Feeling much better today. Got up after a nice long night of sleep and actually had some real food for breakfast. A bit cloudy and rainy for most of the day, so there was no hurry to be out and about. But by mid afternoon I was starting to feel caged in again... a sure sign of feeling better.

    Went out and found a local grocery store and bought a few things. Really only needed some tea bags, but ended up with a dozen or so other items also. Also stopped by a local Target store and wandered around just as a way to walk and move a bit while it was raining outside. Ended up finding some new beach shoes similar to the one's I wear now. Since they are nearly worn out it seemed like a good idea to buy two pair since they were on sale for $7 per pair and they are sometimes hard to find.

   Otherwise I have been back at the trailer for most of the evening. Talked with my good friend on Virginia this evening and it looks like she will be coming down for a couple of days over the Thanksgiving holiday. Looking forward to that very much, but now I have to scramble and actually find somewhere to be camping while she is here. Seems like I do this every year in that I wait until nearly the last minute before looking for someplace to camp. Right now I know that all of the local State Parks will be full over that weekend. Not sure what the big draw is to go camping over Thanksgiving, but the past several years have been just like this. Will need to make a few phone calls tomorrow and see if I can find any place to land.

    For right now though; it is already late and I'm nearly ready to hit the rack. Here are some photo's of the work I did yesterday on the trailer. Not very exciting, but a couple of people said they were interested.

Trailer Hot Water Heater P&T Valve and Anode Replacement as well as Electrical Cord Housing Cover Replacement.

Nov 14, 2013



The exterior housing for the trailer electrical hook up. The little 'flappy' door on the original one finally fell off leaving the whole cavity open to what ever. Rain was my first thought, but then it came to me that some squirrel might think this would make a perfect home and climb on inside the wall of my trailer. A new cover was certainly needed.

The exterior control plate for my trailer hot water heater. The actual 6 gallon hot water heater is just inside this metal plate and is located, in it's own Styrofoam case, under my kitchen cabinet. At the top center in this photo is the temperature and pressure valve that blew about a week ago. Lucky for me it worked as it was suppose to otherwise the whole trailer may have blown up. The square metal plate on the right side covers the propane burn chamber and there was nothing wrong with that other than being in the way of removing the valve. The tube at the bottom of it is the line for the propane to travel through. The red thing on the bottom right hand side is the igniter to light the propane once it is flowing. Below the propane tube, at the bottom center, is the nut at the top of the sacrificial anode rod. See later photo for description.

A close up of the T&P valve. All hot water heaters and boilers will have these and they mostly all look alike. On a regular home hot water heater it will be coming out the side of the heater close to the top. There should then be a copper or PVC pipe attached to it that runs down to about 6 inches from the floor. The purpose of the valve is to keep pressure from boiling water from building up too high without releasing. Should they not work they are capable of blowing up a full size house and maybe more. So they should be checked at regular intervals. In general if they look clean and are not leaking they are likely okay. If leaking you should get it checked right away by a plumber..... for g**s sake, do not stick a cap or plug in the end or even wrap it in duct tape. It is easy enough to replace if you have room and large wrench's, but it might be better to call a plumber.

At the bottom was the anode. The only problem here is that it takes a 1 1/16th inch socket and a 1/2 inch drive to get it out of there. I use to have a 4 sided tire iron that had one side the right size. But that thing weighed about 8 lbs and took up a lot of room. Apparently my lug nuts are not the same size so I had get new gear. Got it out and drained the tank of all the junk inside of it. The old anode, in the next photo, wasn't to bad, but since I had a new one I just went ahead and put it in.

The sacrificial anode for my HW heater. The purpose of these things is to keep 'galvanic' action or more correctly 'electrolysis' from eating holes into the metal walls of the tank. All HW heaters have these because all water tanks create small electrical charges as they are in use. In essence they become very, very, very low power batteries. What this does is start to strip electrons from all the metal parts that this water comes into contact with. Now most HW tanks have glass linings inside of them to protect the surrounding metal, but these linings all have bubbles or other small defects in them and they essentially start to rust from the inside out. Something you can't see or tell until one night it lets go all at once and the next morning you wake up with a swimming pool in your basement. To help stop this from happening companies put these anodes inside the tank. Made out of a less 'stable' metal, usually some kind of zinc alloy, it is easier to strip free electrons from them than it is to strip them from the harder steel shell. The only problem is that at some point all of the anode is gone and then the inside of the tank starts to get eaten away. A dirty little plumbing secret is that if you replaced these in your home HW tank on a regular basis you would likely never have to buy another one again. But no one is going to tell you about that now are they.  As you can see, this one is quite pitted in spots but still has plenty of material left on it. I'll keep it as a spare.