RV Life: Staying warm with failing furnace

Yesterday morning we woke up in a camper that was colder than we like. We run two small electric space heaters that are great but not quite enough when temperatures creep down near freezing. When that happens we just have to run our furnace! It is loud, runs on propane and is not very efficient, but it does heat our camper well, even in freezing outside temperatures. If we suspect that it will get too cold for the space heaters we will set our thermostat to engage the furnace around 68° F and we'll stay warm all night long.

When we woke up I felt right away that it was cold inside, in the low 60s in the living area which means at least several degrees colder in the bedrooms. My wife remembers that the furnace ran at least once in the night. I check the thermostat and bump the temperature slider up a little higher but nothing happens. I then try turning it off and on again, and the familiar sound of the furnace blower gives me great relief, for about 30 seconds before it just stops and will not engage again unless I turn it off and on again. NOT good!

Something is wrong and I start checking the obvious things as fast as I can. We did not run out of propane. All 12V fuses are good, I check the 120V system too even though it should not matter for the furnace. I make the family be absolutely quiet as I cycle it off and on again to see if I can hear the igniter. But the blower is just too loud and I can't know if I don't hear it because it is not sparking or because of all the blower noise. This is not going to be an easy fix! And it is going to get colder in the next few days.

I don't know that much about RV furnaces so I turn to the best, or at least the most accessible, source of all information: the Internet. I quickly find a few blog posts that speak about troubleshooting your furnace and watch a short youtube video of a guy taking out his furnace to service it. Strengthened with confidence after seeing someone else working on their furnace I get to work opening up the access to the furnace.

A small space to work in.

Not much space to see what is going on with the furnace. It will have to come out! I remove the three screws holding it in place and then realize that I also will have to disconnect the gas-line. This makes me more nervous since I have very little experience working with propane lines. At this time I also notice that time is up and it's time to go.

Something that most of you might not know is that we are Christians and have made a commitment to find, and go to, church every Sunday no matter where our travels bring us. So we go and leave the furnace without fixing it first. On the way back home almost three hours later we replan our day so that I can have as much time as needed to get this fixed before it gets cold again overnight.

Before I purge the gas lines and disconnect the furnace I decide to let it run one more time as I now, with the front panel off the furnace, might hear the igniter or notice something else that could be causing it not to work. To my great surprise, it doesn't just run for 30 seconds and shut off. It keeps running and starts blowing hot are in my face as I lay in front of the open panel inspecting the furnace!

I don't know what was wrong, nor do I know how it got fixed but I have two theories that, if you accept the premise that there is a God and that he/she/it is actively involved in human affairs, both are quite plausible.

My wife said, after the furnace started working, that she had gotten a feeling during church that it would just work when we got home. If you accept that there is a God, the miraculous fixing of the furnace is an answer to prayer. An easy fix for the creator of heaven and earth!

A less supernatural explanation (that is not mutually exclusive with an act of God) is that something, like the sail switch for example, was stuck and got jostled loose when I pulled the furnace out a couple of inches.

Regardless of how it happened, we are happy and thankful to have a working furnace now as we know there will be many more cold nights before we continue south after Thanksgiving here in Pennsylvania.

Thanks for following the journey of me and my family as we travel and roadschool our kids around the USA.

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