You wanna know one of the great things about owning a small business?
I’ll have to get back to you…
So, obviously we haven’t posted anything in a while. Sometime shortly after we finished our inaugural 10-day road trip we wrote about here, we had to terminate an employee who (we discovered too late) was so unbelievably bad at her job that we had to do damage control for weeks afterward. Of course we were also looking for a new candidate to fill that position as well so we put off the travel plans we had lined up. We found a very, very good candidate and began the training process until…something called a Coronavirus happened.
I’m not going to go too deep into talking about the pandemic thingy because we’re all in uncharted waters and have no idea where we will end up at this point. All I can say for certain is that we’ll remember this for a long time and I’m glad we weren’t full-timing in our RV with no home base to hunker down in. I feel for all of you out there trying to figure out where to stay next and looking for toilet paper. There might be a surge in bidet sales for RVs after this, if there even is such a thing…
During this productive time of business repair and plague lockdown, we have done a LOT of cleaning (of everything) and prepping the rig for a departure sometime in the unquantifiable future. Since we returned from our 10-day adventure at the beginning of January and since we live someplace that does get cold, we winterized after unpacking. I prefer the compressed air method just because I don’t like the thought of chemicals in the water lines. No big deal. We did it the same way in the fall. This time as we were dewinterizing and getting her ready to high tail it to the nearest anyplace else as soon as this crap is over, something different happened. Something wet happened.
I’m a procedures guy. I’m a VERY linear-thinking procedures guy. I’m also pretty mechanically inclined. I’m not the least bit afraid to take stuff apart, figure out how it works and repair or replace whatever that stuff is. My brain catalogs that junk in a place that I can easily recall later. I might forget the names of my kids but by golly I can rebuild a carburetor that I haven’t seen since 1993. So when I started opening up water lines and flushing out the system in our beautiful, newly cleaned home on wheels, I was completely baffled when no water came out of 2 of the 3 water distributing devices on the rig. BAFFLED! Shower faucet: perfectly fine. Bathroom faucet: nada. Kitchen faucet: bone dry.
Being the confident American male that I am, I told Keli to read the damn owners manual while I keep looking critically at things I don’t know the names of with hopes that an intimidating stare will simply unbreak whatever is broken. She informed me that part of the procedure was to fill the fresh water tank and try using the water pump to send liquid to the sinks. That linear-thinking brain I was talking about earlier couldn’t fathom a logical reason why that would make any difference whatsoever, but I relented and flipped the valve to fill the tank. I waited. When it was full I went in and tested the pump method of water delivery to confirm I was right all along and the stupid owners manual is crap.
The next series of events felt a lot like three stooges episodes I remember as a kid. Water was most certainly being distributed, but not out of a sink. It was flowing freely from under the corner of the bed, which, coincidentally and curiously (I’d like to speak with your engineers), is exactly where the electrical panel is located. Keli was not in the RV. So here I go grabbing towels to throw down on the floor, running around to the back of the RV to unplug shore power, running back in the cabin to see what I can take apart quickly to determine where the hell the water decided to flow from that is clearly NOT a specified location in the owners manual.
There’s this new thing I learned about in RVs that looks like this:
According to the stupid manual, this thing is supposed to be checked, cleaned, maintained, blah, blah, blah…regularly and IF YOU’RE USING COMPRESSED AIR TO CLEAR YOUR LINES YOU SHOULD REMOVE THE BOTTOM BOWL SO YOU DON’T DAMAGE IT AND CAUSE A LEAK.
Stupid manual.
Do you have any idea what kind of idiots go to the camping store to buy a stupid water strainer they just broke in the middle of a pandemic?
Me neither.
Our leisurely day of cleaning and prepping our beloved mini-coach with starry eyed anticipation of the next voyage morphed into tools and RV parts and foul language scattered everywhere with panels removed, wet towels and tiny fans shoved into nooks and crannies while we crawled around attempting to dry out all the things that were never meant to have to be dried out.
New strainer installed, water tank filled (again), lines tested, little fans blowing into moistened RV nether-regions, water hose attached and live… kitchen faucet test: nothing. Bathroom faucet: same.
Do you know what other things RVs have that we discovered that day?
Faucet screens.
Do you know what faucet screens do?
They catch crud.
Do you know what we found in the strainer that some moron blew up and flooded the RV?
Crud.
Do you know what happens when faucet screens catch a bunch of crud? They don’t let water through.
Just read the stupid manual.
Happy camping and everyone stay safe out there!
