Hornswoggled, and Farther South

I'll start out quoting myself in my last post  >> Back out to take another look, back in and turned on the other thermostat and each zone had nice warm air coming out, but the front still cold, finally I banged on the pump and it started up reluctantly and soon after nice warm air to the main area, but wow, the pump was screaming and wobbling so we shut it back down.  Good news is the AH was just fine, it was only one of the circulation pumps.<<

As it turned out nothing could be further from the truth:-(

We left Nashville and made one overnight stop in Alabama at a kind of nondescript place, fine for the one night, then on to Sun Outdoors-Orange Beach Resort in Gulf Shores.  A very, very nice place!  We had a nice evening with a fire.

We were very impressed by this place, first of all it is absolutely enormous, with huge sites with good spacing, everything is paved, the sites are concrete and all have patios, fire pits, and chairs.  The grounds are beautiful, groomed and clean.  Lots of amenities, several pools, and the price is reasonable.  Very, very nice.

We had several things we wanted to do in the area, one of which was to go buy shrimp and fish at a local boat to market place called, Billy's Seafood that Jan's parents, Vern and Viv showed us many, many years ago, and we wanted to go out and eat some oysters and seafood.

So we went to bed, feeling good about the AquaHot, and when we got up in the morning, if it's cold, we usually flip the diesel burner on to give it some added heat, it was 40, so we flipped it on and didn't think much more about it, until I came out to get our second cup of coffee and noticed it was still a little cool??  I looked out at the AquaHot exhaust and OMG, it was just spewing black, black dense smoke like we were fumigating all of Alabama, what?!?  So I flipped the diesel back off, now what?

Once it got completely light we went out to see what we could see, flipped it back on, same awful smoke and we could hear a chattering that didn't seem right.  My go-to AquaHot guy is Rudy in Texas, so I gave him a call.  I said I planned to do a complete service and see if a new filter and nozzle wouldn't fix it up, he told me a little chatter was okay, probably the clutch vibrating a bit.  So after the full service we tried it again and if anything the smoke was even worse, back to Rudy.  He explained black smoke can be caused by several things, the burner not mounted correctly, sealing grommets not seated properly, blocked air intake, bad bearings, or a bad motor that won't spin up fast enough.  I knew everything was fine except for the bearings or motor, so he told me to take it apart and spin it by hand to check the bearings, and I could adjust the clutch a little bit when I had it apart.  So out came the burner again.

Then we had to get the cover off.

The motor is right below my thumb, and the clutch is the 
intermeshed plastic gear just below the motor

I spun it by hand and it turned smoothly and easily, back on the phone to Rudy.  He said the next thing was to check the motor speed, with either an infrared tachometer, or by an experienced ear.  Well, I had neither, so it was time for a professional, and Rudy had a guy just up the road from us in Foley, Mike, Mobile RV Hydronic Service, who he had trained, in fact, and was very good.  I tried calling and calling with no answer, uh oh, back to Rudy.  He had another guy near Tampa if it came to that.  I sent out an email to Mike as well and tried his phone 5-6 more times with no luck.  Rudy called and said he found out Mike was on a cruise:-)  So maybe that was out.  

So in the meantime what to do, go have lunch and buy some fish.  We had a great lunch at the Shrimp Basket.

We ate the oysters so fast I never got a picture:-)

Fried shrimp, hush puppies, and onion strings

Then to Billy's for some shrimp and fish, grouper and red snapper.  Crab stuffed shrimp was on the menu for dinner.

So, so good!

We had a pretty evening.

Jan and I get up early, anywhere from 0445am to 0515am, I know, I know, but it is what it is, and it was my birthday, so when my phone rang at 0540am I figured it was one of our kids calling, but it only rang once?  Caller ID said it was Mike, so I called right back, he said he went to call and since he was on a cruise ship in a different time zone it occurred to him a little late that he was calling at a really early hour, no worries.  He explained he'd not be back until Saturday night, so I figured that was that until he said he'd be happy to come over on Sunday, our last day. WooHoo!  So now all we had to do was wait until Sunday, and since the worst of the really cold weather seemed over we would be fine with just the electric on the AquaHot.

So that nights dinner was baked red snapper with garlic shrimp on top.  It was yummy too.

We went out to lunch a few more times, and unfortunately didn't do too well, but we did go back to Billy's and bought a lot of shrimp and grouper for the freezer.  We had a really welcome warm day and evening which we really enjoyed, nice cocktails and cigars by the fire.

No, I didn't get any pictures, but Mike showed up right on time with a helper Sunday morning, his experienced ear said the motor was shot, so he replaced the motor and I had him put in a new clutch to boot, and I can say in no time at all our AquaHot is purring along now, producing all kinds of heat with no smoke:-)

We left the next morning and arrived in Port St Joe, FL for another week, for, what else, more oysters and seafood, of course!

Presnell's 

Sunset from our site

I wish we could really recommend this park, and the one site we got is really pretty special, but truth be told, the sites are sandy and muddy, very tight together, and the entrance caused us to drag getting in here.