Assorted tasks

We've been working on various tasks around the bus...

While we were at Lake Whitney, I walked around the side of the bus and saw this! I thought Dwayne had built himself a small covered patio... but no... he was working on the power reel for the power cord and had the access door propped up with a board. He had thought the power reel sounded different when he was running the cord out and didn't want to let it go without examining it (we already had a situation that kept the power reel from retracting the cord back in November, 2015, forcing us to "stow" the cord up to the roof and bungee-corded to the goat rail - and I think he didn't want to do that again!). He took the covering panel off but could not see anything wrong, and when we again used the power reel to extend and retract the cord, it didn't make any strange noise... so... it got inspected, but nothing fixed.

We have been dealing with a small leak in the valve that closes off the black tank for a while. The leaked contents are caught by the sewer cap and we are careful to have a catch-basin when we remove it (and gloves on), but it is not ideal. We had wanted National Indoor RV to replace both valves back in October, but they only had one in stock, so they replaced the one for the grey tank since it was harder to get to. They ordered a second valve, and we considered taking Miss Doozie back to them to get it replaced, but then decided we could do it ourselves. We wanted to be at a place with full hookups so we could dump the tanks and rinse the black tank well before starting the job - and so decided Lake Whitney was the place to do it. Unfortunately, they turned the water off in the campground on Wednesday morning so they could fix a leak that they were dealing with... so we thought we were going to be stymied in getting it done, but they got the water back on mid afternoon, so we set to work to replace the valve. I only got a picture from "before" we started cuz once we started working on it, we both had gloves on and felt "yucky" (we really didn't encounter anything all that bad, but anytime we're dealing with the black and grey tanks, it just feels "yucky"!). But... we got it replaced, and... it seems to be working "better" but not 100%, which is a bit annoying!

In the process of preparing to do another project (Dwayne was looking for a way to hook in a 12V amplifier for the tire minder system), we found two filters under the front dash that we had never noticed before. When we pulled them out, they had a foam sheet between two wire mesh pieces. The information on the edge said that they should be washed *monthly*. Let's just say that since we didn't even know they were there... they weren't getting washed monthly, or semi-annually, or annually, or... you get the idea! It didn't look like they had ever been cleaned, and the foam pretty much disintegrated when we tried vacuuming them.

I did some research on the Wanderlodge Owner's Group (WOG) and it seems that others had had a similar experience - totally not aware they were there. There was a source indicated to order new ones (at a total price of $65 for the pair), but one person on the forum said that he just used the "horsehair" type filter and aluminum tape and it was working fine. We decided to go that route...

We opened up the edges of the original filter and then inserted filter material that we already had between the metal mesh. The resultant filter was a little wider than the original, but it fit into the space. We originally thought that they filtered the dash air, but upon examining the space a little more closely, it really doesn't look like that is their purpose (the folks on WOG also thought they were dash air filters though, so maybe that's what they do). I guess we'll see if the dash air flow is impeded any by our thicker filters.