Suburban warfare.......

6:59 am - Wednesday - December 11th - TWW - 24° F, humidity 19%, wind 5 mph out the east by northeast.....partly cloudy today with a forecast high of 58° F.  On this date in 2010 TLE and I were spending the weekend at Rancho Jurupa Regional Park in Riverside, CA (about 13 miles from our home in Ontario, CA).....within 2 months we would move into the Newell to live fulltime, and live (Rancho Jurupa Regional Park) there serving as camp hosts for the next 12 months......

TLE and I had planned to spend most of the day inside the coach as the high temp for the day would only get to 48° F.  We have a lot of paperwork from the past 2 years (yeah, I know.....I've been procrastinating...lol) to scan into my laptop, so we can get rid of the paper, and it seemed like it would be the perfect day for such an activity.  There are plans, and then there is life.  We've been having issues with the Suburban gas furnace which heats the salon, and had not been using it, but it is getting cold now, and it needs to work properly, or we're going to get uncomfortable fast.

I've only had one of the three Suburban gas furnaces out of their cubbyholes to work on since we bought the coach in 2008.  I had to replace the control board in the very same furnace back then (2015).  It is a very tedious job to snake those heaters out of their very cramped confines, and I knew it would be a 4-5 hour job from beginning to end, so I've been avoiding it, but that same heater also sends heated air into our water bay to keep it from freezing, so if we don't want the electric heater in the water bay to turn on and drain our Bluetti battery bank, we needed get that heater working, and fast.  Fortunately, servicing that furnace is also an inside job, so I didn't even have to change out of my pajamas to do the job.

At any rate I began the difficult task of removing it from under the kitchen counter around 9 am.  Since it is under the kitchen counter I need to lay on my side to disconnect the gas line, and wiring so I can remove it.  Lying on a cold floor for a few hours is not fun, and is especially not fun when you are doing it at age 75.  It probably took me a good 90 minutes to finally extricate it from its tiny compartment, and then another 2 hours to service it, and refresh all four of the wire connections (power, ground, and 2 thermostat wires).  I also replaced the 'sail switch' while I was in there.  As far as I could tell the old one (now 42 years old) was still working as it should, but I replaced it anyway.  There are 4 things which can fail on these heaters....the control board, the ignitor, the fan motor, and the sail switch.  I've already replaced the control board, and ignitor (you can replace this item without removing the heater from its cubbyhole).  The motor would squeal a lot when first turned on, so I applied a little lube to the fan shaft, and the squealing disappeared (is still not squealing as I write this morning). I used a 12 volt bench tester to run the fan, and test the new 'sail switch before reinstallation. Once I had installed the new 'sail switch', and proved that it worked, it was time to reinstall the furnace (I did all the work with the furnace sitting on the kitchen counter).  It only took me another 60 minutes to get the furnace back into its cubbyhole, and reconnected to gas and 12 volt electricity.....

This is a picture of the Suburban furnace in the bedroom under my closet floor.  It is actually going to be easier to remove than the one in the kitchen.

 ....now was the moment of truth...I turned on the furnace using the wall mounted thermostat, and it fired right up, and ran quietly for the first time in a few months.  By the time I finished putting away my tools it was after 2 pm, and I was done for the day....5 hours beginning to end, with a lot of lying on the cold, hard floor.....uggggh!  Over the next 2 weeks I'll pull the other two furnaces out of their respective cubbyholes, and service them by replacing the 'sail switches', and control boards.  They run pretty good right now, but I'm not waiting for them to fail.  If the ignitor switches fail at some future date I can replace those in about 20 minutes without removing either furnace.

The heat of the day arrives around 3 pm now, and lasts about 90 minutes, so, after a suitable nap, and a snack I headed out to the trailer to clean up my workbench, and put away a lot of stuff from the last couple of days.  

There was no sunset fire Tuesday evening as it was down to 32° F by 5:15 pm.  The outside temp got down to 22° F Tuesday night, but we slept quite comfortably.  We've had an electric blanket for years now, but TLE recently added an electric mattress heating pad, which really makes the bed comfortable, even when the indoor temp gets under 40° F as it did early Tuesday morning.  As I've mentioned previously, we don't like to sleep with heaters on at night.  The electric blanket, and mattress heating pad do not use much electricity, surprisingly!

Thanks for stopping by!