Melissa awoke with some energy and cooked up a breakfast casserole out of gluten free bread, sausage, eggs, and cheese.
The water maker being broken is a pain. It will affect where we can go as much of the Gulf and Broughton islands are short on water. So the boys get determined to fix it so we decide to hang at Ganges where we have access to parts. Out come the schematics.
They take the control board out of the water maker and find that indeed its badly damaged. The MOV (Metal Oxide Varistor) which is designed to absorb high voltage spikes until the fuse blows – is completely blow up. As Dave says “things never work right once you let the magic smoke out of them”.
They discover a design flaw. The fuse installed on the board is the slow blow variety. So the voltage spike lasted long enough to blow the MOV. Essentially the MOV gave up its life to try and protect the rest of the board. It did protect much of the circuitry, but there were still some traces on the board that were delaminated and burned up from the input to the MOV. Dave put wires in to replace the blown traces and replaced the fuse with a fast blow variety. He doesn’t yet have the replacement MOV but with the fast blow fuse we should be ok to run in this compromised state.
The guys put the board back in, and turn on the water maker for a split second to see if there is any more magic smoke being released. All appears well, so they turned it on for a few minutes until they can see that indeed its making water again! Whoo hoo!
Dinner was BBQ pork ribs, roasted curry cauliflower and roasted maple carrots.
