Breakdowns Happen
Naturally, almost immediately after making the decision to go full-time and moving into the RV, we had three breakdowns in one week. The refrigerator stopped working one day. It seemed to have no power at all. So, we hit the RV boards and saw that people had several problems with them including with some blade style fuses that can blow on the controller board and the board itself that can go out as well as some other power issues.
We watched a video on how to pull the fridge out and how to open the panel on top where the board was. It turns out that the refrigerator is only held in by a couple of screws in a board along the bottom front and a board on top that appears to only keep it from tipping forward and out. We started checking the power with a voltmeter first and found that the board seemed dead but there was definitely power reaching it. I had 12v on the pin where the power came in but no where else on the board. That sure looked like a fuse issue.
I couldn’t initially find the fuses since they had a white paste on them to keep them from wiggling loose and they were snuggled up tight to the transformer. After a second search, they suddenly jumped out to me. One of them was raised on one end and seemed loose. I reset it and as long as I was pushing it down the fridge powered up. I worried it was the fuse holder on the board but replacing the fuse quickly solved the problem. The fuses were 40 Amp and wouldn’t you know, they are actually hard to find and the 4 fuse kits we had didn’t get anywhere near 40 amp. A local automotive parts place had 2 boxes left and we nabbed them both. I went ahead and replaced both fuses since they appeared discolored but not blown and put some caulk on each end to hold them in. After that, we just had to put the refrigerator back into place and secure it.
Securing it was a bit of an issue. The fridge had seemed to be working it's way aft and had been riding right up tight against the aft portion of the enclosure. We tried to shift it a bit forward to keep it from rubbing the outlet near the stove but wound up moving it too far to the right and had issues opening the right side door since it now hit the side of the enclosure. So, we had to move it back a little but not too much!
The second breakdown was the ring that holds the toilet in place broke and we had to find a way to fix it. I suspected that the toilet flange had broken since only one side was loose and we had watched a video that showed the ring was only plastic. Being plastic meant any excess leaning while on the pot will unduly stress the flange. A lot of videos out there will tell you that the flange isn’t glued to the rest of the sewer pipe, but I can assure you, in my Reflection, it is. We had bought a new flange hoping it would be an easy substitution but since it was all glued together it wasn’t going to be so. We watched a few videos on how to cut it all out and replace it with a nice new metal one but that was a ton of work in a very confined space.
As it turns out, when they built our rig, the toilet was set at a slight angle and it always bugged my OCD to see it. Now that would work in our favor. Once I loosened the remaining bolt and picked the toilet up off the floor I could clearly see that I had been correct in my assumption that the flange broke and that the flange was firmly connected to the rest of the pipe. But I noticed that if I were to just straighten the toilet and square it up to the back wall, we would have enough plastic on the flange to hold the toilet bolt (I hope). It was easily put back together and tested out. We’ll see how long it lasts. I was watching a video where a guy replaced the plastic one with a stainless-steel ring and it didn’t look too hard but it means cutting the sewer pipe and replacing it with new. That’s going to take some crawling around in the belly of the rig that I’m not prepared to do yet.
The third problem was a small water leak in the roof. Man, that sucked to see! Nothing scares Kim and I more than the thought of a leak in the roof doing considerable damage to the rig. Right before I retired, we had a downpour one night and into the next day. When I came home from work and went up the steps in the RV there was a puddle at the top of the steps. It was clear from the shape that it was caused by dripping water. Water was coming in around the light right above there. It turns out, that’s where the Winegard antenna is mounted which has a large hole cut through the roof to mount it and run the wires. There was a pin hole in that area on the roof where it wasn't sealed right and the heavy rain found its way in. Some sealant seems to have fixed that issue but we haven’t had any hard downpours to really test it. We inspected the entire roof for any more pin holes and hope we’ve found them all.
