Venting...

     Tonight's sunset...

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     Suzanne, Travis and I began our day with a 2 mile walk around the Sparks Marina Loop located about a quarter of a mile from the RV park. Winnie stayed home.

      The pond has a pretty strange/interesting history. I could summarize but will instead cut and paste a paragraph from The Nevada Department of Wildlife website:

History

The site on which Sparks Marina Park is located was once a gravel pit owned and operated by Helms Construction Company (1968 to 1995).  In 1987, petroleum products and solvents were discovered seeping into the 100 feet deep pit along the southwest wall.  The contamination was traced to a massive spill at the fuel-tank farm one mile west.  The site was declared a Toxic Superfund Site and a comprehensive cleanup was initiated.  In 1996, the groundwater was reported free of petrochemicals and the property was turned over to the City of Sparks.  Millions of dollars of spill mitigation money were made available to the City, which was used to construct the park and make the pit into a recreational pond.  They also planned to fill the pit to a depth of 30 feet; however, in January 1997, the Truckee River overflowed its banks and filled Helms Pit creating what is now Sparks Marina Pond.  The pond is a natural aquifer and in order to keep the lake at the desirable level, the city has to pump 1 to 2 million gallons of water into the Truckee River daily.

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     After returning to the coach and having a bite to eat we hopped in the car and headed for Lowe's. There's a project in the coach that I've been wanting to tackle for a while and today seemed like as good a day as any to have at it. The Outlets at Legends is located in the same area as Lowe's and Suzanne thought she might like to check out some of the stores. As it turned out, a ride through the outlet mall parking lot, following our Lowe's visit, didn't spark much interest - and we returned to the RV park. 

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     Several weeks ago, I think it was while we were staying on the property my daughter and son-in-law own, we had a problem with the coach's Maytag residential refrigerator. The issue was actually with the freezer, which is located at the bottom of the refrigerator. I won't go into the details of how I diagnosed and remedied the problem. Suffice to say it's working fine now and I'm confident it will continue doing so. It wasn't the first time I had seen evidence that there was an issue and a year or so ago I gave it a cursory looking into. The problem seemed to go away on it's own and I sort of forgot about it - up until several weeks ago...

   Anyway, there was some collateral water damage at the bottom of one of two partition walls on either side of the fridge.

That's a propane detector. I'll be replacing it with a new one.

     I considered replacing the entire wall. I considered cutting out the damaged area and scavenging a matching piece from inside the bedroom clothes hamper. My ultimate solution was to cut out the damaged area and insert a 2.5" x 15" air vent. There's really nothing down there that needs venting... but who needs to know that. Don't tell anyone.

     There was some aluminum framing behind the 1/8" veneer plywood so I had to modify the vent just a bit...

     But I think the finished product looks pretty good... 

Kinda looks like it belongs there. Right?

     The vent is designed to be held in place by friction but because moisture had caused the wall to deform, I had to drill holes in either end of the face plate and screw it in. I would have preferred to have had a single screw at either end but the irregularity of the wall made it necessary to add an additional screw top center.

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     I think I forgot to mention in my last entry that when we arrived yesterday there was a high wind advisory through 6am this morning - the forecast calling for wind gusts in the 60mph range. As a precaution, we only deployed the drivers side slide about 6" as high winds have detached its vinyl topper twice in the past. Thankfully, the predicted gusts never materialized and after a quiet nights sleep, we were able to fully extended the slide this morning.

Thanks for checking out the blog!