Stairs down to Ram Falls viewing platform
I had returned from the Flathead area on a mission: get my furnace fixed. But of course it wasn’t going to be simple. The minute you need to order a part you never know how long it is going to take. In this case, it was going to be a long time. Might as well go do some exploring while waiting! Join me for furnace adventures!
I was returning to Calgary for another round of errands and repairs. My Grom had been suffering from some damaged front fork bearings. I guess riding around a mini street bike on the rough ATV trails had taken its toll. I picked up the bike on the way into town, paying the steep price for the parts and work. At least I didn’t have to do an oil change on the motorcycle, I just let them do that as part of an overall maintenance. Service is expensive these days, there is a reason I do my own work as much as possible.
Everything I’m working on is around the limit switch. You can see the restriction plate turned 45deg. in the exhaust port!
I’m about to go into a long discussion about RV furnaces, skip ahead if you don’t want to read a long winded furnace discussion. With that said, I got into furnace teardown quickly, having no qualms about ripping into the gas supply and exhaust side of the unit. I didn’t really have much to lose. If I could figure this out myself I could save a lot of money. I also could end up just getting a new furnace. FYI, as usual this isn’t a complete how to, more of an overview.
I had to take out the whole burner assembly including the gas valve. I eventually get off the burner valve assembly again. The rest is easy, the burner is a hollow arm with holes in it the gas comes through to produce a flame. The ignitor sits above the arm and can be removed with one screw, at which point you might as well remove the other screws holding the burner arm on and give that a clean and inspection. Nothing looked particularly dirty or burnt, even inside the arm that I was removing this time to look inside.
Burner chamber to the left, limit switch in the middle with the blue wires, exhaust pipe to the right
In the process of doing this, I see something peculiar looking down the exhaust pipe. There is a restriction plate I can see down the pipe even with the wall separating the back of the furnace from the heat exchanger. It seems to be crooked – in fact I am able to move it back in place with a long screwdriver poked down the hole. Now I’m wondering if I have found the real reason the furnace was tripping off the heat. The plate is right by the limit switch – if hot air was getting around this plate it might be heating the limit switch, I thought.
Burn through on the bottom.
So off comes the exhaust pipe. Sure enough, I see that the little restriction plate is loose. More concerning, I see the gasket seal around the exhaust plate is burned out, right beside where the limit switch is. Hot exhaust gas was leaking out here onto the limit switch, triggering it once the furnace got warm enough. It was a eureka moment, everything made sense now. The exhaust pipe with restrictor and gasket fix is going to be a bit more of a challenge to fix. The challenge is getting parts: You can’t just get a new gasket, no, you need to order a whole new exhaust pipe with all the parts according to the service manual. What a waste, but it is what it is.
This time I had to really hunt around for the part. No one had the part in stock. Dometic seems to be phasing out most support for these furnaces, according to the skuttle butte from the dealers I talked to. Really?! This is a 2019 furnace, I should be able to get parts for many years to come still. But Caliber RV is a bit more resourceful, being willing to get the part I need from an American supplier. It will only be three to four weeks wait for the part. I say ‘only’ as the only other possibility I had from Fraserway had them having the part built, with a two month wait possible.
Normally, you’d just take the whole RV in and your unit is out of service while it is being worked on. I intended to stay in the rig while waiting for the part, having electrical power still. There would be no gas, but I do have an electric hot plate that would do, and I can run the fridge off 110V. I don’t have an option for hot water, but I can live without that. I can’t use propane while I’m parked in the garage anyways, so nothing would be different for me while I was in town. I also could do my oil change and grease job, not that that takes more than half a day.
The little nut below is the cap.
Having several weeks to wait still for my exhaust vent, I really would rather head out for a while: I needed to find a plug that would cap the gas line while I was waiting for my part. I could reinstall everything, but that is a lot of work for what would be essentially a large gas cap. Capping the line gave me the option of heading out and boondocking sans furnace – I could still use the stove/water heater/fridge. But getting that plug was a pain. A RONA finally yielded the plug type/size I needed. I could have gone to a plumbing specialty store, but that would have been yet more waiting for the weekend to be over. Of course my need occured on a Friday afternoon just before all the plumbing stores closed for the weekend.
The fence goes up
…Resuming non-furnace stuff
Did you skip down to here? I know I’m mostly talking to myself on these furnace repair things, but I’ll summarize the above as I spend a lot of time trying to fix a furnace I was now waiting for a part on. There were a few other things going on too. One of the neighbors to my step mom had come into a bit of money and had decided to do a bit of backyard upgrading. They like being outside, having get togethers out there regularly. But it’s not private – my step-mom can see their fire pit gathering spot through the chain link fence everytime she goes to the backyard. Evidently, this bugged the neighbors, so they offered to pay the whole deal for a new privacy wood fence. I’d normally be grumbling about this as a new painting project, but they were going high end with planks you don’t need to paint. It makes me sad seeing neighbors walling themselves off like this – we all seem to want to live in our little bubbles these days. My step-mom doesn’ t even mind the fence, she likes privacy too. But you don’t get to know your neighbors anymore. I did have an amusing moment sitting outside enjoying the sun one afternoon just after the fence went up. A conversation was going on at the firepit on the other side of the fence that I’d say was not meant for my ears. Out of sight is not out of sound, but people forget once they can’t see if anyone is on the other side of the fence that sound travels perfectly fine over a wood fence.
View from the 59th floor balcony
I did get a great opportunity to tour one of Calgary’s premier skyscrapers while in Calgary this time. My step cousin is a property manager for Telus and offered to take a bit of time out of her day to give my step mom and me a tour. We were touring Telus Sky, a mixed residential – office building built with our phone bill money. It is an unusual looking building in a subtle way. This extends into the interior, which has some features you don’t normally see on a skyscraper, like balconies off the 59th floor meeting space you can go out on. It’s the first time I’ve been up higher than the Calgary Tower in an office building, even though Calgary has had taller buildings for years now. These spaces just are not open to the public and I never had the fortune to work for a company downtown that had floor space that high up. I’m not going to post a ton of pictures from that tour, but I did create an album on Flickr you can click on if you want to see the sights in and out of the building.
West from 59th balcony
With the furnace gas line plugged and me waiting potentially up to three more weeks for my replacement exhaust, I decided to head off to a recreation site I had visited when I was first toying with the idea of going out in an RV. It’s a long ways down gravel roads, but worth it for being one of the few lakes in the foothills NW of Calgary. Back then, I’d gone off in my CRV, with not even a bed built to sleep in the back. This time was going to be much more comfortable, including Starlink!
Things have changed at the recreation site too. Peppers Lake Recreation site was no longer being managed by the Alberta Government, rather it had been taken over by the Friends of the Eastern Slopes Association (FOESA). That means no more ridiculous pricing for a mediocre maintained campground out in the middle of nowhere. FOESA had upgraded the campground too, expanding the choice lake view spots to actually be level and able to hold a medium sized RV.
The downside is that this site is more popular than ever, especially with me going out in mid-August. I drove in and see they have upgraded the road too – it used to be a narrow grown in path, now it is wider with two lanes available for a good part of the road. I head down the lake view loop first. There are only four lake view spots – all of them are taken on a Monday. I wasn’t expecting to get a lake spot, but figured at least some of the sites would be empty from the weekenders leaving. The lake loop had a couple of spots I wasn’t too fond of, so I checked out the larger back loop that is better setup for large RVs. I was looking for something with a bit more open sky for my Starlink. I finally settle on what is a the most open remaining site in the area, far away from the lake. I could have gone to the overflow area which has lots of open sky, but that is too far from the lake. I’d make due with my compromise.
Map of the campground. I’m in Loop 2
I had perhaps a third open sky – it would be interesting to see if Starlink could connect at all. What I didn’t expect is that the dish software was telling me to point the dish south rather than north. I’d already parked myself situated such that I could point the dish north into what open sky I could get. I set things up and see that despite the less than optimal situation, I do get at least intermittent internet. It’s better than nothing, I can even watch a bit of Youtube if I am patient waiting for video buffering. The campground has lots of fully treed sites – you are not going to do much better unless you can get one of the lakeside sites that do have a bit more open sky.
I unloaded the motorcycle and my folding kayak. It was a bit of a walk carrying the kayak down to the lake with my gear. I was happy a Tucktec folding kayak is pretty light and compact folded up, it is possible to carry it down a steep trail to water. Fishing was frustrating – I had a few bites on lures and got a couple to the boat, but nothing in the net. Bait was working much better for other people there.
Potential Boondocking
Having the motorcycle again meant I could explore around the area for boondocking. The area right around Peppers isn’t the greatest. There are some spots off the forestry trunk road if you want to get away from the people. There are a couple of other campgrounds not too far away if Peppers is full, so you have options at least. I decided to checkout Hummingbird Campground, with a stop at Ram Falls Provincial Campground along the way. I’d never been up there, with the great weather it was perfect to take the Grom up that way rather than rattling the motorhome for what may be a dud camping area.
The two campgrounds contrast the difference between provincial and FOESA run campgrounds. Ram Falls costs $28 per night, with standard pit toilets, firepits and picnic tables. You do get garbage cans for that, which FOESA does NOT do at any of their sites. On top of it, the platform overlooking the Falls – the MAIN attraction of the campground was closed due to erosion of the base rendering the structure unsafe.
The area extends for a ways back from the sign
Hummingbird has the same facilities, kept cleaner and in better condition, with horse support added in. There are more informal sites around the area if you want to be farther away from people. The provincial sites typically only allow camping in the formal sites. I know which campground I preferred out of the two! I should add that the FOESA campgrounds closer to civilization run with the same rules as the provincial ones in that no informal camping is allowed close to the formal campground. They inherited that rule from the province.
The old road washout made for a good camp
I decided to return to the area for a second week, this time camping at a boondocking spot in the Hummingbird area. I was quite a ways in down the gravel roads. Rocky Mountain House was my closest resupply point an hour away, with half of that being travel along gravel roads. The gravel roads are pretty good – they support logging and petroleum activity. However that means you are likely to encounter big rigs on what can be narrow roads in places. I was willing do the two hours of travel as the Hummingbird area looked pretty interesting from my little motorcycle exploration.
I had scouted out a spot on the old road that got washed out several years back – there now was a spot where the road ended at the washout, and one 100m back beside the river. The September long weekend was coming up. I hoped to snag the dead end spot, and expected someone to come take the other spot. I wasn’t wrong, but in timing. Two different groups occupied the spot between Friday and Monday – not what I expected. Everyone who stayed only did one night, with the Saturday being empty. Whomever came in for Sunday got lucky that such a good spot was available. I never ended up talking to any of them. I couldn’t hear them half the time as the river drowned out a lot of the sound, then most of the time they were gone when I walked by.
Onion Lake view
I was happy where I was – just far enough from the other campers, with a nice river view, a firepit, some deadwood already cut down in the trees nearby. I even had a fishing spot I could hike to a half hour away. Plus there were trails to explore with the motorcycle. Even the deer were accommodating for some video. Now that I was much closer to it, I decided to take the Grom in on the trail to Onion Lake. It turned out to be more of an adventure than I expected. The weather was normal for the area: sunny, then hail, then back to sunny. The track was quite rough in places too – it was all I could do to get across some of the rocky creek washes. But the view of the lake was worth it. You could even camp – there is a little campground with toilet there.
The fish hide here.
I had a good week in the area, even caught and released a nice fish in the fishing hole nearby. Thanks to my Starlink, I was able to stay connected and found out that my part was in. It was time to return to Calgary and deal with that. I left the area with the intent to return someday. There are other camping areas I’d try especially in the off season. In the meanwhile, I returned to Calgary to finish fixing the furnace, for the last time I hoped! It wasn’t going to be hard – I had left everything disassembled, so I just threw in the new part and put everything back together. Now, I could head out ready for the beginning of fall. Join me next time for one unexpected side adventure, then off to my fall explorations.
