Last Days at the RV-Dreams Reunion Rally

Saturday:

All of us campers were served a continental breakfast this morning at 9:00 AM. After the breakfast, Michael Witt, a Master Certified RV Technician, answersed questions from the group about RV maintenance and service issues. Most of the questions were about Norcold or Dometic RV refrigerators and toilets. Michael Witt offers a 4 hour RV Owners Maintenance Course in which he meets with the owner of the RV and spends the time going over all of the maintenance issues involved with an RV. Connie and I are thinking about taking this course sometime in the future. We have been having some issues with our Norcold RV refrigerator not keeping the freezer cold enough. One of the campers here is an RV tech himself and when he had looked at it earlier in the week he noticed that the cooling fans were not turning. So on Saturday, I removed the two cooling fans (neither of them was working and they are the same type that used to go into desktop computers) and called several places that sell computers to see if they have replacement fans in stock. No one had this size cooling fan, so I track it down on the Internet. No one had free delivery and it being Saturday, I figured I would wait until Monday to order. When I was explaining this to a group of campers, one of them, Craig, said he had a bunch of computer cooling fans in the basement storage of his 5th wheel RV (I have no idea why he carries around used computer equipment in his 5th wheel, but I was sure glad that he did). We looked at what he had and decided to try to daisy chain 4 smaller fans together to replace the 2 larger fans. It took Craig a while to complete the task, but he was able to get the fans going and air began to move across the cooling fins at the back of the refrigerator. The fans ran for a few minutes and then stopped. It was time for the evening "Final Day Dinner" to start and we decided to stop for the time being and look at it again tomorrow. After dinner, I came back to The Duchess and decided to look at the fans again. Craig noticed what I was doing and came on over to the RV to see if there was a solution to the problem. All the electrical connections seems to be working, no fuses where blown, yet the fans were not running. Craig disconnected the temperature sensor that sits on the cooling fins and should regulate when the fans turn on and off and as soon as he disconnected the fans started running. We decided to leave the thermistor (that is what the temperature sensor is called) off and see what happens overnight.

The Final Dinner had a Hawaii theme with a roasted pig, shrimp, chicken and all of the trimming. We enjoyed the meal and the games that we played afterwards. A collage of "thank yous" was given to Howard and Linda Payne, the force behind the RV-Dreams website and rallies and I think they were touched with all of the wonderful things people had to say about them. After visiting with the other Rally attendees for a while in the eating pavilion, we went over to our neighbors RV to continue visiting as the sun went down and the moon came up.

Sunday:

We had a full breakfast this morning with all of the other campers and then said our good-byes to the ones who were leaving (about 10 rigs are staying Sunday nights and a few are staying around to have some service work down). It was sad to say good-bye to all of the people we had met this week since we were just starting to get to know one another. We all hope that we will see them again "down the road".

We decided to give The Duchess a bath, so Connie and I got out the washing equipment and proceeded to get started. It took us a couple of hours to do all of the sides (we decided to wait on the roof), but The Duchess looks much nicer now. We also clean all of the mirrors and tried to get the dead bugs off of the front panel.

I have plugged the thermistor on the RV refrigerator back in early this morning to see if the fans would come on with it "on".  After leaving it on for several hours, the temperature in the RV freezer continued to rise. So, I went ahead and disconnected the thermistor and for now the cooling fans will run all of the time. We will have the refrigerator looked at once we have completed all of the other repairs from the awning accident.

It started to rain in the afternoon and as I write this around 7:30 PM the rain is continuing. Between rain storms, we visited with some of the campers who are remaining overnight here in the campground.

Note:

I added a page that will show where we have stopped along the way this year called 2015 Travels. It is at the top of the blog next to the HOME tab.