Our front and mid AC units were having issues for some time — mostly not getting cold, and sometimes refusing to come on at all. We got a few techs to look at them, without any conclusive results or solutions.

While staying at Thousand Trails Orlando, we got Charles Sutton of CS Mobile RV Repair LLC to take a look, and he determined that the compressors on both were shot, and we needed to replace them. An unpleasantly large expense, but he handled it very professionally.

Here he is lugging the very heavy AC unit up to the roof (and I appreciate the padding on the ladder to protect our paint):

The offending part:

Inside the old AC unit, partially disassembled:

It is nice to have reliably working AC units now.

Back in 2022 a truck clipped the driver-side mirror on our motorhome, smashing the mirror glass. I replaced the mirror glass, which made the mirror usable again, but unfortunately the motor that allows adjusting the position would only work three of the four directions, so I’d have to manually push the mirror if it drifted out of position (which seemed to happen regularly).

We were going to get it replaced when doing the annual service, but the pandemic supply chain issues made the part unavailable at the time.

It wasn’t a super urgent issue, so we put it on the back burner, but it continued to annoy us. Eventually after much research I determined that one could buy a replacement head for the mirror, which (in theory) could be easily plug-and-play replaced. The part is manufactured by Valvac, and the part number is 719853, “Euromax-XL Replacement Head w/Camera, Lighted, Left Side, Chrome”.

I purchased this part:

The new mirror head:

It looked like an easy job, but we were about to be in Red Bay, so I got a mobile tech to look at replacing it for me. Good thing I didn’t try it myself, as it was too hard for that tech; he couldn’t fish the wires out of the mirror arm.

So later while at Thousand Trails Orlando I got a local RV tech, Charles Sutton of CS Mobile RV Repair LLC, to have a go at it. He also had lots of difficulty with it, but eventually managed it (and was very generous in not charging extra for it, too; I’d highly recommend him for any RV services!).

Here’s the old head removed:

He had to remove a bunch of excess insulation in the generator compartment to access the wires to get enough slack to reach the plugs:

Finally able to reach the plugs:

The replaced mirror head:

So nice to have that working again. And if we ever need to replace it again, it should be a much easier job next time.

We keep a mop and broom hanging in our half bath, as a convenient place to keep these long tools. They hang on the wall with Command Broom and Mop Grippers, available from Amazon. They are mounted using self-adhesive Command Strips, so can be installed and removed without drilling any holes or damaging the wall at all.

Very handy.

Back to our regularly scheduled blog posts, with RV modifications on Mondays, travel on Tuesdays, campgrounds on Wednesdays, and attractions on Thursdays and Fridays.

When staying in deserts or other places with low humidity, we use a humidifier to make us more comfortable. It lives on our bathroom counter (or stored in the closet when in more humid places):

It is important to only use distilled water with the humidifier, to avoid greasy steam. For a long while we purchased jugs of distilled water from grocery stores, but that gets expensive and a hassle after a while.

So we later bought a water distiller to take tap water and distill it:

We fill this with tap water, and it effectively boils it and captures the evaporation as distilled water, dripping it into a jug, that we can then pour into the humidifier. It takes about three hours to make a jug of water, but it has a timer to turn it off when it’s done, leaving a little water in the bottom to make it easier to clean up. One jug per day is enough to be able to keep the humidifier running all day.

We’d rather be in places with a comfortable level of humidity, but we do enjoy deserts, and would rather too low humidity than too high (and yes, we do have a dehumidifier for such places too). It’s good to have tools to be able to make such places more comfortable.