Bad news

As I said the front AC starting acting funny, weird sounds and what I thought was a funny smell, so I shut it down.  We have 3 AC's on the coach, so it's not do or die, although it is hitting the 90's during the day.  We took the cover off the unit, and it looked like the run capacitor was smelling burnt.  We ran it again with Jan on the roof watching it, but no cold air, and it sounded strange.
This morning we took the run capacitor off the middle AC and put it on the front AC to see if that was the problem.  No No!  The fan started running right away and sounded good, but when the compressor tried to start and didn't, concurrent with Jan screaming from the roof to shut it down since she was watching flames coming out of the circuit board, connections, and start capacitor, we decided we might need a new AC unit.
There are no service centers anywhere near us and I'm not keen on most of them anyway, so we went on line to find us an AC unit.  Called Dometic, the manufacturer, and of course, they are not making our unit anymore, but they have a bolt in replacement.  Great, now to find one and see how much it costs.  Roughly $1100 each!  And nobody has them in stock, and even Dometic has a backlog of orders.  We decided to look at all 3 AC's while we were on the roof, and it turns out for whatever reason our front AC and our rear AC are older than our middle AC, and that is exacerbated by the fact the front and the rear work harder than the middle.  So we decided, especially after talking to our neighbor who offered to help us with getting it on the roof and the old one off(they are about 100 pounds apiece), that if we could find 2 of them we would bite the bullet and order them.  After much looking online, and many phone calls, we finally found a place in CA that had 2 in stock and could ship immediately.  Then we find out since they are new units they are not compatible with our thermostats, so we need a conversion kit, actually 2.  So for a mere $2800, we have 2 new AC/heat pumps coming to us here in Montrose, and a big project of replacing them before we head out.

Funny, I've never been a fan of extended warranties in most cases, but when we bought our coach, they threw in an extended warranty for an extra 5 years.  We've never had an occasion to use it until today, so when Jan calls to get the details, they ask her the mileage on the coach?  She says what does the mileage have to do with AC units?  They say what is the mileage, she says 65,000, and they say your warranty expired at 60,000, have a nice day.  Nice, huh?