Louisville Bound …. Day 2

Day Two:

Let’s take it back a couple hours to night one …. Did I tell you the furnace quit and it got down to 29°? The furnace ran 1 full cycle raised the temperature about 6 to 7 degrees and came to a normal stop. After this 1 cycle the furnace would run for about 30 seconds and then it would shut down. This continued on for several more attempts. The 2 electric space heaters that we have were called in for overtime duty. I put one heater in the bedroom and the other I left in the galley on full blast.

Earlier in the evening I was able to run the heat pump down to about 38° but I didn’t want to push the technology so after the temperature bottomed out it was no heat except for the space heaters. Sitting in the front of the rig watching TV, my nose got cold! We were pretty upset since we had already had this situation looked at before leaving the beach. Here we are no heat at it’s looking like it’s going to be freezing every night that we are going to be away. Tired of worrying about this issue I decided to go to bed. Bed was nice and warm with the blanket pulled up over my ears.

At about a quarter to seven I woke up and looked out the bedroom window to see the dawn of a new day. I checked the outside temperature, 29°. I checked the inside temperature, 63°. Not bad I thought it could have been a lot worse. I reached out to some iRV2 folks that I thought might be able to help but we were closing on our departure time and I decided to press on and see if we could get this fixed in Louisville. I thought to myself; let me try one more thing just to satisfy my curiosity. I thought that I’ll go and buy a new pair of filters at the Walmart.

I got dressed went outside turned the corner on the car and saw the windshield was frosted over. Dang nabit, no ice scraper. I started the car to warm it up and disconnected the towing equipment. Sitting in the car I sprayed the windshield and ran the wipers a few times. This helped clear the windshield and in a few minutes I was able to make my way toward the campground entrance. Boy that sun was bright! It just was hitting me smack in the face and the sun visor wasn’t doing very much for me.

I found the Walmart in town; it was only a couple of miles away. I got the 3M filters and I also grabbed an ice scraper but I stopped at buying a snow brush. Returning back to the rig in quick time I pulled up to the back of the rig and grabbed the filters and made my way inside. We have a filter under the bed in the floor and the 2nd is in the back closet, again in the floor. Once those were replaced I tried the furnace – no improvement. Well at least I ruled that out.

Back on the computer for some more searching, I called the campground here in Shepherdsville, KY and got the name and phone number for RV Mobile Services. I then called Eric and he said that he would meet me at the campground at 5:00PM. Things were looking a bit better for me and this boosted our morale a bit. At least we would have a good chance to get this problem looked at – again.

The camper was ready to go having taken in the shore connections, and raising the jacks. Ding, ding, ding the jack alarm repeatedly offered. There goes that left rear jack again. I’m thinking I don’t have time for this so I lowered the rear jacks and grabbed my can of WD-40 and sprayed the piston. Grant it it’s not the best solution but I found out too late that my can of All-In-One spray lube was empty. The Wd40 did the trick the jack came right up. Finally we were off.

We didn’t make it too far before we stopped to fuel up. In Newport, TN this morning at the Exxon, gasoline was 2.659 at Exit 432 on I-40. While making my way out to the Walmart this morning in the other direction, gas was in most places 2.759. I filled the tank, filled our coffee mugs and grabbed a couple of egg & cheese biscuits. And we were gone. When Colleen figured out our MPGs, we got 7.25 MPG for day 1 which was mostly a hill climb.

When we got on the I-40 we were about 4 to 5 miles away from the Jct of I-81 and I-40 and continued westward. The road had its ups and down but the ol’ horse did well. Instead of running the entire trip in cruise today I decided to do a lot of foot on the gas driving. In cruise my rig will want to maintain the preset speed so it may downshift to 3rd or lower at times and I’ll see 4200 on the tach or so and it’ll muscles its way up the grade. When I disengaged the cruse and manually powered my way up the grades, I was able to get some good speed although somewhat less but the RPMs were staying in the 3600 to 3800 RPM range. Although I was busy on the throttle at the end of the day I expect that the MPGs will have improved or not gotten and worse.

We made one Roxy stop, had lunch, ran the car’s engine for a few minutes and pressed on. Shortly after coming out of the rest stop we came on a traffic jam that appeared to go off into the horizon. We listened to the CB radio to get some idea but none of the eastbound rivers had anything to say. We crawled along at 5 MPH or so for what seemed like 30 minutes of more and we came onto the scene of a very bad accident at the 50.5 mile marker on the I-64. There were several fire and rescue units, ambulance and police vehicles working the scene and the camera crews were setup. There was an unrecognizable SUV in the woods with what looked like its roof torn off that appeared to have struck hard into a tree. There were luggage and personal items strewn about in a wide circle behind the vehicle. It is very likely that there would have been some very severe injuries to the occupants due to the scope of the scene.

We came on a Hook at Exit 43 on the I-64, filled up and topped off the LP tank. MPGs calculated out to 7.28. Propane was 2.899 in Waddy, KY. We arrived at the KOA Louisville South Campground and are setup here until Friday. Eric came over with his service vehicle and he looked came and to check things out. I gave him a history on the issue and what had been done and what the furnace was doing. Eric’s conclusion is that we have a bad heater switch in the thermostat. On the very first attempt, the furnace fired and ran perfectly. Eric stayed and ran 4 more complete cycles and the furnace re-fired and ran just the way it’s supposed to. Eric is concluding that in his experience the detent where the furnace makes contact in the switch has proven to be unreliable on thermostats that have been in service for a number of years. Eric left and he’s going to see if he can find a thermostat. We might need it by Wednesday for sure when the temperatures are forecast to go below freezing once again.

After Eric left, I tried to get over the air digital TV but there really wasn’t anything that we wanted to watch. So out I go to setup the dish because they don’t have cable here. Glad I know how to do this in the dark. At the current time temperatures are 55° and it’s raining. Thunderstorms are expected into the night and earlier tomorrow. Lows tonight are forecast to be 52°.

Tomorrow is show day so I have to get an early start.

Mike Pelchat