Date:         Sun, 26 Aug 2012 14:50:15 -0500
Reply-To:     Jim Felder <jim.felder@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Jim Felder <jim.felder@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Pulled my fridge today and...
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Fixed it. At least it looks that way. .

The performance of my once ice-making, easy-to-light fridge has been
faltering the last year or so, to the point that I took a cooler along on
my last trip. Yesterday after lunch I turned it on propane and took notes
more or less every hour of its performance. The temps fell slowly, and
tracked about 12 degrees below ambient all night and this morning.

I am in the habit of touching the flue vent cover when I am traveling, just
to see, and I know what it should feel like. It should be uncomfortably,
but not blistering, hot. It wasn't. It wasn't half that.

So, I pulled the fridge out and had a look at the burner box. At first I
didn't notice anything really out of the ordinary. Then as I was moving
things around, I saw some black silt fall out of the slits in the burner
tube. I took it all the way out and cleaned it good, and cleaned on each
side of the orifice but decided that if I could blow through it and tell it
was moving air, it was OK. I got a lot of what looked like fine black sand
out of the tube. Say quarter a teaspoon in all, and blew some of the same
out of the flue vent tubes. I put it back together and fired it up, after
the obligatory ten fifteen minutes of priming it. The flue vent cover was
hot. I started recording the temps. In the first 30 minutes, it has fallen
more than it did all night last night. I am confident enough that it's
going to work that I am—gasp—hooking up the sink faucet.

Jim