Warning: don’t do what I did; rather, learn from my mistakes.
2019 DX3 37TS
I thought it would be fun to take the family to Colorado last weekend to go skiiing in Vail/Breckenridge. I left picked up my MH out of storage, filled the water tank and hit the road.
The temperature when I left was about 25 degrees. My biggest fear was the roads. It turns out, that the MH does incredibly well on various winter road conditions. There are some limitations though, more on that later.
The first issue was that the kids in the living room complained they were too cold. At the RV Park in Breckenridge, I investigated and found out that my heater (Aqua Hot 400D) wasn’t running in the living room. After a couple hours of troubleshooting I found that there were some wires that appeared disconnected on the Aqua Hot Electrical Conrol Panel. I found two sets of blue wires. I decided to connect them all to Therm 0 and Therm 1 for Zone 1 and Therm 0 (still connected) and Therm 1 for Zone 2.
I finally got heat going at 1 am. At this point, the coach was at 54 degrees but the kids were sleeping with lots of blankets. By morning, the coach had only come up to 58 degrees in the living room. It was also 0 degrees outside.
Conversely, it was a nice 68 degrees in the bedroom. The heat had been running nonstop but couldn’t catch up in the living area. I also discovered that one of the cozy fans under the fridge (LP) had become disconnected and was able to fix that.
I went to go fill up our water tank to no avail. The lines in the wet bay were frozen solid. So, I decided to hit the road to Vail and deal with that later.
I started the MH with the help of the coach batteries (only got one strong crank out of the chassis batteries). It ran for 20 seconds and then died. I tried this a few more times and then called a friend. He told me to plug in the engine and go to the parts store and buy some Diesel 911. My diesel had gelled.
A couple hours later I got was back at the MH ready to pull my first diesel fuel filter and fill it up with Diesel 911. However, I noticed that it wasn’t foggy any longer and so I decided to try to start the MH one more time. It ran perfectly. I added some stabilizer to the tanks and was on my way.
Back on the road, people complained that the heat wouldn’t turn off and the back bedroom was 78 degrees. After some more troubleshooting I learned that only one wire in the set needed to be connected and the common was elsewhere. So, I disconnected the second Therm 1 wire for zone 1 and zone 2.
By this time, I had purchased a couple of space heaters. The small one for the wet bay kept acting up and unfortunately, never unthawed my pipes there. I wasn’t able to ever get water into the MH because of it. One thing I would do is move the water line from the hose reel to the top of the bay, rather than its current location on the bottom of the bay at the coldest part.
We did manage to get a few hours of skiing in and after all this it was still worth it. We started making our way home.
Once home I didn’t think twice when our street had snow on it but didn’t consider the factor of the hill (up until now I hadn’t slipped at all). The MH didn’t stop and I slowly slid. It was terrifying. I finally got it to a stop about half way down and put on the brake. But that brake isn’t for all 4 wheels so it started sliding again.
My foot literally started shaking as I held down on the brake to lock all 4 wheels and barely hold our position. I had my son dump a bunch of ice melt under the back wheels and eventually was able to get the coach to hold with just the back brakes. I went go disconnect my wrangler and it was dead. Ice had built up in the connector and it wasn’t charging on the way home. I got that jumped and pulled off and then had to figure out how to get the MH out of there.
By this time the sheriff showed up because I was causing too much ruckus at 10 pm. Luckily, he was pretty cool and suggested I back up the hill rather than slide down. I had read good things about autosocks and bought those instead of chains. They went on very easily. I locked my differential and slowly backed up the steep hill with the help of the sheriff guiding me (you can imagine my rear camera was unusable because it was so dirty).
The next day, I went to go dump and the Sanicon wasn’t running. I tried to figure out why it didn’t have power but still have not. I went to go winterize it again and couldn’t get prime. Apparently, there must have been some ice in the line and it must have destroyed the impeller at some point on the trip.
I learned a ton on this trip but also have a bunch of stuff I need to address.
* Always keep the coach plugged in
* Always run stabilizer in the fuel during the winter
* Have secondary heat sources available (good large space heater)
* I need to insulate my wet bay (open to suggestions) and move my water line to the top of the bay
* I need to figure out how to turn my tank heaters on. I don’t see a switch anywhere as the manual states or on the Precision Plex screen menu
* Blowing out the water lines doesn’t cut it for winterization, you also need to pour antifreeze in the drains because the p-traps have water
* I need to figure out what those extra wires are on the aqua hot panel. It still kicks off after a long period of time and won’t come back on. I might have a bad board.
* I need to add a zone to the wet bay so it has heat
* I need to figure out how to get the sanicon working again so I can dump
* I need to add more cozy’s to the living room, the 6 that are there are under the fridge (4) and opposite the fridge on the galley side (2). That’s not near enough to keep the living room warm. Has anyone added some more in the living room?
Fun times!