Odyssey homecoming

We are at Infinity Coach, in Sumner (map).

We arrived Sunday afternoon, got squared away, and unloaded the bikes. On Monday, we had a nice visit from friends Ron and Judie, who are staying nearby in Puyallup.

Monday afternoon the entire Lewis clan pulled in to the lot in their respective rigs, back from the holiday weekend somewhere on the dry side. It's been nearly two years since we've seen them, and we had a nice reunion, including a barbeque at their house.

Things got underway Tuesday morning, with Odyssey going on the lifts for a lube, oil, and filter change, followed by a complete generator service. Today we had the driver A/C serviced, wherein we discovered that a fitting had come loose and the system had lost its entire charge. And the local Detroit service guy came by to have a look at the TPS problem.

Of course, nothing ever goes completely smoothly, and, after removing all our old house batteries, we discovered that the replacements don't fit in the allocated space. We're running the whole coach right now on our two Wal-Mart group 65 starting batteries (although, to be fair, we are plugged in to a full 50-amp shore service). I spent this evening re-drawing the battery bay layout to accommodate, we hope, the new Trojan 8D AGM batteries. If these don't fit with the new layout, we will have to go to size 4D, and we would have to then go to a Discover brand EV battery to get the capacity we need (the Trojan 8D's are 230 AH each, and the Discover 4D's are 245 AH each).

Tomorrow we will find out if the eight Trojans can be crammed in to the existing space in a different orientation. No matter what, we'll need to make some new jumpers and modify the hold-down brackets.

Of the eight Xantrex 8D's we removed, all fully charged, four read "Good" and four read "Marginal" on a battery load-tester once we had them out. Of the four marginal ones, one had a badly warped and inflated case -- clearly, we cooked it, and I am very glad it did not explode or out-gas. There may be something particularly warm about that spot in the bay, as it is closest to the Trace and the Vanner, so we will be moving the battery temperature sensor for the charger to that position.

If the four "good" batteries are still reading good after sitting for 24 hours, we might move two of them to the start battery bank, replacing the aforementioned Ever-Start flooded group 65's. The other two will be up for grabs.