Date:         Tue, 14 Aug 2012 18:17:30 -0400
Reply-To:     David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject:      Re: Dometic failure on propane, one time
Comments: To: Alistair Bell <albell@SHAW.CA>
In-Reply-To:  <60C5E58C-8E90-4784-BC62-A8BA86CCEB2F@shaw.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 04:08 PM 8/14/2012, Alistair Bell wrote:
>just coincidence or does the stove being lit do anything :) I'm not
>convinced about the line purging theory :)

Two burners together pull gas through the line about 15 times faster
than the fridge, so they'll rather quickly clear up any mixture
problems in the common line and regulator.  When my house furnace or
water heater have been shut down for a while (they use much
smaller/lighter natural gas, but have pilot flames about three times
the size of the Westy fridge full flame) it takes an irritatingly
long time for a working mixture to get from the gas valve to the
pilot sometimes.  Irritating because the buttons on those big
Honeywell valves are hard to hold in, the thermocouples heat slowly
and cool instantly so you have to hold them in a long time and if you
miss you're back to square one (or so it seems) and on the newish
water heater they've got some fancy (probably
flame-propagation-resistant aka "explosion-proof") shielding that
makes it darn hard to see the pilot flame at all.  The valve on the
Dometic is a piece of cake by comparison.

If the piping's been open there's no question that purging the line
takes longer than you'd expect even with the stove burners.  If
not...I used to know chapter and verse on how my fridge behaved,
instrumented it every way from Sunday, discovered that a bigger fan
in the back can actually lead to less cooling sometimes, ran it on
the bench for weeks, ran it with the burner can open and watched the
flame, you name it.  But all that was a long time ago now and my
brain feels like high-grade Swiss cheese sometimes and low-grade the
rest of the time, so I'll stop now.

Yours,
David