As you know I spent every weekend leading up to retirement diligently working on the coach. I tweaked and tightened and adjusted and tried to make everything as perfect as I could. That work likely has saved us a lot of grief, but unfortunately you can't pre-fix everything.
So for those interested, I will recap the unexpected repairs we have had to make along the way. The first was our Aquahot.
Aquahot is a great system. It provides endless hot water and also heats the coach and the coach floor. It also heats the entire basement so we can camp in some pretty cold weather without worry of frozen plumbing.
It is powered by both 110v electric and a propane burner. The electric works fine for daily use, even showers, but is not enough for coach heat. That's when you are supposed to kick on the propane burner.
So we arrive at Capital Reef, high in the mountains of Utah. The average daytime temps are in the 60s and mid 30s at night. They predicted some nights below freezing and we had several sleet storms during the day.
This national park is absolutely beautiful, but it has no utilities. Thus we were relying on the generator and solar to charge our batteries which will run everything in the coach except the heat pumps, or the electric side of the Aquahot. But that's where the propane side of the aquahot takes over and all is well... when it works that is.
It seems the internals in the aquahot are quite sensitive to voltage fluctuations. So they install devices called buck-boosts. Their purpose is to "buck" or lower voltage that is too high, or "boost" voltage that is too low, thus keeping everything happy.
When I turned the Aquahot burner on, nada. So out come the tools and off comes the Aquahot cover. I traced the circuits to determine what wasn't happening. I discovered the furnace burner fan wasn't coming which causes the burner to turn off after 10 seconds as a safety. Tracing that circuit I found a blown fuse. Ha, I've got this. We did have to make a run to purchase a new fuse but expected it should be easy after that.
We got back with the fuse. I powered everything down and installed the fuse. When I turned the power back on, BANG! The buck-boost unit for the fan literally exploded. It didn't do any additional damage, except to my heart, but it was obvious this was not repairable.
I called Aquahot support and explained what had happened. They walked me through a couple of troubleshooting steps to assure nothing else was damaged. All was good, I just needed the "new and improved" replacement buck-boost. Ok, where can I get that I asked. The answer was "from us". No distributer had these and they had to be shipped from the manufacturer. Ugh!
The next place we could align shipping was 2 weeks away. Since we had no choice, we placed the order. Unfortunately that left us with no heat or hot water except when we could run the generator which was 2 hours in the morning and 2 more in the evening.
But even with no heat or hot water we survived just fine. We spent most of our days out hiking and at night we have an electric blanket. It was actually pretty nice. We warmed the coach before bed with the generator, slept with the electric blanket, and then warmed it again in the morning during generator hours before leaving for our daily hike. Our basement is very well insulated and we never saw temps in the basement below 40 so everything went ok.
We received the buck-boost shipment a couple weeks after and all is working again. By the way, the Aquahot has 2 buck-boost units and I replaced both 😁.
For us this was almost a fun adventure. We learned what we could do in a pinch and made the best of it. In fact Capital Reef was so great, we would do it again even knowing we would be challenged for heat and hot water.
The next repair installment will cover the virtues of the power electric cord reel.
Thanks for reading!
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