Chaos Leaves Town

October was a bit boring…I used the newest heat pump extensively to good effect with both heating and cooling working fine. Made sure the venting that exits the output tunnel and heads up the rear than inside of the RV was well sealed without any air leaks. Then I hired some handymen to help move the two salvage heat pumps onto a pallet on the cement pad directly behind my RV. Got permission from the park manager to leave them there until spring when I should be able to part them out and sell the parts online. Winter is when most RVers ‘park’ their RVs at home for the season so I’d not expect to get any buyers. I didn’t do much of anything this month but stay home and watch the start up of the football season.

I did get a potential buyer that saw my ad on Facebook Marketplace and it turned out he only lived a couple blocks from me. Turned out he had a 6537 model, which is an odd duck but he couldn’t buy my 6535 (same as a 46515 model that the salvage units are) because it won’t fit. He did hire me to help get it working properly, which I did and made a bit of pocket money.

November became a travel month…Since I had the heat pump working, installed and buttoned up, had the salvage heat pumps put to bed with a nice blue tarp covering them, it was time to think about heading south for the winter. But first, Ms. Kitty…we had a wind storm come through around 2 weeks before I was planning on heading out and to protect my LR slide awning…which was flapping way too much…I pulled in the LR slide. This is often a warning to Ms. Kitty that we’re going to be traveling. She hates travel in the RV. Or car. So she hid in the BR and didn’t come out until the next day when the weather was sunny and warm. I left the door open for her like I do and she heard that and came zooming out of the BR like a shot and zipped out of the door. She did NOT return for 26 hours! I feared she was gone forever but did the normal posting to social media about her with a picture. Here she is lounging in the BR…when she senses we’re going to be driving, she hides under the bedspread on the floor and then acts freaky whenever I stop, trying her damnedest to escape out of the door when I open it, or sitting in the stairwell yowling at the closed door. Very often on the route I can let her out, but other times, it’s just not allowed or appropriate.

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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.

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Wasn’t much happening around the RV park, other then giving Walter a hand with his full on off-grid solar setup. I was giving advice, such as it was, about the install and the problems he’d run into on occasion. He had a good grasp of the system already so I just mostly agreed with his assessment of how to do things. One problem he ran into was when he’d installed two 24V to 12V converters. When he rotated the switch, it arc’ed and popped. I agreed they were most likely defective as his wiring was top notch. He sent them back and got replacements and those both worked.

But, on with my tours around the area…decided to head back into Ensenada one day just for a look see. I did stop at two RV parks and one I’d read the reviews on still hadn’t rebuilt the main office. So there’s an entire RV row that lost power during a fire that had been mentioned in a review a year prior…still not rebuilt. None of the wifi extenders worked either so wifi was only near the office where they had jury rigged that setup so it worked, somewhat. And I stopped in at Corona Beach RV and that’s a nice one. So I was thinking to heading there after leaving Guadalupe RV park. Turned out I just headed back to the US instead but that’s for later. Here I’m heading back to that massive shipping area and over on the right are some new homes for sale. Since at that time my brother and cousin were considering moving down here, decided to stop by and take a look on the way back from downtown.

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Left Tucson heading to Mexico in late February…

and first stopped at the TSD station for a diesel fill up. And couldn’t get the pump to start pumping! Tried every trick I knew about pump islands with remote pumps on the opposite side but nothing worked. Dammit! I needed fuel! So I drove around the fueling station (these are business type sites…no humans anywhere around) and tried a different pump, and it worked. Cost me nearly 45 minutes of screwing around to find they have defective equipment but no sign. Wasn’t until I was 10 minutes away that I realized I could have put a note on the pump myself. Doh!

Anyway, I did make it out of Tucson onto the west bound I-8 freeway.

One of the dune buggy havens that dot this area. There’s a huge meeting over those dunes a couple times a year. I’ve passed it in the past but never stopped.

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