Last Day in Aransas Pass this Season

As the old saying goes, all good things must pass.  In this case it’s Aransas Pass.  Tomorrow morning we will be pulling out to head up to see Thad, my oldest son, in Cartwright, Oklahoma.  Cartwright is just across the border from Texas and is just west of Colbert, Oklahoma.  We plan on staying tomorrow night at Wally World in Bellmead, Texas which is just north of Waco, Texas.  We are planning on staying Friday the 26th and Saturday the 27 in the Eisenhower Campground on the Texas side of Lake Texoma.  Sunday morning we will leave for Oklahoma City so that we can be at United Motors Monday morning to have the filter changed in the Allison Transmission.  If all goes as planned we should be parked on the slab at my son Todd’s place between Cushing and Yale Oklahoma Monday evening.  As per our normal traveling schedule we hope to pull out no later that 10am tomorrow.

How do you like my map?  I just learned how to do this.

The great battery fiasco or “Duh”

Well my bragging about my new batteries and the watering system ended up biting me in the hiney.  Before I took the old batteries out I made a drawing on a sheet of paper showing the + and – poles and their locations on all four batteries.  I also drew how many cables were attached to each pole and put the battery number on each cable.  The cables were identified by color code with either red or black for the + or – poles.  Sounds good doesn’t it?  However I used masking tape to identify the cables and by the time the battery compartment was washed out some of the markings weren’t very clear.  Still no problem cause most of them were OK and I still had the red and black ends to make sure they went to the correct poles.  So what could go wrong?  I had been having trouble with the front furnace not working all the time.  Some time it worked and other times the blower would come on but the burner wouldn’t ignite and so the blower would time out and shut off.  I called a local RV repairman that several people had used and were happy with his services to look at the furnace and also to get the hot water heater working on electric.  We have been using the hot water heater on propane for about 18 months.  I knew it was the thermostat on the electric part of the heater but had never gotten around to fixing it.  Long story, short, the repairman came out, found a wire that wasn’t making a good connection on the furnace and installed the thermostat on the hot water heater.  $143 later and we were great, until the next morning when the furnace again wouldn’t come on.  He came out again, unplugged the plug in to the furnace control card and re-plugs it and it starts working.  $35 service call, problem solved.  WRONG!!!!  He comes back out that afternoon and I’ve got low voltage.  My battery bank is only reading about 12.30 volts.  For those that don’t know, a 12 volt system should actually be about 13.2 volts or higher.  We could run a direct line from the batteries to the furnace and it would work but running through the fuse box and then to the furnace it wouldn’t.  This had the repairman scratching his head.  He decides to run direct lines from the batteries to the furnace and did I mention that by now the refrigerator wouldn’t work without a direct line also.  We were going to put conduit under the motor home with inline fuses and just by pass the fuse box.  By now my batteries had dropped down to just a little over 12 volts so I said I thought we needed to see if there was a problem with the Xantrex charger/inverter system that is suppose to keep the house batteries charged.  This is only a $1200 to $1500 piece of equipment.  He agreed and called another RV guy who he said was really good at electrical problems.  I settled up with him for his time for another $150 and the other guy came out at 7:00pm yesterday evening.  Since you’re  probably tired of reading this I will cut to the chase.  After about 1 and 1/2 hours of checking everything he could think of, he finally discovered that although we had all the cables that were attached to the batteries in the right places there was one cable down behind the battery pack that wasn’t attached to anything.  It just happened to be the cable coming from the charger to the batteries.  It now appears the problem has magically gone away.  Isn’t it funny how things work better when they are hooked up correctly?  This visit cost me another $160 but that is a lot better than having a problem with the charger/inverter.  I hope this is all I have to say about this.     

New Toy

The house batteries on the motor home were the same ones that came with it when we bought it in 2006 and I knew they were ready to be replaced.  One of the problems with the house batteries was putting water in them.  In fact, the last time I  added water was last year while we were here in Texas.  The problem was the batteries were not on a slide out tray so you had to either take them out or try to get into the battery compartment and add the water in place.  In order to do that you had to loosen or remove some of the battery cables in order to get the caps off the battery cells.  The coach batteries are four 6 volt golf cart type batteries that are hooked up to produce 12 volts to the coach.  I had been researching how to make the maintenance or watering of the batteries easier so I would actually do it as needed and I wanted to do this before I bought new batteries.  The answer turned out to be made by Pro Fill.  Camping World has the system but it is $65 for two batteries.  I found the same system for four batteries for $95.  You still have to purchase a hand pump which is just a rubber bulb that sucks the distilled water out of the jug and pushes it through rubber tubing to the battery cells.  I paid $23 for the pump so the system cost me $118 plus shipping.  This picture is of the actual battery compartment.  The yellow stuff is to clean the corrosion off the cable connections.

    This is Gary putting the valves into the new batteries.

This is the new batteries installed into the battery compartment.

  This final picture is of the completed installation with all the batteries connected to a single hose that attaches to the pump.

The hose has a cover over it when not in use.  The pump end snaps on the the fitting that hangs down from the side of the batteries.  Really a simple system.  All you do is put the end of the pump into the water, prime the tubing, hook up the pump to the batteries and squeeze the rubber bulb which puts the water into the battery cells.  When the water reaches the correct level in each cell, the valve closes, the bulb gets hard to squeeze and you’re finished.  I think it will pay for its self in longer battery life.  The batteries are Trojan T-105.  The four batteries cost me $398.  The company I bought the watering system from is PowRparts.com

Sunny Day = Cookout

Yesterday we finally got a really nice day, could have been a little less wind but sunny and warm.  So of course we had a cookout.  Gary and Sonny (Missouri) did the cooking of the hamburgers and sausages and the ladies did the rest including the roasted Jalapenos stuffed with cheese and other goodies. We didn’t get to have a cookout when Jack and Barbara, Dwayne and Vicki, and Dale and Jennifer were here since the weather wouldn’t cooperate. These are a few of the pictures I took.    As you can tell from the pictures, everyone had a good time.

Just to regress a little bit I thought I would put a few pictures in from our trip to Mexico when we drove down.  We spent the night the 23rd of February at a very nice Motel.   The next day some of us when over to Mexico again and the rest went shopping.  We all met back at the Motel and then went to CiCi’s for pizza. After pizza we went to the “Flea Market” in Donna, Texas.  I got distracted and started following this “Hot Babe”.  Unfortunately, she wouldn’t give me the time of day so I found a new RV to look at.  I think I could have traded our motor home if I could have come up with a little bit of cash.