A Short Update

Almost all the way back to Florida, a dump truck gave us a gift of a rock in the windshield, sounded like a gunshot.  But it was nicely contained and an almost perfect circle, turned it in and  after 3 scheduled appointments, the third being the charm, we got it all fixed up.

As I had mentioned, we lost most of the readouts on our Aladdin monitoring system, and were thinking the worse.  We have to have a way of reading our electrics, AC, DC, battery banks, amperage to and from both, we could live without the other stuff, like temperature, compass heading, and with our new tank system, the tank levels.  With much research I did find that there is a replacement system called Silverleaf that is almost plug and play, but quite expensive, so we were very relieved when Jan, the diesel mechanic got it working after unplugging and replugging several connections.  We had hoped it was just a loose or iffy connection and that is what it turned out to be, thankfully.

A part of the system where those affected modules are,
on the ceiling of one of our basement compartments

We had a wonky switch problem when we first left Florida last year, the switch that controls the driver's side front slide extension, it was intermittent, but with some persuasion, you could get the slide out.  And in fact it seemed to work perfectly after a few days until a few stops before returning to Florida.  The button is on a 10 button panel that feeds our multiplex system, a computer driven system that allows each button or switch anywhere to do most anything in the coach.  Like a lot of things on our older coach, replacements are hard to come by.  There is a company M&M Electronics that are experts with these Intellitech systems.  I called them and they had me pull the switch panel out and send it to them.  They are confident they can fix it.  Time will tell.

These are two similar switch panels

A big thing on our agenda is getting our captain's chairs recovered.  We had them recovered in 2015, paid a lot to have them done in ultra leather and never imagined they would need to be redone for as long as we have the coach.  Well, the driver's seat started to split and chip off, at one seam at first, then it looked like the material had "broken".  At first we thought the passenger seat escaped, but sure enough it started to crack as well.  After a lot of research we found a shop in Sarasota that has been doing custom car restoration and upholstery for over 50 years.  We talked to them and made an appointment for them to redo our seats.  We also found out that the ultra leather we had paid for wasn't even ultra leather!  This time we are having the seating surface done in real leather and the rest in a matching commercial vinyl, more like auto seats are done.  I'll enclose pictures and more info when we get them back.

You can see the cracking at the seam, but the entire surface is cracked

Then I learned a very expensive lesson, in fact one that has cost hundreds of dollars over the years.  We and most other coaches built by Monaco, and I am sure many other brands use a pretty robust water pump made by Remco, variable speed, puts out a lot of water, and is fairly quiet, but it does have one weakness.  There is an internal check valve that fails periodically after 3-5 years that allows pressurized water from the campground source to bypass through the pump and fill your water tank.  You can live with it for awhile, just by turning off the hose bib and using tank water, after all the pump still works fine.  With no research and just dumb thinking I have thought all these years, yeah this goes back at least to 2008 for this coach, that the check valve was deep inside the pump and unserviceable, so the solution to this issue was to buy a new pump for $230.  And I did just buy my probably third pump for our coach.  It is a very easy swap out, and I had cut the wires on the new pump, attached the electrical connectors after removing the older pump, and I happened to look into the outflow side and what do I see?  Something that looks like a chintzy plastic check valve, what?!?!  Then I look into the new pump and there isn't one??  So I call Remco and am told they don't include a check valve any longer, and yes, that is the check valve, easily replaced by just pulling it out with a pair of pliers, and if I want one I can order them for $7.99!!!!!  OMG, after buying pumps for over $200 I could have been buying check valves for $8.  Live and learn:-)  And no, I can't return the new pump as I had already cut the wires.....

So to close, I have to include at least one food picture, a delicious dinner we made, seared scallops on a bed of spinach with roasted turmeric cauliflower.  Yummy!