Bye Bye, Plumbing Week!

July 6 2009 by Darrin.

Sunday night here, and the AATREC is as plumbed as it can be.  We’re lacking one fitting to finish the gray water tank drain, but at the end of this week:

• the shower’s complete
• hot and cold water are running
• gray water makes it to the holding tank
• the toilet is ready
• the furnace is operational and tied in with the chassis coolant
• the Force 10 range is installed

Looking at the list, it doesn’t seem like much, but it was a solid week.  Anna and I even missed our Independence Day cookout with the Bulls.  Doug Bull was my high school band teacher in Baltimore 25 years ago.  (Damn - 25 years ago.  Did I just type that?  The gray in my beard says I did…)  We always go there and have a machine gun shoot (click for YouTube video) and BBQ, but not this year.  I really didn’t feel like celebrating anyway, for reasons I’ll avoid ranting about.  Suffice it to say we’ll all be celebrating May 5th soon instead.

After completing my 3rd camper, back in 2005, a friend remarked, “This took you a year and a half to build?  I don’t see six months of work here.”  Well, it could have taken just six months, except that virtually every piece has to be designed, and then hand built.  Where, for example, do you find a furnace control panel for a 2009 AATREC-FM204 with an Eberspacher D5 Hydronic furnace and three heater cores, constructed so that the furnace can be controlled by its own timer or a programmable thermostat?  What?  You can’t find that with a Google search?  Well, I guess you have to make one…

The panel in the above photos controls the diesel-fired furnace, which can be seen just behind the front tire (gray box) in the following images…

 The furnace and the chassis have a great symbiotic relationship.  Because the camper’s heating system is hydronic and uses the same type of fluid as the engine’s coolant, the systems are plumbed together.  When we’re driving down the road, we can warm the camper with excess engine heat in the same way your car’s engine warms the interior.  When we’re parked, the furnace can preheat the engine by circulating hot coolant through its water galley.  A simple ball valve allows the chassis and camper to be isolated when required.

Another noteworthy component of the system is the potable water heater, which also gets its heat from coolant.  It’s super-insulated and retains heat quite well, so after just one half hour of driving, we generate 6 gallons of 185º water that will stay hot literally for days!  That’s hot enough to peel your hide off, so it’s mixed in a valve to produce ~100º water.  For what it’s worth, 6 gallons of water at 185º will make 23 gallons at 100º when mixed with water at 70 degrees, so it’s plenty for a couple showers, dishes, etc.

Now we can dirty dishes too, as the Force 10 range was installed today.  I’m always a bit freaked out to cut into the counter top, but it came out great.  The Force 10 is a marine range and, unlike cheap RV appliances, it’s thermocoupled.  You simply cannot leave a burner valve open, leaking LPG into the camper.

As a little end-0f-week treat, I finished off Sunday by beginning to install my ham radio gear.  This Kenwood equipment has been passed from camper to camper over the years, and incorporates a TS-480HX 200-watt High-Frequency rig, and a TM-D700 dual-bander for 2M and 70cm.  I don’t know if I’ll have time to complete it, but thanks to Michael F. for the encouragement to be on the air by our departure for Alaska in five weeks.  Here are the control heads mounted - YES the shifter has plenty of room to clear!

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