RV Dish Repair

Sunday: (06/24) We started the day with a quick visit to Walmart for a couple of things.

Fried sauerkraut potatoes with pork and eggs for breakfast. I finally got to work on the satellite dish on the RV. I've been having problems with it for the past couple of years and have attempted to find the problems myself and hired help on several occasions. No lasting or permanent fixes have occurred. After having it repaired by the Motosat factory folks in Quartzsite in January it was acting up again a month later in Yuma. I finally determined that the then remaining problem was a heat sensitive LNB. I suffered with it the remainder of the trip because I had another at home from the spare dish I got a couple of years ago. As an aid, I installed a silver bubble insulation cover for the LNB that gave me a few more hours use per day. We've now been home for almost four months and it was time to fix it. I swapped out the complete arm including the transmitter and LNB. I also installed a missing base cover on the dish from my spare. The cover had evidently blown off on our way home from Pismo Beach last month. There were some fierce winds and evidently two screws had worked their way out and the third screw remained to hold the remaining half inch sized cover piece. So now the dish appears to be working properly and fully. I installed a monitor on it that should tell me if it is intermittent.

Lunch was olallieberry shortcake with whipped cream.

A few days ago I noticed that the Fantastic fan in the RV was not working. I also looked at it today. I suspected that the motor had burned out. Maybe not. Several years ago the rain sensor that closes the vent if it detects rain failed and intermittently closed the vent with no rain. Since we needed a good vent to make our traveling cat happy I disabled the sensor and the fan worked well otherwise. Sometime later the manual/automatic crank failed and the vent couldn't be opened or closed automatically or manually without appropriately wiggling it. The automatic portion needed to be disabled and the manual crank was used. Now, the motor failed. Well maybe not. The variable seed electronics failed. The motor ran when I bypassed the speed control.  So I remove the electronics and wired the motor directly. The fan seemed to be working properly. I left the fan running. When i came back later it had slowed down and barely turning. It should have still been going full speed so I guess the motor is kaput. So I guess it has come to the end of it's life after all.

Later, I washed the three cars. For dinner we toasted wieners on a campfire in the backyard. It was served with corn on the cob, potato salad, grilled squash and zucchini, chili beans and sauerkraut with bacon and apples. For desert there was key lime pie. Yum!

Monday: (06/25) I took Dawn to an appointment this morning. The plan was that we'd meet Lou after the appointment for breakfast in San Jose. Lou was waiting at home for a call from Home Depot about the new carpet installation at Dawn's place. As it turned out Home Depot had the wrong phone number so they never arranged the morning appointment to measure for the carpet but scheduled at afternoon appointment today. So I returned home. Breakfast was some of Lou's chili beans.  A ham sandwich for lunch. Lou went down to meet the carpet installer to measure for the new carpet. I dropped by Harbor Freight and bought a plate tamper. It's a bit odd that it's cheaper to buy one than rent one. I also stopped by Walmart and bought a new desktop computer that was calling to me. It's a mini desktop (3.3ghz, 3GB Ram, 1TB HD) with a monitor for $300. No reason to suffer through my 9 year old slow and dying laptop that has been serving as my home desktop.  More chili beans and artichokes for dinner.