Some work around the rig

We moved into Gracie about a week before leaving Mesa so we could make sure systems were working and that we had gotten everything we needed from the house, but when we got to Show Low, we found a few things that weren't working...

One thing that seems to not be working is our Oasis electric hot water and heating system. The diesel burner works (but creates quite a diesel smell in our neighborhood), so we wanted to try to get the electric burner working.

Sometimes it seems like actions similar to magic incantations are needed to reset systems -- Carl remembered that, at some time in the past, removing all the electricity to the Oasis system (110V and 12V) caused it to reset and start working again. We could turn off the 110V system by turning off shore power, but 12V requires removing power at the batteries. He did that, but, unfortunately, no success on getting the electric burner working. We had a problem with this in the fall of 2024, and the technician at Freedom RV worked on it; he said that he did not find anything wrong, but found quite a "snakes nest" of wiring that he straightened up, and it magically started working. We're figuring we may need to make another trip to Freedom RV later this year to get it addressed again. We can't exactly remember when the electric burner was last working -- we think maybe when we were in Mexico in November, and we had other electrical problems there, so maybe something got burned out at that time.

We also started having very low water pressure from "city" water -- this started when we were in Mesa, and we supplemented it by using the water pump to supply water from our fresh tank. It took a very long time to fill our fresh water tank -- even though water flow from the spigot was strong, we weren't getting much water into our systems from the hose. At some point in this process (I think when we ended up emptying our fresh tank while in Mesa), the auto shutoff on the water pump stopped working -- we thought it might just be due to air in the line, but usually that will resolve itself. We would like to have a working water pump so we can boondock if necessary. 

We started looking into why the water flow from the "city" water was so slow -- the pressure from the spigot seemed to be fine. We inspected all the connections, looking for a screen that might be clogged, and we found a severely clogged screen right where the water hose goes into the RV system (just above Carl's hand) -- it had so much sediment caught by the screen -- good that it was caught before it got into our water system, but yuck! so much sediment coming into our water systems!

Correcting this, however, did not cause our water pump to auto shutoff, so Carl did additional debugging on that. We replaced the water pump when it was not working well back in the spring of 2023 (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2023/05/a-stop-in-new-jersey-seeing-cousins.html), and we thought that we had kept the old water pump (it wasn't dead, it just wasn't working as well as it should be). We were thinking that we should have a new water pump on hand...

... and it turned out that both of us had forgotten that we actually got a new water pump to keep in the bay "just in case".

Carl noticed that the new-in-the-box water pump had an inlet strainer that the installed water pump did not have. Because of the screen earlier in the system, there shouldn't be "stuff" making it through to the water pump, but he decided to go ahead and install the inlet strainer on the installed water pump. Between that and disconnecting, re-connecting the water pump, the auto-shutoff was now working -- hurrah! 

He still has a plan to replace the burner nozzle on the Oasis diesel burner to see if that will help minimize the diesel smell when we're heating water, but for now, we just try to minimize when we need hot water!  In Mesa it wasn't so difficult as, with 100F+ temperatures, water coming out of the tap feels pretty warm, but, in Show Low, with temperatures in the 70s, the water coming in is pretty cool.