In order to keep myself sane and remembering where the various projects are, I’ve been using a whiteboard to track things. It has been full of chickent scratches, stars, Xs, in shades of black, green, and purple. It seemed that just as I would get near to finishing a task, something would happen and I’d have to add a few more things onto the whiteboard.
It never seemed to clear.
But, over the last few days, things have been clearing up and now I think I see the finish line to complete all the insurance-mandated things that I can right now.
It’s a good feeling to think that maybe, maybe, there’s an end to this gerbil running in the exercise wheel and never getting anywhere.
There are really only three tasks remaining.
The first is getting the propane system working properly. We worked 1/2 a day on that and finally got it to the point of plugging in everything and… the system gave off alarms. We checked our wiring. Seemed right, but the system still gave us alarms. check it all again. Still alarms.
Finally it was getting late and we knocked off the time being. Josh went home and I… I couldn’t leave well enough alone and went back to trouble shooting. Eventually I decided to try something radical – let’s reset the whole control system. It SHOULD have reset several times when we removed power, but let’s try it again now, manually.
And…
Wait for it…
Almost there…
Just a little more patience…
System reset and… no alarms. Everything’s fine.
That was this afternoon. This morning was working on the heating system for the boat. We managed to get everything hooked up and tried to start. It tried. It really did. It huffed. It puffed. It blew a little black smoke. The pump pushed fuel into it. We heard the igniter ticking.
And…
Wait for it…
Almost there…
Just a little more patience…
Errors codes and it shut down. The error code was no flame detected, aka failure to start. So now we are faced with three possible options.
- Send it in to Wabasto main office for servicing – likely to be around $1,000, plus shipping.
- Junk it and purchase a new one, likely to be about $4,000.00
- Ignore the problem and leave it disconnected, which is likely fine for the summer, but fall and winter not so good when at anchor.
So that’s going to be a conversation with Anne tonight to plan out what we want to do.
The third task is replacing the safety lines on the boat. We are awaiting some hardware that is needed to do the job, and I’m hoping that will arrive tomorrow or Saturday so we can get to cracking on that one. I’ve already cut myself twice on the “meathooks” of the fraying safety lines and it’s not fun.