Work in M-F…

Today is Oct. 3rd 2024, and yesterday I was finally able to fire up the heat pump and get air-conditioning. And this morning get heating from the finally installed heat pump. A project I’ve been working on for months now. The heat pump had been installed less than a year when it failed in late May ’24. 

If you remember last time I showed pictures of the shipping damaged heat pump delivered by FedEx. Than around 3 weeks after receiving that damaged one, AirXcel delivered another one, again by FedEx, but without shipping damage this time…except it was obvious that somewhere either the pallet was dropped, or a fork from a forklift caught a cross member on the pallet, or something heavy was placed on top, or the truck had hit a swale in the the road that caused a compression event. Which caused the heat pump to push down on the pallet, breaking a cross piece. So it was on a 10° tilt on the pallet when it arrived. Made the shipping guy stand there while I peeled back the wrapping and inspected. Eventually determined that it was likely just the compression event and there was zero damage to the heat pump as far as I could determine. So I signed.

Then it sat there on the pallet while I tried to arrange for muscle to move it. Two weeks passed and finally had a couple guys hired and they moved it to the platform next to the RV and it’s basement compartment. Opened the top, replaced the oil type pillow block bushings with pillow block ball bearings, rerouted and dressed the poor wiring in the control section, and than tested it. And it tested within spec. Both compressors came on, all the currents measured within specs.  Pretty happy about that. I also found that the factory worker who put the top on had stripped out 3 or more screw holes that hold the cover in place, grrr. So it rattles a little bit when either compressor switches on. But it seems it settled down as I haven’t heard it since the first time I turned it on.

So here it is installed. I won’t say much about the difficulty with installing this in the rack and frame of the RV but I will say that the tolerances were measured and this new heat pump is the same dimensions as the original, but it does take some finagling to get it in the compartment. The main problem is getting it squished up against the foam seal from the return air plastic vent that drops down from the bedframe. Getting it to go that last inch to under that lip is a bitch. Once it’s mostly under the lip, then have to quickly start ratcheting the bolts to raise the tray. Took over an hour to get it positioned just right and under the lip, and the tray lifted without damaging the frame of the heat pump by prying too much with a crow bar and a flat bar.

I now have 3X 200 lb Coleman Mach, AirXcel heat pumps. One installed, one damaged in shipment that I’m setting up to test, and one that has a failed compressor. The first two just a few weeks old, the one with the bad compressor started this entire saga back in late March of this year when the unlubricated pillow block bushing on the ODBM sized up, after almost a year of use. That caused a cascade of issues of burnt up relays, discolored motor wiring due to over current, and finally the #2 compressor either failed or was bad all along. Inside the house, it’s hard to tell if one or both compressors are running and the way the thermostat works is it only triggers #2 if there is a wide differential between set point and ambient. So it’s hard to know if it ever worked or not.

It costs around $250 to ship these things so AirXcel was happy to let me keep them for salvage. I’m going to try to build one good one out of the two bad ones.  And then try to arrange for them to be stored while I try to sell them, part them out and sell off the parts (could take years), or take them to the local dump. I really don’t have much room to store them. I’m anticipating that and have an idea or two that I’ll have to get permission from this RV park to do. Most of the ideas involve leaving the two pumps here over the winter, which brings it’s own set of problems due to wet weather. I hope to recoup some of the labor and time costs out of them or I’d have taken them to the dump already.

In other news, I thought I would head down to the Milton Freewater library. It’s pretty nice, and there were never any protests there that I’m aware of. They did have a sign about people policing their own freakin’ children and to keep them out of adult sections but that was about it.

Hung around the library for an hour or so. Has all the modern devices like computer stations, and a librarian that can research anything you need for FREE. I used to use library research for homework all the time when I was in college, back in the days before the internet.

I’ve always been a fan of flower baskets on ol’ timey lamp posts. See them in smaller towns where there are many volunteers to keep them pretty.

Very nice.

And that’s about all that’s happened here in M-F for the last 2 months.

I did drop Hulu streaming service when they raised their price another $2/month. I only signed up and stayed with them because of Resident Alien, but after the 2nd season, they sold the show to Paramount or someone and I’m not going to follow it over to a much more expensive service then the $8/mo I paid Hulu. But they had a few interesting shows and I watched some movies but have been thinking about dropping them for quite a while now. Them raising price was just the trigger point for me. So now I’m content to watch OTA TV and the $15/mo Netflix.

Been a stick-in-the-mud stay-at-home cat dad for weeks now while I brooded over getting the heat pump installed, wired up, and running. It’s finally done, and once I get the unit with shipping damaged tested, that will help me decide on whether or not to part it out, or change the damaged metal frame pieces out with the undamaged pieces from my old one and sell it as a full unit…which I hope is the result because selling the entire unit for $1,999 (half the price of a new one) is much easier then trying to sell individual parts out of the two units. I feel for those RV’ers who might have had the problem of the unlubricated pillow block bushing seizing up like I did, barely a year after purchase, if they’re not a DIY’er and aren’t in a RV park that allows work on your own RV. Shops are really expensive doing work on a heat pump and I don’t envy owners that are forced to have it done at a shop.

Thanks for reading!

Jim@HiTek