kaput!

Continued from “and then it rained“…

We ate our sandwiches for supper and our evening in the Cottage was longer than what we had experienced over the past eleven evenings. It felt good to be home at a more reasonable time.

Another round of storms rolled through Jordan about 10:00 pm. This time it really poured and the wind blew. All at once, chaos began. I realized the skylight in the bathroom had been left open. It had been raining for a while so there was quite a bit of water all over the floor and running into the carpet. I quickly grabbed a couple of towels to soak up what the rug on the floor had not. At the same time this was happening, the fridge started beeping.

“Can you take care of this while I’m cleaning up this mess?”, I questioned Jim. I was probably unnecessarily put-out with him but he had been the last one in the bathroom! This mess wouldn’t have happened if he would have just shut the skylight. (this is what I was thinking)

The beeping doesn’t stop so Jim runs upstairs and grabs the owner’s manual. “The error code has something to do with a high temperature shut off mechanism and it says the owner can’t fix it.” – Jim

Great!

So, what happened next? The fridge is shut down…not working…notta…KAPUT!

What does Jim do next? He went to bed. There was nothing he could do. It was Sunday night and we wouldn’t even be able to buy ice for coolers.

So, I got online and started googling what the error code meant and how I could fix it. Well, I wasn’t going to be able to fix it. I went outside in the rain with my umbrella hoping I could just wiggle a couple of wires and it would magically come back to life. Wrong! According to what I read online, this safety mechanism had been placed on all Norcold fridges because they were getting hot enough they had started fires. When water gets through the vents behind the fridge, though, it will cause it to short. Apparently Norcold hasn’t figured this out because they are still being placed in a bad location.  There was enough wind with this storm to blow the rain through the vents and cause the mechanism to short, create the beeping noise and the fridge to quit.

Nothing more I can do. I may as well just go to bed.

I crawled into bed.

WAIT! There’s a really large roast in the fridge and cinnamon rolls in the freezer. I hated for those two items to go bad. So, I got back out of bed and put the roast in the crock pot and the cinnamon rolls in a pan. There…now I can go to sleep.

I woke up several times throughout the night only to smell the roast cooking and remember the problem the rain had created.

The next morning (Saturday), I emptied the fridge while Jim took the stuff in the freezer to a friend’s house and brought home a large cooler and bags of ice. I was so frustrated! I knew none of it was anyone’s fault but it was going to be such an inconvenience to have to dig through a cooler until we got home. The only way this can be fixed is to have the trailer taken to a dealership and a certified mechanic put a new safety device on the back of the fridge. There was no way we could give up the Cottage for a week to get it fixed.

This rain that I had waited for had instead turned into more work. There was laundry that had to be done (wet towels and rugs) and the fridge would have to be emptied and cleaned out.

After I got the fridge cleaned out, food in the coolers and laundry in the dryer, Jim wanted to go back to the field to see if we could get the pickup out of the field. I could tell the road was in much better shape than when we had left the evening before. But, the pickup was going to have to go up an incline to get out of the field. Could it make it?

NO PROBLEM!

It was late afternoon by then but Jim still wanted to make a trip to Miles City (170 mile round trip) to look at a small fridge and he needed a couple of other items too.  I never figured he would even consider buying another small fridge as we already have two at home. I was certainly relieved to hear this and that I wasn’t going to have to live out of a cooler until we got home.

We were about 25 miles outside of Miles when we ran into a blinding downpour. Jim slowed way down because it was raining so hard he could barely see much beyond the front of the dually.

When we got into Miles, we could see they had had quite a storm as there was water everywhere!

Miles City

We got a fridge, made a couple of other stops (Wal-Mart and Murdochs) and ate Mexican food for supper before heading right back to Jordan. It was just before midnight when we opened the door to the Cottage.

And I thought I was going to have a day or two to get caught up…