC fan stayed on, for 6 minutes we’d have cold air, but then warm air for 4 minutes. That made for not-so-good cooling, and the temperature inside our RV started climbing.

I looked for help on a couple of online RV forums, and received a promising solution from someone I was familiar with. He said to disable the “freeze thermistor” — essentially, cutting the “blue wire”.

So I schlepped onto our RV roof, removed the front RV shroud and cut the blue wire . . .

Naked AC

Which Wire Did He Say?

After putting everything back together again, I climbed off the roof and went inside to fire up the AC again. However, this message appeared on our thermostat:

Quick! Run!

From the Dometic Penguin II manual:

Open circuit or out of range Freeze Sensor. Air conditioner and dehumidification operation will be locked out. Heat pump, furnace, heat strip and fan operation can continue to operate but displays the last temperature set-point.

In Ordinary Speak, it’s broke. While the rear (bedroom) AC works fine, the front AC is now completely dead.

Super. It’s late afternoon now and the heat of the day is peaking. Inside, our RV is hot as hell now because I’ve had both ACs off for some time. We need coolness . . . fast!

Solution: a “swamp cooler” . . .

Our Swamp Cooler

We picked up the only one left at a nearby hardware store. For those of you not familiar with evaporative (or “swamp”) coolers, they’re basically a desert thing. These coolers only work in hot, dry environments because they operate by evaporating water from a porous material by blowing air over that material. Simple and relatively cheap. Swamp coolers are not as “cooling” as ACs, but in a pinch, they’ll do.

So . . . we now had AC in our bedroom and a swamp cooler up front.

We spent the rest of the day calling RV repair places to find out AC replacement and installation costs . . . between $1500 and $2100. Ouch!

Finally, as a last ditch effort, I went back up on the roof and reconnected the “blue wire” I had cut previously.

Eureka! Front AC is back on again . . . no error messages . . . and it’s been running continuously (no 6 on, 4 off nonsense) since I “fixed” it.

Fingers crossed.