May 25th - A Smalll Memorial Day RV Project

This afternoon grandson Kellen and I went to the storage shed and exercised the generator in Marge for forty minutes. She ran flawlessly. I got back at the house and decided it was time to exercise the generator in Homer as well. I hadn't turned it on since I changed the oil last month. When I turned the AC on to put a load on the generator there was a sporadic clicking sound coming from it. I decided to pull off the inside AC cover to see if I could find the cause of the clicking sound while it was running.
To my knowledge the AC unit in Homer is the original one, i.e. 27 years old. When we first got him five  years ago I took the AC cover down to clean it and to replace the filters. The filters are on the return air side, just like a home AC unit. The filters were shot so I made replacements with foam strips and home AC filter material. They have worked well.

The filters are behind plastic grates held in placed by plastic tabs, which of course being that old, broke off as I pried the grates out. I reattached the grates with small screws. Here is a picture of the cover. The red arrows point to some of the screws I used to hold the grates in place. The green arrows point to the homemade filters I made today.

Here is another view of the AC unit cover on the ceiling. There is a black vent on each end from which the cold air blows out. There is no ductwork. The entire rig is cooled from this AC unit located in the center, blowing in each direction. It does a good job since Homer is only 25 feet long.

Here is a picture of the dirty filters I took out today. The two strips on the right were taken out and the material on the left was used to make new filters. Obviously they were really dirty but I'm sure they have been in for a couple of years because they are a pain to replace. I had no idea they were that dirty though because they are hard to see when in place.

I don't believe the source of the periodic clicking noise is the squirrel cage blower in the AC unit but I couldn't see anything else causing the noise. I quickly figured out that to service anything on the AC unit, other than the filters, I will need to get on the roof, take off the cover, and try to isolate the noise. As the AC ran the noise mostly went away so I will worry about finding its cause another day when I have help who can turn the AC unit off and on as I need to track the noise. Nothing is hitting so the noise isn't hurting anything.