A Bit of 'Learnin' and a Bit of Maintenance

Bushnell, FL

We arrived on Saturday at the Paradise Oaks Golf & RV Resort for a week-long educational seminar put on by Geeks on Tour (Chris and Jim Guld) and TechnoRV (Tracey and Phil May). According to their website's description: "A joint RV rally presented by Geeks on Tour and TechnoRV. Spend some time learning about your camera, computer, tablets and lots of other technology to enhance your RVing lifestyle." We've attended several of the "Geeks" classes at other RV rallies throughout the years and I'm sure we will both take away many useful things and ideas from the classes.

 Karen is attending the two-day classes on Smartphones use. I decided to forego this, but both of us will attend the remainder of the seminar beginning on Tuesday.

 Karen was very impressed at the end of the first day and learned several useful tidbits of information. This class was kept small by design to enable greater interaction between the students and Jim and Chris.

This gentleman was using a flip phone and taking the class primarily to decide which Smartphone he would like to purchase.  Because of this he fashioned a "dunce cap" for his not-so-smart phone.




 While Karen was in class, the weather outside was pretty bad today. We had severe thunderstorms and several warnings for tornadoes in nearby counties. As they say in Florida, however, if you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes, and it'll all pass over. It did!

View of engine from above. Coalescing filter
is under the cover indicated by the box.

Since the weather was nasty outside it gave me a chance to perform a bit of maintenance on the engine of our MH which I had put off for awhile. I'm a big follower of the Tiffin RV Network  (TRVN) forum and have learned a great deal about our coach and its' maintenance from folks on that forum. A few months ago the subject of changing the coalescing filter on our Cummins ISC engine came up. I had read about this maintenance in the Cummins required maintenance list, but didn't have a clue what a coalescing filter was, much less how to change it. As it turns out, Cummins indicates that it should be changed every 60,000 miles or 24 months (whichever comes first). We have now had the rig for 36 months and I was fairly certain that this had never been done.

Remove bolts with a 5/16" socket

Place the coalescing filter in place and
re-bolt the cover.

 After a bit of reading on the Forum I located the proper part number for my engine and placed an order thru Filterbarn.com. I've used them to buy most of my filters and their prices are very good. The coalescing filter is located on the top of the engine under a metal cover. The installation is very easy, but requires that the engine cover (on the bedroom floor in our rig) needs to first be removed. I won't go into that here, but suffice it to say that if you've never removed the floor engine hatch cover before that it will take you as long to do this as it will to change the coalescing filter.

I did a complete "how to" with pictures on this maintenance item and placed it on the TRVN under this thread, but a login to the forum will be required first for those who are not members. It is a very useful forum for anyone interested in the workings of their MH (and associated components) whether you own a Tiffin product or not.  The website is administered COMPLETELY by Tiffin owners and has no connection to the Tiffin Motorhome Company.  Ok, that's my pitch for TRVN for today.

Last night we also found out AGAIN that apparently all campgrounds are required to be positioned near railroad tracks. Because we have a road crossing about 300 yards from the back of our rig, train horns were heard several times thru the night.

 Thanks for taking a look!