New Furniture & More

Our spring itinerary has been driven by the need to be near Elkhart, IN for the week of May 10th to pickup our new furniture. The furniture was ordered back in January and the lead time dictated a pickup timeframe of the second week in May. Thank you, COVID-19, for incredibly long lead times on getting things. We did have some issues with the power in our house on wheels that took us a while to diagnose and, in the end, we got extremely lucky.

What’s Up With Our Power?

It all appeared to start when we were in Georgia at Whitetail Ridge COE. If you remember from the banner image of our last post, we had an awesome site at the campground and it was even more coveted because it had 50 amp hookups (most sites in the campground have 30 amp). The problem is that when we plugged into the 50 amp, things went crazy on our power monitoring system and our inverter. We immediately assumed the power at the pole was bad and tried the 30 amp connector. That seemed to work fine so we commenced enjoying our stay and didn’t give it a second thought.

Fast forward to our time in Tennessee with our friend, Jim, before his wife, Corinne, joined us. We were smoking some ribs in our smoker when we lost power on the rig. We have read stories about connections getting loose in the junction boxes under the slides, so Jim and I crawled under and checked them all. We came across a couple that looked suspect so we tightened them down and felt good that the problems was solved and it was time for a beer.

A couple weeks later, while in Taylorsville Lake State Park in Kentucky, when we plugged into shore power the inverter displayed an AC overload and shut itself off. After resetting the inverter a couple times, we finally got it to accept shore power and it seemed to operate smoothly. The only times it exhibited bad behavior was when power was applied. It would go through a few seconds of AC overload, then settle down and operate normally. Something was definitely not right.

When we left the state park in Kentucky, our first stop was a Harvest Host brewery called Our Lady of Perpetual Hops (cool name with so-so beer). When we went inside the rig, we discovered that we had no power in the kitchen/living room outlets and none in the bedroom either. We crawled under the slide to look at the wiring again but nothing fixed the problem. We then checked the sub-panel that contains the AC breakers for the circuits powered by the inverter. We determined that both the bedroom and the living room outlets shared a dual 15 amp breaker. The output of the breaker did not have power. Simple. Let’s get a new breaker.

When we moved to our next Harvest Host, Simmons Winery and 450 North Brewing in Columbus, IN, we obtained a new breaker. Upon installing the new breaker, we had exactly the same behavior as before – no power on the output of the breaker. Hmmm, I wonder if there is power on the input of the breaker? Nope. Our inverter was failing to provide power to one of the two legs of power that it outputs. Only the circuits connected to the other leg were getting power. Luckily that included our refrigerator. It was now evident that there is something wrong with the inverter. But how do we get it repaired and still live in our rig? No inverter means no power without serious rewiring and that would require being plugged in all the time. Luckily this Harvest Host had excellent beer and very good wood fired pizza that we could consume while pondering our dilemma.

We researched how to get the Magnum 2812 serviced and discovered an authorized service center a short detour on our route between campgrounds. We got a hold of a service tech at Solar Energy Solutions, LLC in Nappaneee, IN and he told us we could stop by and likely get it fixed while we waited. So as we travelled from Mississinewa Lake campground to Potato Creek State Park, we detoured about 12 miles out of our way to have the inverter looked at. We pulled in at 11:00 AM and left at 1:oo PM with a fully repaired inverter. Being just a few months out of warranty, the repair cost us $425. We felt blessed to be able to get the critical component repaired with very little interruption to our schedule.

New Furniture (Finally)

Our primary purpose for being in northern Indiana as we worked our way to Rochester for a visit with the grandkids, was to pickup the furniture we ordered several months ago. Our allotted time for pickup and install (we bring the RV and they put the new furniture in and dispose of the old) was 12:00 pm on Monday, May 10th. We arrived early and had to wait for 3 other rigs to depart before it was our turn. We did get to see our new furniture sitting in the service bay just waiting to be installed. We wandered around the show room at Bradd & Hall while their crew installed our new Lambright furniture.

So, why did we need new furniture in the first place? Well, the furniture that came with our RV had a form of faux or fake leather that we have now come to call “flake” leather. About a year ago, the upholstery on Dan’s side of the theater seating began to flake and, more recently, Amy’s side as well. The sleeper sofa was fine because we hardly use it. We replaced the theater seating with something similar in function but way better in quality and comfort. We replaced the sofa with a swivel recliner and will eventually add a wide storage ottoman and a desk. We are very happy with the new furniture.

After getting our furniture, we took advantage of being in the heart of RV manufacturing to try and locate a few items for minor repairs. We did manage to snag some replacement shrouds for the ceiling vent fans. We have three of these fans in our rig and all three had cracks around the screw holes, with the one in the bathroom being the worse. We had determined we could order them online for $30.00 apiece so when we found them for $8.00 each, we were pretty pleased.

On our last day in Potato Creek State Park, the weather was nice and we were done running around doing errands so we spent the day checking out the bike trails in the park. They have a very nice mountain biking trail designed for beginner mountain bikers. For the most part, it was just a curvy path through the woods with small hills and few obstacles. We thoroughly enjoyed riding the 7.4 mile loop and even did a section of it a second time. In addition to the mountain bike trail, the park also has a nice paved trail that was also a lot of fun to ride.

With reservations at Southwoods RV Resort in Byron, NY for the second half of May, it was time to make our way to western New York. We took three days to get there from northern Indiana, with two nights spent at Harvest Host locations. The first was Halliday’s Winery where we met a nice couple from Apache Junction, AZ who were traveling to visit family in Michigan. They were taking a slow 3-week journey to get there with the goal of spending as many nights at Harvest Hosts as possible. The wine and sandwiches were excellent.

Our second Harvest Host was only in their second week of being a host. Arundel Cellars and Brewery in North East, PA provided a choice of wine, beer, or cider. You could get a flight of any combination. Amy chose to try all four of their ciders in her flight while Dan sampled the beers. This place showed that things are starting to get back to normal with several limousines in the parking lot and at least three bridal shower groups in attendance. We enjoyed the stops at the Harvest Hosts but are glad to be sitting still for a couple weeks and spending time with our grandkids and catching up with old friends.