Dutch_12078

The check box label under the billing address is "Same as Service Address".

All checking that box will do is change your billing address to match your service address. It will not change your service address. Sorry...

1 hour ago, rocksbride said:

 

Here's a link to happy fun loving encouraging facts.  It really is the tag line in the URL.  I'm not making it up.

Happy fun loving encouraging fact #11:

11. Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the Moon, wrote his daughter initials there. They’ll be there for at least 50,000 years.

I'd call writing initials in the dust on the moon  a drop of rain in the Great Lakes compared to the 400,00+ lbs of junk humans have dumped there since 1959. And certainly no more damaging than the thousands of semi-permanent foot prints also left in the dust.

25 minutes ago, Kirk Wood said:

While I have used them, I have never bothered to keep one in stock. As handy as that might be, I have only replaced an ignition circuit board on 1 furnace and on 2 water heaters over more than 40 years 6 different RVs. That doesn't include those I have done while helping other RV owners, as there have been several of those. I did carry an extra water heater ignition probe and a few other things when we were fulltime. If I remember, the Atwood ignition boards were not always potted. 

I don't recall just when Atwood switched to the potted boards, but it sure eliminated board level repairs when they did. Since we visit a fair amount of cool/cold weather areas in the course of the years, I thought it prudent to have a board on hand just in case. Now having two furnaces though, it's less of an issue since we can keep warm well enough on one furnace in moderate cold weather. The 20 degree nights we're seeing right now in upstate NY though, could be a little problematic if we had a furnace failure. With both of them working, we've been comfortable even at temps a few degrees below zero. The furnace boards work fine in the water heater as well if needed. It takes a little getting used to the time delay before it fires up though.

I agree on the "preventative spares", John! I had a Dinosaur universal igniter board on hand that I bought in 2008 and never had a board failure that needed anything more than contact cleaning to correct. Then I used my spare board to fix a neighbor's furnace while in Florida this winter. Since we were moving frequently at that point, I didn't get around to replacing the board, so of course, three weeks later my Atwood water heater's potted igniter module hard failed. Fortunately, because we have two Hydro-flame furnaces, I was able to borrow the igniter board from one of them to keep us in hot water for several days until we were near an RV dealer that had a new board in stock. And shortly after that, I added another universal board to my spares. 

9 hours ago, Lou Schneider said:

You're right Dutch.  I've had both types and both the bad circuit board and the gummed up gas valve were on the Suburban water heater.   Of course, it's OEM in my 26 year old motorhome so I'm not too disappointed in it.

Oh yeah, at that age I'd say your old lower case "dinosaur board" is probably due to be replaced by a new upper case "Dinosaur Board"! 

I usually keep a spare Dinosaur UIB-S universal igniter board on hand that can be used as a replacement in many RV furnaces, water heaters, and refrigerators. 

7 hours ago, Lou Schneider said:

I had the same problem with my water heater - it would refuse to start when the tank was cold, in warm weather or with warm water in the tank it worked fine.  Plugging and unplugging the connector would fix it for a while.

Eventually I removed the board, inspected it with a magnifying glass and found a cold solder joint near the connector.  Wiggling the connector would flex the board enough to fix the bad joint for a while, but the real cure was applying heat and flux from a bit of new solder to re-flow the bad connection.

I'm guessing that you have a Suburban water heater, Lou. Atwood uses a fully potted board that's impossible to service beyond cleaning the connection contacts. When my Atwood heater failed recently, I took the potted board with me and had the parts guy verify it was bad on his tester before I bought a Dinosaur replacement.

Maybe it's time to take a look at Dish for your sat TV service. We change our service address as often as daily with just a 5 minute online chat session. 

When I was discharged from the Army and my wife and I moved into our first house, we went to my parents house one weekend to finishing retrieving the items I had left stored there. While we were pulling out my camping and hiking gear, my wife suddenly called out to me that I had left a dirty sock inside my aluminum cooking set! I started laughing and explained to her that the originally white cotton sweat sock was actually quite clean, but had been my "coffee maker" for at least 5 or 6 years while camping. I put the ground coffee in the sock and tied it with a loose knot before dropping it into a pan of hot water. Once the coffee had steeped long enough, I just dumped the grounds out and rinsed the sock until the next batch. Back home, despite numerous washings, not surprisingly the sock remained permanently stained. Later on while prepping for our first camping trip together, my wife made sure I remembered to bring the "coffee maker sock".

3 minutes ago, GlennWest said:

As long as it's 200 degrees it will make great coffee.

It certainly will...

We use a basic Mr Coffee $12-$15 drip machine with just an on/off switch, no clock or timer, for our coffee whether we have power or not. With no power, we just heat up a pan of water on the stove and pour it through the coffee basket with the top open. Then the coffee goes in an insulated AirPot carafe for dispensing as needed. Makes our coffee just the way we like it. Hot and tasty...

A quick way to test if the board is bad if you have a Hydroflame furnace, particularly the common 8500 or 8900 series with easy access, is to just borrow the igniter board from it and try it on your water heater. When you turn it on, there will be the same ~20 second delay that the furnace has, but then it will fire up and work normally if nothing else is wrong.

Coach-Net covers winch outs up to 100' from a maintained or campground road. The distance limit is pretty common, and is based on standard tow truck winch cables being 125' long. I think GS/Allstate has similar wording, but I haven't seen the full benefits wording for the other two.

5 hours ago, whj469 said:

My question regarding the Escapees roadside assistance is how will they be better? CoachNet and Good Sam have been in business for some time and I would think that they know what they are doing? Also there are only so many roadside/tow companies around and I have been told that Good Sam and CoachNet use mostly the same companies? Which companies will Escapees use.

I hope they are not trying to reinvent the wheel?

Are you aware that Good Sam contracts with Allstate Motor Club for their roadside assistance plan? When you call for assistance, it's the Allstate call center that answers the phone, but that's subject to change when the contract next expires.  SafeRide by the way, has been around for 20+ years and has a very good reputation in the towing industry. Do various roadside assistance plans use the same service providers? Sure they do... In each town, there's only so many service providers available, and not all will contract with the various plans. Those that do often sign on with multiple plans because it's good for their business, filling in between the more lucrative direct contact calls. The downside is at busy times with multiple plan subscriber calls, the plan that pays the best/fastest will get priority after the direct calls. For many years that was Coach-Net, but I haven't seen the latest numbers in a few years now.

Whenever I pull into a truck stop or rest area and need to park with the "big guys", I look for empty slots that are the least accessible for them, yet still doable for me. 

The Bosch eAxle modular drive system that Nikola is using has a listed weight for the 150 KW (about 200 HP) version of 90 kg (about 200 lbs). I didn't find a weight spec for the 300KW version. The eAxle combines the motor, transmission, and electronics in a single package.

Yep, same thing here, shared photo ok, non-shared no good...

I drink a pretty good amount of coffee every day, and don't like to go without it. We use a plain old $12 Mr Coffee 12-cup drip machine that has no bells and whistles, just an "On/Off" switch. When we're boondocking and/or don't want to run the generator or suck down the batteries, I just set the Mr Coffee up as usual, and then pour a pan of hot water from the LP stove into the top through the grounds basket. After it's done dripping, we store the coffee in an insulated "Airpot" that keeps it hot for hours. It's very low tech and easy to do, with no additional equipment needed. We do have a Melitta setup stowed away as an emergency spare, but the last time I saw it was when we moved everything from our old coach to our current coach.

Years ago, we had a "Roadpro" 12-volt drip coffee maker in our Class C, and it brewed so slow that we almost needed to start it at bedtime so it would finish by morning. I donated it to Goodwill and bought the Mr Coffee at Walmart.

We use an inline double sediment/charcoal filter for all water coming into the coach, and a secondary PUR filter attached to our kitchen faucet for drinking/coffee water, etc. We use PUR's "MineralClear" filters that reduce 71 contaminants per the NSF certification.

I signed up for the credit monitoring on the 13th, and my activation email came today. Hang in there...

5 hours ago, Kirk Wood said:

Be careful as we have found that KOA tends to have a bunch of little extra charges once you arrive that push the rate up above what was quoted. Things like $3 extra for 50a, $2 more for a pet, $2 for cable TV, $3 for wifi, and so on. A friend tells me that the letters KOA stand for the words "keep on adding."  

I've never found all these extra charges at KOA's other than an occasional WiFi charge. The price we were quoted on the reservation site has always been the price we paid. Your list reminds me of some non-KOA parks though, that have an extra $1-$2/day charge for 50 amp, and some of them only have Tengo WiFi at a price, while others have no on-site WiFi or cable at all. Oh, wait a minute... Those are Escapees owned parks...

We normally stay at two KOA's twice on our trek south and back north each year, and those stays alone accumulate enough points to pay our VIK membership each year plus a couple of free nights now then, from other KOA stays throughout the year. However, both of our regular KOA's have gotten so busy that getting reservations has become difficult over the past couple of years. This coming winter we're replacing one of the KOA's in GA near the FL line with a GA state park that's only a few miles away, and the other one with a nearby park that's now open year round in PA. We tried that PA park last spring, and were very pleased with both the park and the rates. Given the reduction in KOA usage, it may not be worth it to us to maintain our VIK membership. We'll see how it goes, and we will still have our SKP, GS, and PA memberships that more than pay for themselves...

One of our two furnaces is located below the kitchen sink. The sink cabinet got warm enough in cooler weather that while not concerning, it did limit what items we could store in it. To help keep it cooler, I added a vent high on the cabinet wall using a standard floor register as a louvered grill. The mod was basically free in our case, since I had recently replaced a fixed floor register with an adjustable one, and the new vent just repurposed the extra fixed one.

Independence Day celebrates our independence from British rule, not from the entire world...

I did our '95 Coachmen Class A with Red Max Pro acrylic finish (which was actually private labeled ZEP 3), and the only failure after a year was a relatively small area that started to peel on the rear cap where my prep was probably inadequate. I redid that area, and the coach still looked good when I sold it four years later.

Our 16 year old day/night string shades are still working fine with just minor repairs. Today I had to repair a tension spool when a section broke off releasing the string. I just untied the double string, reversed the spool, and put it back together. Took about 10 minutes including getting the square driver out of the tool box. That's the third spool that's broken recently, likely from the plastic getting brittle, so I'm ordering a package of dozen for $11.45 on Amazon. The restring kit I bought several years ago "just in case" is still sealed. We like our string shades...