Another productive week and birthday celebrations

We had another busy week last week . . . and accomplished quite a bit.

Tom finished waxing the RV,

and then it was time to tackle the AquaHot service. 

While we were in the mountains, we had to use the AquaHot on diesel for heat a few nights, and we started getting a lot of white smoke from the exhaust.  Then, it wouldn’t stay running, and we were getting a strong diesel odor in the RV, and Tom found diesel fluid dripping from the exhaust pipe.

A quick call to Lloyd Degerald (who had done our AquaHot service last year at the HR419 Rally), and he determined that we probably had a gunked up nozzle.  He said it wasn’t a huge problem, but we needed to have the AquaHot serviced.  Lloyd assured Tom that, with a little reading and watching a few YouTube videos, he could do the service himself.

Luckily, once we moved down to Suffolk, we didn’t need the heat anymore, so we had time to do some research. Tom figured out what he needed to do and ordered the necessary parts, and it was time to get started.

First he had to detach the diesel burner from the AquaHot, and remove the combustion chamber.

It was very sooty, and so was the inside of the burner.  He spent the next hour or so cleaning everything.

Much better!

With the burner cleaned out, it was time to change the nozzle and re-install the combustion chamber.

Re-attaching the diesel burner to the AquaHot.

With the service complete, we plugged in the connectors and it was time to fire it up.  It fired right up . . . but we were getting smoke . . .

then LOTS of smoke!

We were smoking out the whole campground!

After several minutes with no reduction in smoke, Tom made a quick call to Lloyd.  He assured us that it is normal to have that much smoke with the amount of diesel fuel we had been pumping into the burner.  He said just to leave it running, and after about 8 minutes, it would stop smoking and the diesel burner would cycle off.  Then, we should run the hot water until we got the burner to fire back up, and it shouldn’t smoke then.

Sure enough, it happened just like he said it would!  Success!

With our projects done, it was time to get back to work on Nick’s camper.  When we replaced his couch, there was a little half wall next to the old one that had to be taken out.  It had an electrical outlet mounted in it, so we ordered a surface mount receptacle, and installed it on the slide wall.

Then, it was time for the water system.  He’s been getting some odor in hos water, so we sanitized his fresh tank and water lines, and flushed his hot water heater.  The water heater was actually pretty clean, but sanitizing the lines took care of the odor.

That was it – our work was done for the week!

Tom and I both had birthdays on the weekend, and Nick was off Saturday and Sunday, so we had a few outings planned.

Saturday was the Shake, Rattle & Roll Car Show in downtown Suffolk, so when Nick got home from work in the morning, we went downtown to walk around.

Nick and Tom were in car heaven!

Several blocks of Main Street were blocked off and lined with cars on both sides.

There were some real beauties there,

and some cool old trucks, too!

As usual, lots of Mustangs!

This beauty was “Best in Show” – I love the orange!

The guys spotted a nice Cougar, too,

and a couple of Broncos that were in great shape!

REALLY NICE!

Even a nice VW Bug for Bryce!

It was a really hot day, and this guy was getting LOTS of business!

I think somebody had a little too much ice cream!

Then there was this little guy . . . he had something to say about Toyota!

    

From there we went into Norfolk to check out a couple breweries and get some dinner.  Nicolas took us to O’Connor Brewing Co.

We each enjoyed a cold brew (OK, they did, mine was Diet Coke!), and then we went in search of dinner in the Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk, near Old Dominion University.

We had an excellent dinner to wrap up our afternoon, and headed home to the campground.  Nicolas was going out with his friends for the evening, but we had big plans for Sunday . . . more on that in another post.