Saturday, January 17, 2009

NC here we come (again!)

We got up early (that’s early afternoon for us) and finished up the packing and the preparations. Mar’s charlie horse still hurts so she is still limping and moving slow.

Bernie went outside to de-winterize Bella before getting on the road and it turns out the house outside pipes are frozen so nothing came out of the water hose. We had to postpone the de-winterizing and will have to stop to use public restrooms along the way.

Today we drove about 6 hours on our way to Judith’s house in Chapel Hill NC. Judith is a member of one of our rv yahoo groups and offered us her driveway, with water and electric.

When we got there it was already dark but since the house pipes weren’t frozen, Bernie decided to go ahead and de-winterize Bella, so we could use the bathroom and kitchen.

Everything went well until we tried to use the water heater to take a shower. We could tell the water in the water heater was hot but the water coming out of the hot water faucets inside was absolutely freezing. It took some detective work to figure out how to fix this.

After checking several rv websites, pulling out our rv books, and asking questions of an online friend via instant messenger, we drew a diagram of our water heater bypass which helped us decide the right position of all three valves. Bernie got under the kitchen cabinet, turned the valves and we finally had hot water so we could shower. Another rv puzzle solved!

1 comment:

  1. When I winterized our new Class C for the first time this year, I filled the water lines with the RV anti-freeze. It took about a gallon and a quarter. The way ours is set up, it uses the RV pump to take a suction on the jug of antifreeze. After all the water lines were filled up, I switched the valve for the hot water heater bypass back to the hot water heater so that the rest of the antifreeze went to the hot water heater. The reason that I did this is that to make sure that the section of water line to the hot water heater had antifreeze in it and so that I could return the valve to it's normal position. To get to the valve, I have to take a piece of panel off from under the galley sink, which requires all of the cabinet contents to be removed. By having the valve in its normal position, all we have to do is flush the antifreeze out of all of the lines, and the camper will be dewinterized.

    Mike Goad (at home in Arkansas)
    Haw Creek Out 'n About

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