This little tale starts about two years ago, but really came to light last year in Newfoundland, the Hurricane heater and I had been having a few issues off and on. Well in Newfoundland the blower motor for the combustion chamber decided that it was done, so I ordered a new fan which had to come from British Columbia, so a full twenty days by mail. And as I had the manual out reading, it talked about an electric heating element for the hot water heater, so after a little looking I found it. But it had no power, I looked high and low for a switch to turn it on but just couldn’t find one, there was a breaker poorly labeled but I determined it was the correct one, so my assumption was we had a broken power feed.

As a temporary fix I connected an extension cord to the element and just plugged it into a receptical in the basement, and we had hot water, so I didn’t rush into pulling a new feed wire through the coach as it would be a major undertaking. The heater located right front, below and behind the passenger seat, and the breaker box located in a cabinet in the left rear of the coach above the bed, so a fifty or sixty foot run…not a task I was looking forward to would be a bit of an understatement.

Well last week we joined the “Beaver Ambassador Club” and one of the clubs big features is the forum that they run, now I have worked with forums before with very limited success, but I thought let’s throw the question out to the forum members.

Basically I was looking for a wiring diagram for our coach, but I asked about the heater issue to see if any one had experienced a similar problem, and in about twenty four hours I had a couple of responses and discovered a switch located inside a cabinet close to the breaker box that controlled the hot water element. When I took delivery of the coach, the tech had pointed the switch out but had mentioned it was for the power washer (yes our coach has a built in electric pressure washer with outlets at both ends of the coach but I did not have a hose and wand, so had never used the washer or the switch. And to my amazement this one switch does pressure washer and Hurricane heater…I guess it is designed so that you can only have one or the other on at once, neat idea but one that had kerfuffled me.

So as I have reattached the power feed line, and reassembled the covers after removing the extension, and flipped the switch to Hurricane heater, and the hot water elements starts working the way it was designed, the $40 fee to join the BAC (Beaver Ambassador Club) was a really good investment, as I know the wire alone would have cost more than the years membership.

Of course now since I was helped so quickly with good correct information, I now feel I have to check the forum regularly to pay back the help I received, it’s not a real hardship but is a little time consuming and I have such a busy schedule….lol

So it started today, the first ten units to be prepared for the winter season. We have our little trailer with the antifreeze and a pump to push the antifreeze thru the trailers water system, we have an air compressor to blow the out the water out of the water lines before charging them with antifreeze. We have to drain the hot water heaters, ice makers, any thing that has water can and will freeze, and when water freezes it expands and whatever has water in it will crack or break…that’s just the facts of physics.

With a skid of antifreeze, there must be quite a few on our list, I think Richard said sixty to seventy, the number doesn’t really matter its just a task that we need to complete. Richard has been doing this for a lot of years and remembers a lot of the trailers, so we can make sure we don’t miss any items like an outside sink Richard spotted on a new to the park trailer in the first group of ten, it was located in a small compartment only about eight inches high, one I would never have expected it and it was obvious enough the trailer owners had never used as it still had antifreeze in it from the previous year. But missing something like that would certainly ruin an exciting opening weekend in May!

We have booster cables to operate slides as necessary to get to things tucked behind the slides. As we recommend that the owner disconnect the batteries over the winter months and in a perfect world they would take them to recharge them over the winter as lead acid batteries loose about 8% of their charge each month especially in the cold. Almost every hot water heater has a by-pass and the by-pass allows us to charge the rest of the water lines with the antifreeze without filling the hot water tank, as it is just left with the drain plug removed until spring. We always have to be on the look out for outdoor showers, outdoor kitchens, plumbing for washing machines, ice makers, and of course water filters.

The process is not difficult, but is time consuming, as without two people working at it, there would be a lot of steps in your day. So one does all the inside work while the other does all the outside work, and for right now me doing the inside seem to be the quickest. Oh boy only another sixty to go…..