Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Test Run of Guppy Repairs

Last week we went camping with The Guppy and we got to see how it works when there was no power or water hookups. I took along a second battery in case the RV battery wouldn't last the 4 nights we were there. I brought my boat battery which has the same type terminals as the RV battery. After 2 nights I switched batteries when the RV battery was down to 10.2-10.3 volts. Probably could have used it longer, but didn't want the refrigerator to stop working and not notice that it had. It did last longer than before I changed the battery charger, I think the old one was draining the battery when there was no power hooked up.

In a previous post I mentioned cleaning out the fresh water system. It worked very well. The only thing I noticed was that when the pump built up pressure and shut off, occasionally it would run for a few seconds even when no water was used. I have a hunch the check valve in the pump might be leaking because I haven't seen any signs of a leak in the plumbing. I can get a new screen with a built-in check valve and that should take care of that problem.

On the plus side with the water, The Old Lady took a shower and said it was almost like when we are hooked up to city water. The shower doesn't work that well in any case and is on my list of things to do.

Old school coffeepot and toaster.
We've had this four slice toaster for about 30 years. We got it when we didn't have power at The Ranch and used it to toast bread on a woodstove. The coffeepot is fairly new, we got it after we got The Guppy. We got it for when we are boondocking and don't have electric so we could cook coffee on the stove.

One of my next projects will be to see if I can get the generator running and installed back in The Guppy. According to the hour meter it only has a little over 43 hours running time. The generator was removed before we bought The Guppy. I think it was removed to replace the slides that hold it in The Guppy and allow you to pull it out to work on and/or check on it. I'll change oil and filter before I try to start it. If I can get it running I'll try to figure out how to put it back in The Guppy. It would be handy to have it for charging the battery. I tried running the engine to charge the battery and figured out I would have to run it way too long to charge the battery.

Tried to see if we could get any TV reception and failed. A couple days later when we went out to eat I figured out why I couldn't get any TV reception as we climbed this big hill while going in the direction of where the TV transmitters are. One of these days I get a new antenna, the one we have is an old analog one. It is also a directional one, in that you have to turn it to point towards the transmitter to get the signal. I'm going to get an omnidirectional one so all I have to so is raise the antenna when I want to get a TV signal.