The final chapter to our hot water saga...I hope!! I took the control board out and began searching for a replacement. To my shock the one that I needed ranged in price from 220 to 250 bucks!!!!
The biggest problem I had with that(besides the money) was that I was dealing with a 16 year old water heater and all the parts that I DON'T replace are still old and I'm not 100 percent sure this part would fix it...I looked at just replacing the whole water heater and the cost was around 400 bucks, so no savings there, and then I remembered that the previous owners had installed a Camco Hot Rod to make the water heater electric also. They told me that it just worked for a short while and then started throwing a breaker...so I got a wiring diagram from Camco and started checking their install...sure enough they had not wired it properly and fried the element in the tank which was causing a direct short and throwing the breaker!!
12 bucks for a new element, about 20 minutes of re-wiring and it worked like a charm!!!! ANDDDDD the best part of the story is my wife bought me tickets to the NASCAR race in Ft. Worth with the money we saved!!!!! WIN/WIN for me!!!!
Thanks so much for all the ideas and assistance from everybody!! This is a great forum!!