We Found Our Leak, Thanks to a Frog

 

In my last post, I mentioned a huge water leak from our living room slide.  At that time, we were baffled as to how it occurred.

My dear sweet husband was on a frog hunting mission for me one night, when he discovered our problem.

I have been deathly afraid of frogs and toads for as long as I can remember.  Al knows  how afraid I am and does everything he can to keep my life as frog free possible.

For the past few weeks we have been hearing the all too familiar “barking” sound of a tree frog coming from somewhere on top of the coach.  When you’re in the bathroom, it sounds like it’s in the bathroom with you. 

A couple weeks ago, Al was doing a frog hunt on the roof and managed to catch a Cuban Tree frog.  If you’ve never seen one of these buggers, they are quite creepy.  Sorry, I can’t post a picture of one because that would involve me looking at pictures and I don’t want to do that.  :)  They aren’t native to Florida and have been eating the local frogs and lizards.  They recommend you kill any you find, but we just can’t do that.  We took him on a walk (in a container) and let him go a few blocks away.

A few days ago we were sitting outside and heard the familiar barking type sound of a tree frog. We’re wondering if the first frog came back?   Al discovered it was hiding inside the bathroom vent which is on the roof. No wonder it sounded so close from the bathroom.    Al was unable to catch it that night. A few nights later it was out of the vent hunting, but it hid under the slide topper cover and Al couldn’t catch him.  He worked until well after dark trying to catch it, but was unable to get it.

Since the frog was out of his bathroom vent, Al covered the two vents with screen so he couldn’t get back in.  If they go down into the vents, they can actually get inside and come up through the sink. 

While he was frog hunting, Al noticed that the slide topper had come out of the groove that held it to the side of the motorhome.  There was about a 3-4 foot gap in the center, where the slide met the wall of the coach. This is why we had the leak.  Both ends were still attached, so we hadn’t seen the problem until he went up on the roof.  Thanks to that noisy frog, we discovered our problem.

The next night, Al went on another frog hunt and this time was able to get the frog out of the roller tube and he finally caught him and he’s been relocated to a new home. This time, Al drove him to a new location (not as far as I would have liked but hopefully far enough he won’t come back).

I called Lazy Days on Monday, and was told the first available appointment would be mid August.  I reminded them this was an emergency since we had a leak, so they got us in the next day.  It’s an advantage if you are a previous customer and have bought RV’s from them, I guess.    We expected Lazy Days to be be pretty empty, after all this is “slow season” in Florida.  Boy were we wrong! 

The Lazy Days in Tampa has 220 service bays, and almost all of them were full!   If you’ve never been to Lazy Days in Tampa, you should visit it some day. It still amazes me every time we go there.  It’s quite an amazing place.

There is a shop on the Lazy Days property called Wade RV.  They do custom work like MCD shades, dash covers, window graphics, entry mats, vehicle wraps, solar screens, upholstering, and other things like that.  Lazy Days uses them to do some of their work.    Our toppers are made of a fabric  material that looks to me like canvas but it’s called acrylic.  Wade has the matching fabric and sews it for Lazy Days.

We arrived at Lazy Days by 9am Tuesday.  We checked in and by 9:30 we were back in a service bay hooked up to electricity with the AC running. Gotta keep the kitties nice and cool.  I had requested a specific technician, but he was unavailable so we got one by the  name of Rob.   

We decided to get our Air dryer cartridge replaced (another diesel thing) and also get a four corner weigh of the coach.  They did the weigh for $99, and we didn’t think that was too bad of a price for the convenience of having done while we were there.

Rob took off the old awning topper fabric, walked it over to Wade RV so they could match it and get the right size. They custom made the new awning topper. While Rowas waiting for that, he changed out the air dryer, and then they took the coach to the chassis department for the 4 corner  weigh.

We were a little nervous about our weight.  We have never had a 4 corner weigh done.  We weighed it at a CAT weigh station but that was only the front and rear axels, and not an accurate way to determine proper tire pressure.

Our GVWR (gross vehicle weight rating) was 5270 lbs under the maximum weight.   Yay!

I still need to educate myself a little more, but we didn’t find any major issues with our weights.  It turns out we estimated pretty closely on how much PSI we need in our tires.  The PSI is determined by the tire manufacturer and the weight on each tire. 

I’ll post more about that after I do a little more research.

After the weighing was done, they brought the coach back over to Rob.  The topper fabric was done and he had the slide topper back on before 5pm.  Since it was late, we were tired and they hadn’t gotten the bill ready yet, we decided to stay the night. 

We were snug in our service bay with 50 amp electric, water and sewer if we had needed it, and free and fast WIFI.  We pulled the coach out enough so that we could put up our satellite dish and we were happy campers for the night.

We got up early the next morning, paid the big bill and headed back to Quail Run.