Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Another productive week and birthday celebrations

I need an orange car!

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

Tom finished waxing the RV,

Finishing the detail job

and then it was time to tackle the AquaHot service. 

Time for 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.

Dirty 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!

Much cleaner now!

Outside is cleaner, too

IMG_9071

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

New nozzle installed

Re-attaching the diesel burner to the AquaHot.

Re-Installing the combustion chamber

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 . . .

Getting some smoke when we fired it back up

then LOTS of smoke!

Uh oh!  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.

Re-installed Nick's electrical outlet

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.

Shake, Rattle & Roll in downtown Suffolk

Nick and Tom were in car heaven!

Guy heaven

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

New and old










There were some real beauties there,

That's a beauty!

and some cool old trucks, too!

Old Ford truck


Interesting truck bed


As usual, lots of Mustangs!

Mustang

Mustang











Nice color!

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

Best in Show

The guys spotted a nice Cougar, too,

'67 Cougar

and a couple of Broncos that were in great shape!

Nice Bronco

REALLY nice Bronco!











REALLY NICE!

That's dune ready!

Even a nice VW Bug for Bryce!

VW Bug for Bryce


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

Ice Cream Truck

I think somebody had a little too much ice cream!

Too much ice cream?


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

Smile     Not sure how to caption this one!









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

O'Connor Brewing Company

Enjoying a brew

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.




2 comments:

  1. Looks like you had a fun day out with Nicolas especially at the Car Show. The 70 Torino Rag-Top brought back memories of my Hardtop.
    Doing maintenance is a necessary part of RVing but when things start smoking people start wondering what you're doing. Almost Embarrassing!
    Be Safe and Enjoy!

    It's about time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Happy Belated Birthday's!!! Great Job on the Aquahot...all that smoke would have made me a bit nervous;-(((

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for reading! We'd love to hear your comments!