An annoying beep

If you have followed this blog throughout the years, you know that most of my travel journals lament the woes of something going wrong in our RV, especially our second (and current) RV, "Junior." Many of the woes I have written about concern electrical problems, which can be particularly nagging in a motorhome because manufacturers do not conform to a standard method of running wires. Each motorhome is laid out differently.

I am happy to report that on this trip, we had no unexpected problems. (We did have one, which Jim will fix, that occurred whenever we started the engine after its being idle for several days. But, we knew about that one, so it doesn't count!)

Well, my statement about no unexpected problems isn't exactly accurate. We had one--an annoying one--which we eventually solved.

The annoyance was a very quiet, intermittent beeping, similar to the sound a microwave makes when it announces your food is done. The sound was three beeps, often (but not always) followed by five short beeps.

I Googled this type of beeping. Articles on the web said that it could be caused by a detector's batteries that are dying--or it could be caused if the detector was ending its life cycle, generally five years. Those theories sounded reasonable. So we started listening.

We stood under the carbon monoxide detector attached to the overhead cabinets in the kitchen. Nope, not that one. We listened at the smoke detector. Not that one either. We put our ears down near the floorside LP gas detector. It wasn't  that detector either. And we had run out of detectors.

What could it be?

Jim thought it sounded like it was coming from under the refrigerator, so he went outside, opened the basement door, and listened. And he heard it.

It turns out the beeping was from dying batteries--in the safe he had installed when we bought Junior four years ago. Actually, the safe with its original batteries predated Junior; Jim had originally installed it in our first RV, "Baby."

Jim changed the batteries, but that, unfortunately, was not the end of the beeping. Finally, after another 24 hours of this annoyance, he looked at the safe again and decided to reprogram the entry code to the one he had originally inputted. That solved the problem. It turned out that the fresh batteries were needed, but the safe did not like the new longer code Jim had programmed.

Problem solved.

We are home again, after a great vacation in south central Florida. And we did not have any real problems to plague us.

Until next time,

Your Reluctant RoVer,

Linda