Sep 30 2011

It’s cool in Paradise

It was hotter than Hell yesterday, but today it’s cool in Paradise (Texas). Not only did the heat wave end, giving us a beautiful day, but our new 15,000 BTU air conditioner was installed and is now chilling out the Airstream.

We don’t really need the AC today, but hey, we’ve got it finally and I want to make sure the unit is solid (not about to have a “crib death” as electronics sometimes do) before we drive away.

The refrigerator, however, is another story. No “smoking gun” issue was found. It seems to be slowly failing for an unknown reason. We found no sign of leaking coolant, no blockage in the vent, no ammonia smell, and it works equally badly on electric and gas. This points to internal blockages in the cooling unit, which are not repairable. The cooling unit has to be replaced, or the entire refrigerator.

Since it’s working a little (the freezer still makes ice but the refrigerator warms up to 50 degrees during the day), it was reinstalled for the trip home. We’ll use it with some bags of ice to complete this trip, then figure out how/when it will be replaced later.

The new AC comes with a high-tech looking thermostat which basically does what the last one did but looks cooler doing it. It reminds me of a Samsung front-loading washer.

Since we don’t trust the freezer entirely, Eleanor has embarked on a mission to cook up a bunch of the frozen stuff. Last night she made dinner for seven (Paul, Anne, Marvin, Annie, and the three of us) which we ate in Paul & Anne’s house. Tonight we’ll have dinner for five, since Marvin & Annie are leaving soon. Tomorrow, it will be IKEA day: Swedish pancakes and meatballs for brunch before we hoist our moorings and point the ship west.

Struggling with the dual appliance failures and talking to Paul, Denver (tech), and Marvin has gotten me thinking about other upgrades and fixes for the Airstream. Marvin & Annie are using a very interesting composting toilet in their 30 foot Argosy trailer, which they are enthusiastic about. It has several advantages: no more black tank, no smell, and the ability to boondock for long periods of time. On the other hand, it’s expensive at about $1k, does require you to empty a urine cartridge regularly, and requires a little user education. You can’t just turn someone loose in the bathroom with this thing and expect good results. I read the manual that comes with it and the manufacturer clearly has a bit of fun with the explanations of What To Do, and Where To Do It.

Eleanor and I had a chance to go inspect the Caravel, which is parked nearby, and see the work Paul did on it. It looks great. We asked for a few additional tweaks to the gaucho and battery mount, but nothing major. It will be great to break the Caravel out this winter and perhaps take it to a vintage rally (if we can find one in a reasonable distance) or do a weekend at some tiny campground like the one in the Chiricauha National Monument. It has been great visiting with Paul & Anne, so in a way I’m glad I’ll be making the 900-mile trip back soon to pick up the Caravel in the next few weeks.

Sep 29 2011

Not cool

Things looked hopeful in the morning when our refrigerator was reading 42 degrees, but as the morning sun rose, so did the interior temperature. By 11 a.m. I had conceded that it wasn’t cooling properly on gas yet, and Paul switched it over to electric to see if that worked better. I also turned on our fridge vent boost fans, which we normally use whenever the ambient temp is above 90 degrees.

No joy. By 2 p.m. the refrigerator had risen to 52 degrees inside, which suggests the worse possible scenario. These units don’t have a lot of failure modes. When the fridge won’t cool on electricity or gas, and the circuitry has been eliminated as a cause (as proven by use of Paul’s testing device), it usually means the cooling unit is a goner. They aren’t field serviceable, so the only solutions are either a replacement cooling unit or a whole new refrigerator. Either way, it’s bad news.

Before we go to the replacement scenario, we’re going to try “burping” the fridge, which basically means turning it upside down for a while to try to work out an internal clog of the gasses and liquids that are essential to the cooling process. That’s a desperation move. We’ll also remove the topside vent cover to see if perhaps something nested in there during our stay in Vermont. The refrigerator will be removed during this process. If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to consider various replacement options, which are dependent upon shipping and availability. We might have to go home with no refrigerator and donate all of the frozen goodies Eleanor has collected over the summer to Paul & Anne.

To add to the fun, this is the hottest day we’ve experienced in the trailer without air conditioning since we dry camped in Death Valley in May 2006. (In fact, that was the trip that inspired us to later install a pair of boost fans in the refrigerator vent, which have worked very well since. Until now. There’s no compensating for a dead refrigerator cooling unit.)

It’s 100 degrees outside as I write this. Because we have no air conditioning, the trailer interior is also 100 degrees. It would be hotter but our three vent fans running at full speed are keeping us on par with the outdoors. Eleanor had the excuse of grocery shopping for tonight’s dinner as a reason to drive off in the air conditioned Mercedes to an air conditioned store, but Emma and I just toughed it out. Emma worked on math, and I worked on Airstream Life.

When the interior of the Airstream reached 100 degrees, Emma and I went into full-blown Death Valley Cooling Mode. It’s dry here, so evaporative cooling is the trick. We took cold showers and then put on wet cotton t-shirts. I wiped down the dinette seats with wet cloths and rigged up a makeshift evaporative cooler for my laptop too, using a wet rag and a plate. All of this made the heat somewhat tolerable.

Good thing, because it would be easy to lose my cool given two expensive appliance failures. The air conditioner is gone after six years, and now the refrigerator is gone after just three years. This will be our third refrigerator. I’m not impressed with the quality of RV appliances — never have been, but this really seals it. I said earlier that they don’t make ’em like they used to, and I meant it. We replaced the original refrigerator in our 1960s-era Caravel after 37 years, and it was still working. (We replaced it only to get a larger modern unit with better cooling control, but now I’m wondering if we made a big mistake.) It’s not uncommon at all to find vintage Airstreams with original refrigerators in them. In twenty years, will anyone with an early 2000s-era RV or travel trailer have an original appliance left?

This afternoon we relocated all of our refrigerated items to a spare refrigerator Paul & Ann have in their house. We were too late for a roll of biscuit dough, which popped spontaneously in the refrigerator, and our milk is also history. But at least we are in a friendly place with resources. Eleanor is making dinner for Paul & Anne in their kitchen, which will use up some of our food. I know for sure we are having biscuits with dinner. Meanwhile, we’re working on Plans A, B, and C for the next few days, dependent on whether we fix the fridge, replace the fridge, or skip it until later and head home with an ice chest.

Sep 29 2011

Fahren fahren fahren

Remember that 1970s-era Euro-pop tune by Kraftwerk? “Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn” (English: We drive drive drive on the motorway) That pretty well sums up the past two days.

We just needed to get the Airstream from the panhandle of Florida to north Texas as expediently as possible, and for that job there’s nothing like a nice boring Interstate highway. Load the snacks, the podcasts, and some books and and the Gameboy for Emma — we’re going to check out half a dozen Interstate rest areas along I-10, I-49, and I-20! Woo-hoo!

After an unremarkable overnight in Alexandria LA, where the height of excitement was discovering that we had accidentally spent the night parked next to a sign that said “NO OVERNIGHT PARKING,” we plowed up through Louisiana and across north Texas into the dark heart of the Dallas/Ft Worth metroplex. The Louisiana roads were fine, quiet and even a bit scenic, but I do not enjoy the D/FW traffic nightmare when towing. We encountered about 40 miles of construction zones (narrow lanes, signs missing, Jersey barriers) and the usual maniacal drivers making high-speed radical drifts across three lanes right in front of us while texting.

Twice we were forced off the road by a combination of “Exit Only” lanes that weren’t marked in the construction zones and drivers who would absolutely not let us enter “their” lanes. At one point I decided to assert the mighty power of a 48-foot rig and almost literally crushed a small econobox that was being obnoxious. He got the message. But most of the time we played nice and tried to be steady and smooth as much as the twisting and crazy construction zones would let us.

We survived D/FW once again and eventually emerged on the northwest side near Decatur. We are now parked at Paul Mayeux’s home, where he is running his own 2-man Airstream service center. Long-time readers will recall that last April I left our Caravel here for repairs and never got back to pick it up. So now we have two Airstreams here at Paul’s, 900 miles from home.

Our primary reason for coming here was to get a new air conditioner installed. We’re going with a 15K BTU model (high capacity than the 13.5K model it is replacing). We’re skipping the expensive dual AC/heat pump unit because we hardly ever used the heat pump and we have two other sources of heat anyway (furnace and catalytic heater). That saves about $450. Paul and Denver (who used to work on our Airstream when Roger Williams Airstream in nearby Weatherford was in business) will install the AC on Friday.

It always seems that when we get to a service center we find a bunch more things to fix or check. During our last two days of roadtrip we’ve noticed that the refrigerator has climbed up to 52 degrees during the day. That’s very bad, because it could indicate a failing cooling unit, which is very expensive. The fridge has been running on gas during this time, so Paul checked the gas pressure with a manometer first and found that our pressure was below spec. We adjusted the regulator and left the fridge running in a test mode (basically at top cooling capacity) all night to see if it would cool down. This morning it is showing 42 degrees, which is better but not yet good enough.

Since it was packed full of food (thermal mass), it may be that a few more hours are needed to reach optimal temp (somewhere in the low 30s). These gas absorption-type refrigerators are very slow to remove heat relative to your home refrigerator that uses an electric compressor. That’s why you have to start them the day before you go on a trip. Today we are expecting highs in the upper 90s, so it’s a good test day. If the fridge continues to cool, we’re fine, but if not, we’ll have to dig a little deeper to find the root cause.

We’ve also noticed that the bathroom vent fan seems to drip a little in the rain even when closed. It probably has a crack in the plastic, so we’re anticipating replacing it on Friday as well. That’s not a major job.

Parked next to us is a Canadian couple in an Argosy who are here for installation of solar panels, Marvin and Annie. We’ve met before, way back in 2005 when Project Vintage Thunder was first displayed (unpainted and incomplete) at the Florida State Rally in Sarasota. They remembered us and Vintage Thunder. So it’s like being in a little campground here at the shop.

The best news we’ve had so far is that nights up here are cooling down nicely. We’re getting 65 degrees by daybreak, and the humidity is low, so even without AC at the moment it’s very comfortable. We finally used a blanket on the bed last night. And added to that, we zipped up to Decatur last night and got our first Texas barbecue dinner of this trip, which is always something that makes us all happy. I don’t know why, I guess it’s just a tradition now. Memories of other great trips.

Sep 21 2011

Taillight warranty

I don’t blame Super Terry, really.

He tried his best. He spent hours replacing the burned out motor in our air conditioner, and it seemed to work in heat pump mode when we tested it. But as he joked, it had the “taillight warranty” — when he can’t see my taillights anymore, the warranty is over.

We’re 489 miles from his view now, near Birmingham AL, and I just turned on the air conditioner to remove some of the intense humidity we are feeling tonight. It blew warm for a few minutes, cooled down a little, and then started blowing very warm humid air. … sigh…

We did a quick telephone consultation but the consensus is: “He’s dead, Jim.”

(note to non-geeks and those under age 45: That’s a Star Trek joke)

The full post-mortem hasn’t been done but it doesn’t matter, because I’m out of cheap options. We aren’t going to repair this air conditioner at shop rates. At six years old, it has gone Tango Uniform. Farewell, Dometic Penguin — you are already missed, on this humid night in an Alabama state park.

I would like to wait until later this winter to replace it, but we also use the Airstream as a guest apartment and we have people slated to arrive in October, which is still air conditioning season in Tucson. Somewhere in the next 1,900 miles I’ll find a good deal on a replacement unit (probably a 15k BTU air conditioner without heat pump) and we’ll do a swap. That’s a topic I’ll start researching in the next few days.

Sep 20 2011

Maintenance done & rolling again

I hope that this will be the last maintenance post for a while. It’s good to have gotten things tweaked and fixed but I’d rather write about our travels.

Just to wrap up the repair saga, Super Terry came through with an amazing job on the Dometic AC/heat pump. He salvaged the 1/4 hp electric motor from another unit and installed it in ours starting at about 6:30 Monday evening. The job, conducted entirely atop the roof of the Airstream, took until about 9:30 pm, so mostly in the dark by flashlights.

I went up and down the ladder a dozen times to fetch tools as requested, and otherwise just stood at the top of the rungs admiring a mechanic with 30 years of experience solving what appeared to me to be an insoluble problem. That unit is not designed for easy serviceability, and the motor didn’t come out without a fight. But at the end it was in, the whole thing went back together and upon testing it ran like new. I’m amazed and grateful that this effort allowed us to avoid an expensive replacement, which is normally the only option.

For those who suffer this issue, believe your mechanic when he says the best fix is a whole new air conditioner. Counting the time it took to salvage the motor from another unit, Super Terry put in a solid five hours on the job. He did this as a friendly favor, but if I were paying shop rates it would have been probably $500 plus parts, and I’m left with a 6-year-old unit that probably will have some other fatal issue in a few years. At the risk of sounding like an old RV codger, they just don’t make ’em like they used to. Hopefully ours will hold on for a few more years but I’m not expecting decades of service.

With the late dinner and the usual post-dinner conversation it was a late night, and then this morning we had a slow-motion getaway. It was 11 a.m. before we got on the road, westbound for Alabama. We got as far as 30 miles past Atlanta (hit downtown right at rush hour, which was challenging), then stopped for dinner and overnight parking in a private lot. It’s pouring rain tonight, so I’m very glad we resolved the leak in the Fan-Tastic Vent.

Our goal tomorrow is Birmingham. It’s a city we’ve never visited, and there are a few sights we want to see there, which I’ll write about in future posts. From there, our travel plan is basically to head back to Tucson in two weeks or less. We’re going to leave the exact stops loose, but this is familiar territory so if we want something different we’ll have to divert plenty from the beaten path. There are a few days built into the schedule for that.

The big splurge of our two-week return budget is going to be this weekend. I’ve actually made reservations — a rare thing indeed — for a park in the Florida panhandle for four nights. We all want beach time, to fill that piece of our souls and sustain us through the dry interim in the southwest this winter. Detouring to the panhandle will add 300 miles to our route but I’m sure it will be well worth it.

So that’s the sum total of our remaining travel “plan.” Not much, really. Rather than figure it all out, we’ll let circumstances and whimsy suggest the opportunities. In the nearly 1,900 miles ahead, I have a feeling we’ll find more than a few interesting things.