RV Adventures

This blog post had a number of titles as I considered what to title it. Contenders….

• I’m spoiled.
• Never leave home without 6 feet of Romex wire.
• Honey, we are out of hot water.
• It’s always something.

But we’ll stick with “I’m spoiled.”

Why am I spoiled? Is it because I’m sitting in the sunshine on the shore of Lake Superior? No.

Is it because we are on another adventure? No.

I am spoiled because I have a husband that can FIX THINGS!

It all started when we pulled into our campground in Ashland, Wisconsin, right on the shore of Lake Superior. I went to do the dishes and I noticed the water was not as hot as it should have been. Funny…we had plugged into shore power a good hour before and turned on the electricity to the water heater, and the water heater had worked that morning before we left out previous park.

“Honey, we are out of hot water. I think there is something wrong with the water heater!”

Our water heater can be run on electric (best when plugged in at a campground) or on propane gas (the ONLY option when boondocking). Jim said he would look at it the next day. So we turned off the electric to the water heater and turned on the gas and went on with our day.

At 8:30 the next morning, Jim dug into the mystery of “no hot water on electric.” He is very familiar with this water heater. When we first got the Blue Flame, the electric heating element needed to be replaced in the tank. A few years later, we had to replace the thermostat control. The problem was probably one of those components.

Jim got out his voltmeter. He quickly eliminated both the heating element and the thermostat as being the problem. Darn, this was something new.

A “few” tools were dragged out and more diagnosis was done. Jim next concluded that the problem was the outside on/off switch on the water heater (see the picture above).

You see, we have an on/off switch inside the RV and an on/off switch outside on the water heater. The inside switch supplies power to the outside switch. The inside switch was measuring 120 volts as expected. The outside switch was anywhere between zero and 40 volts.

It must be the outside switch causing the problem! But how to get it out? YouTube came to the rescue. When Jim scratches his head over something, I hop on the Internet. Inevitably, someone has had the same problem and documented it. Sure enough, I found a video on how to get the switch out. The switch was removed and Jim tested the voltage at the wires. We were still getting low or no readings.

At this point, Jim was again scratching his head and I was making totally off the wall suggestions (hey, I dig computers, not RV wiring). Things were just not adding up electrically, and Jim knows his electricity.

This is now where the Romex comes in. If you were raised in my family, you know what Romex is! It’s a brand name for the wire used to wire houses (I can thank my Dad the electrician for that knowledge). If we had some Romex, we could “replace” the almost totally inaccessible wiring between the inside and outside switches with the Romex to at least test what is going on. “Jim, do you have Romex?” Silly me. Of course he did, about ten feet of it!

This is another one of those moments when I shake my head at how prepared Jim is.

“Why have 10,000 tools onboard? Because you will need 11,000 tools.”

– James A. Goeke

Jim hooked up the Romex from the inside switch to the outside switch and PRESTO! The water heater was working. Yay! Elation quickly led to disappointed realization. Jim was going to have to dig into the internal wiring between the two switches.

Inside, the water heater is located under the kitchen sink. Soon, Jim was on the floor removing the components in the way, including heating ducts and other wiring harnesses, to get to the junction box where he thought the wires from the inside switch met the wires from the outside switch.

Jim removed the cover from the junction box to the right of the water tank and I heard “Uh oh!” Had he found the problem?

Oh my! Things looked a little charred in the box. The wire nuts (again, my siblings and I all know what wire nuts are) on the wires fell right off. In fact, one of them was totally melted. There was evidence of smoke on the junction box lid. Yikes!

Somehow things had gotten hot inside the junction box (which is why connections are REQUIRED by code to be placed inside junction boxes) and “stuff” (wire nuts and wire insulation) melted until the connections finally failed.

Somehow, Jim had to get a fresh wire between the two switches. In a house with a basement, that is not too terribly difficult. In an RV, it’s nigh on impossible.

Fishing a new piece of stiff Romex through the existing openings was not going to happen. But, since only one wire was fried, maybe only one wire needed to be replaced.

Jim being Jim, he pulled out a spool of appliance wire rated for the current and temperature (90 degrees C, this is going into a water heater) sufficient to replace the fried wire. After about 10 trips in and out to get everything ready he fished it though from the outside switch to the junction box. Next was another work inside the cabinet session to make the connections (have you ever tried to twist wires and install wire nuts one handed while laying on your back with your arm stuffed through a small opening and lots of sharp edges waiting to ‘bite’ you?). Things were hooked back up and we held our breath when the power was turned back on. It worked!!!! Yay!!!! We were back in business.

It took four hours, but Jim figured it out and got the water heater fixed. If we had taken the RV in for this repair, it probably would have been at least a $600 bill (4 hours at $150/hour) or more. Could the average RV technician even track down this issue? I doubt it. They probably would have tried to sell us a new water heater.

And that is why I am spoiled. I now have $600 to spend on quilting fabric. Or a four pack of a high-end IPA beer for Jim (he deserves it at this point). Or more tools. Or diesel fuel. You get the idea.

I may complain about the amount of tools and supplies Jim carries with us. But an incident like this shuts me right up. And we have now had two major hiccups for this trip, getting stuck and a water heater repair. That’s our quota for this trip. Right?

Jim’s Explanation as to why….

So what happened? This is what I think, it was twofold. First, I think improper wire nuts were used. When putting in the new wire, I selected wire nuts the same size as the old ones. I could get them “snug” but not completely tight. Normally I twist them until they will no longer turn and then give it a final tweak with pliers. When I selected the next size smaller wire nuts to replace the original choice, I was able to tighten them to my satisfaction. The second (possible) cause could be the wire may have been disturbed. When we had our slide-out repaired at the factory last year, we had them replace the old leaky kitchen faucet, which is directly above the water heater. They may have moved the electrical supply line going into the water heater causing the marginal connection (see wire nut problem above) to weaken. This would increase the resistance slightly so the connection would heat more than normal, which would cause more damage to the connection, which would increase the resistance, so more heat, so more damage, so more resistance, etc. Until finally the damage was so bad and the resistance so high that the connection literally melted the wire nuts and the wire insulation causing total failure.