[Richard]

Hopefully you will read this as an entertaining tale about yet another Richard folly. 

The expression is, when you hear hoofbeats think horses first, not zebras.

Starting a year ago, my aquahot began to exhibit some strange behavior. It would almost always light when turned on, but occasionally during the cycle, or when restarting to reheat the tank, the controller would fault. In another worlds for no clear reason the red light would go out. Flip the switch, and almost always it would ignite. 

I am going to give away the punch line, but I know the Rudy would advise to service the unit and replace the nozzle. Well I did, sort of. But I used the old nozzle because it had less than 10 hours on it. 

Being convinced this was some sort of sporadic gremlin, I bought a data acquistion device and hacked into all the control wires to allow the device to see what the voltages were doing for the pump, ignition, flame detector, and ON light. Since the data device could discern events as small as a gnat's eyelash, I was certain it would allow me to capture the sequence of shutdown events and go right to the source of the problem. After all throwing parts at an Aquahot is not a cheap exercise. And I'm cheap. 

But alas, the data acquistion device consumes a ton of storage to give that level of detail. More storage than my poor laptop has. And the malfunction being sproradic, and the AH not heating that often in the tepid Florida winters, meant I never captured the event. I would run out of storage. I, and my computer became weary of the exercise. 

But, not to be deterred, I bought a little microcomputer and wrote the code to have it monitor the same things as the data acquisition device, the only real difference being that I wrote the code so that it cleared the useless data from memory frequently so that the data bank would be open to capture the failure. By the way I learned this data clearing technique from my self. These days I am always clearing my own data bank but I haven't figured out just how to keep the useful stuff yet. 

Anyhoo, hook this new toy up, and cycle the unit. Three days and no faults. Oh well, must have fixed itself. Yeah right, that happens a lot in my world. 

Get ready to leave for the 2018 tour, remove all the extra wiring from the AH, and away we go. First time we tried to use the diesel function on the AH, it's back to it's old tricks. Arrrrrggggggghhhhh. 

To prepare my self for an embarassing phone call to Rudy, I went ahead and cleaned the unit and installed a NEW nozzle. Not one single fault since then. 

So, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.