Priceless day - grrrrrr

Yesterday was an interesting and kind of expensive day.

As most of you know, I ran a Chimney Sweep business before we started doing this RV thing. Well, the National Chimney Sweep Guild and Chimney Safety Institute of America Headquarters is in Plainfield,IN. (oustide Indianapolis)

It's about a 3 hr drive from here and we decided to go visit a number of Sweep friends who were going to be working there to help spruce up the place. (volunteer labor) We did tell them ahead of time that we were coming to socialize and NOT work, and we planned to be there before noon.

Connie decided to make a batch of lasagna for the crew to eat and our plans were all set. Until about 6:30 AM that is.

It's been pretty hot here for the last two weeks, and several days we've run both air conditioner units to keep it tolerable. Apparently our 11 year old 50 amp power cord got tired. At about 6:30 the power started to flicker on and off about every two minutes.

We checked breakers both inside and out and couldn't find anything wrong. I called the owner to have him check the breakers and he didn't find anything either.

Then I tried to disconnect the locking end of the cord from the rig. It said NO. grrr
Jeff tried it. It said Nope. grrrr

Now it's about 7:10 and I called an RV Tech guy that has a Mobile Service in this area. I told him the problem, and he said he'd be here in 15-20 minutes - AND - He WAS. yaaaaay!!

He tried to disconnect the cord. It said NO Way!!! grrrrr

After about an hour he got the cord apart and disconnected from the rig. It had shorted in the female plug and fused itself to one of the terminals.

See!!!!!

He checked all the rest of the electrical stuff to be sure there wasn't a problem somewhere else, and offered to pick up a new plug end if we wanted him to.

Since we'd already replaced the other end of the cord in 2007 (thanks Tom) I decided it would probably be a better idea to just replace the whole cord and start over new. Since it was going to be 90+ yesterday, and we had a pretty full refrigerator we needed to have power.

Nobody carries a 50 AMP Spare cord, so we fired up the generator on the rig, and left one AC running. (we put the fridge on gas just in case)

We finally left Cave City at 8:30AM, but since we're on CDT and Indy's on EDT, we weren't going to get there before 12:30pm at the earliest, so Connie called to let them know when we'd arrive and we started the ride.

Just before we hit the outer circle around Indy, we spotted a Camping World, so I at least had one place to try to find the new cord, but we were delivering lunch, so we had to keep on going.

We did make it to the Tech Center at about 12:35 and had a really nice time visiting with folks. I made calls to several RV places and the only one who had the cord in stock was CW. I told them to hold it for us and we picked it up on the way back to KY.

We gat back to the rig around 7 PM and got the cord hooked up as soon as we could get everything shut down inside. IT WORKS!!!!! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

Gas for trip - $30

RV Tech - $125 well worth the money

New Cord - $330 Ouch

Working power grid in the rig - Priceless

ttfn

Paul