How I Solved Furrion Chill RV Roof A/C Design Failure for Free

well good morning guys and welcome back to an absolutely gorgeous September day here in Queen Creek Arizona and it is about a year to the day since I installed a a furion RV roof AC to replace the carrier roof AC that had been up there originally on this 2005 Gray Hawk from Jayco and today we're gonna finally finish it I'll also be very happy to stop carrying around all this extra stuff now before we start the repair I think it's very important that I explain how we got here and why it's taken me a year to get this done and then because this is now a three-part series I need to catch everybody up who hasn't been following along with me now when I started this project over a year ago the owners of the Jayco explained that the roof AC was no longer cooling properly this one is the carrier RV roof AC very nice AC unit almost never had to fix a single one of them but ironically this one we've got now in that first video I did I explained that carrier RV roof ACS were so reliable I never really happened to fix one and then when I got on the roof and took a look at it we just discovered that was basically falling apart the plastic had failed plastic on this thing is a completely cracking and falling apart so I don't feel like this is worth saving even if we got it working now I reached out to the owner explained that the roof AC was gonna have to be replaced and because it was a 20 year old carrier the inside probably almost got to be replaced along with the thermostat but also carrier had Wireless thermostats on it so they're all remote control so the inside plenum was got to be replaced and I was gonna have to run wiring to a thermostat which we did so basically it was going to be a fresh installation of a whole AC unit now we went with the furion unit for a couple of reasons not just because it was cool looking but because from my experience at the time both RVP uh Coleman AC units and Dometic units have had a lot of issues with the fan motors going bad and the units failing fairly quickly not to mention that at the time and of course currently there's still a Parts Supply issue so it's really just down to uh Fury and AC or an Atwood AC which is a Dometic product and while the Atwood AC has been very reliable and very durable and I've not had to fix a single one of those either I also not a big fan of the thermostat that it comes with and from what I had gathered at the time the furion's been a very good unit and it looks sleek and was supposed to outperform even the Atwood and more importantly it was available now the good news is the unit itself has been performing spectacularly well for the owners there's no problem with this and I don't need the ladder anymore yeah they just went through one of the hottest Arizona Summers on record and the AC worked flawlessly for them all right well maybe not flawlessly all right so there were problems but not with the AC making cold air it was with the control side which is video number two that's when we discovered that the engineers at firion decided to put the thermistor that detects the temperature of the air inside the plenum here looks like these air filters could be cleaned a little bit but it was mounted this is the thermistor right there that detects temperature it was mounted inside the air box up here even though I installed the AC correctly and sealed up the air box substantially better than the factory would ever do when it would make cold air and it would dump out here it would suck some cold air right back in there and say oh the air temperature is cold now because the thermostat right here does not detect temperature it's detecting it up there make a work around by extending the thermostat right here and so then I had to re-troubleshoot my installation and they came up with that work around right there [Music] of repositioning the thermistor that was right about here over to here so at least I was sensing the outside temperature which worked okay for the time but of course I wasn't paid to make it kind so in my research I discovered there was two options I could go with one was a new furion thermostat that had a uh thermistor built into the thermostat right there but it would require a new thermostat and a new controller box or when I was working with micro air they said oh yeah our thermostats will solve that problem and that took us to the second video and I tried to install that only discover uh this does not bypass that thermistor micro air still is using that thermistor right there so I bought a thermostat a smart useful and good thermostat but didn't solve my problem so I did reach out to furion spoke with the director of technical support I think and explained the issue with that I was having and was informed of the part numbers I needed to get uh for the controller and the thermostat and I made a video explaining this entire situation uh and also how difficult it was to get parts and how difficult furyon was well I'm sorry Lippard was to work with and I'd say it was a really good thing I made that video because I learned a dirty little secret about fury on AC controls well the new upgraded thermostat control from furion from a number of my uh commenters on that video they informed me that yes in fact you do get a new controller box right here with its own thermistor uh so that the new thermostat can sense the temperature of the AC unit but it also still has a thermistor in here to detect the temperature of the air because the new thermistor that's going to be on the thermostat in here is only to solve the problem with the furnace and that's something I didn't even cover in the last video explaining that this AC and thermostat combination still controls the propane furnace which like every RV furnace out there runs off battery power and Propane and furion and Lippard were only forced to do this upgrade because everybody was complaining that the thermostat was not reading the correct temperature when they're running the furnace because as you can imagine with the thermistor up in there when you're running the furnace the AC fan is not running because the furnace runs on 12 volt so we just have this air box right here with basically the outside temperature of let's say it's 46 degrees the furnace is never drying any air through this area so this would never read the temperature of the air temperature because the air is not being drawn across it it's stuck with outside temperature readings because the furnace does not run air through here it's Eric strangers right here underneath the refrigerator it draws the air across right there and then blows the heated air out the floor duct work and into the bedroom here too and so leopard put the new controller and thermostat together to solve the problem of the Furnace but they still retain the thermistor inside the air box for the AC unit so even this new upgraded thermostat and controller isn't solving the original problem it only solves a furnace problem which is apparently still an ongoing problem and I can't believe furion and Lippert just haven't conceded and redesigned the entire system to work through the thermostat I don't know why they had to reinvent the wheel it's a very bad design so in the last video I did I ended basically being broken and sad and dejected not knowing what to do but on this furion setup I can't recommended at all didn't solve any of my problems just created more problems for me and I really wanted to sing his praises seriously I'm just I'm I want to throw up and here we are a year later from the initial installation still trying to figure out how to make an AC unit cool properly using a wall mounted thermostat in 2023 and while the owners of this RV have been incredibly kind and gracious and patient with me they've even offered to switch out to a whole different system again I'm not willing to give up or have them waste their kind of money on that and this is what I think the final decision is going to be since the new furion thermostat's not going to solve my problem and even this uh microair thermostat's not going to solve my problem I'm gonna have to do what everybody in the comments basically told me to do uh all those months ago and it was something I wanted to do I just didn't have time because as simple as it is to write in comments to just take the thermistor and then relocate the thermistor instead of right there over to the wall thermostat right there if you guys remember when I installed this I had to run the thermostat wiring which I chose just to do flat four because I only needed four wires and I'm quite confident that's why every HVAC technician that was watching it probably commented uh something along the lines of that's why we run extra wires to a thermostat from the controller but I was unaware that furyon had such a horrible control design on four wires so I knew that running just two more wires from this position all the way over to here was going to take the better part of a day because I did a pretty good job sealing off all my holes with foam even when I drilled a hole through there I sealed that up with foam even when I took this wall panel out and the ceiling right there I seal it off with foam so I knew I was going to have to basically redo my entire wire installation and I didn't want to do that and I didn't have time to do that so I was trying my best to figure out another way of doing this and yet here I am gonna have to do that so now that I've updated everybody about why the decisions were made that were made and why nothing seems to have worked with this horrible design from fury on I'm gonna go ahead and repair my installation for hopefully the last time and while I know it some people are saying they they make conversion kits to allow the fury on roof AC to work with Coleman wall thermostats I hate the idea of mixing components unnecessarily and the Coleman wall thermostat still needs to have power and ground here so I would still have to take this wall apart again to run wires and hopefully I'm letting everybody know about the problem so they're not spending the next year of their life trying to fix a obvious engineered problem but it's not their fault I do like to be done with the job the first time okay so there's my foamed in ceiling pull that out take this light back down again hey look there's my foamed in hole probably even made some sort of comment at the time with that first video Never cleaning up finishing up an installation until you test it all out so you don't have to tear it all apart again but he's been a slow learner I guess it's my own fault it worked well all right there's my wire all right pull on that and we got slack over here now I'm pulling that now the wires come out there so that's half the work all right just have to cut all my wires to the thermostat okay now I'm gonna go ahead and use uh this to trace it well not trace it but the fish The Wire using my existing harness right here in my head it works rather than trying to fish another harness through there at the same time this is just the plastic insert for an awning fabric you never know when they come useful so now I can just pull on the harness here and pull it back through just like when I installed it like I said in my mind this has to work all right so I have that and the end of it there now I have this harness right here it's already a two strand 12 volt harness I think for a satellite dish it's already been wrapped and secured with the rubber insulation now I just have to tape this onto my four wire harness that'll give me six wires to the thermostat from the AC now if everything goes as I want it to there it is now I can just start pulling over here and hopefully feeding it back through that wasn't too difficult push it back through there I got the extra two wire harness that I put in looks like I can make it to my connection point there now that harness right there the white and brown I already extended from the actual control logic board right in here for the thermistor actually goes into the board so I'll just be utilizing these wires right there that I've already extended of course don't lose the thermistor because the controller is uh calibrated for the uh settings on this thermistor which is just an adjustable resistor it depends on the temperature outside it changes the resistance value of it expecting the actual reading of the thermistor I'm assuming that'll only be one or two degrees because my wiring is going to be bigger than the existing tiny tiny tiny little wiring that was there but I've explained that to the customer and I think they're going to be okay with it but yes it does affect the resistance value with the amount of wire that I'm running not a lot but enough probably good thing about using this bigger wire here is that I can just use the away go lever lock connectors to wire this back up which are very handy connectors see that cutting-in-cheek because I can do this with one hand and then because I don't think that uh it's polarity sensitive but I will wire it up uh white to black red to Brown so at this point is where we should have been with the last video because we are going to still use this expensive uh touch thermostat for microair because it is Bluetooth conductivity and Wi-Fi connectivity because the owners of this Jayco greyhawk do have animals and they want to make sure that they can monitor the temperature inside the unit at all times and adjust it if they have their animals in it and of course uh I couldn't return an electrical item after I opened it and installed it but since I already own this thermostat I will have to modify it just a little bit in order to make this work so this is the bottom of thermostat this is going to be the thermistor I'm going to go ahead and use one of the openings down there to feed the thermistor itself out of but it won't completely fit through it's a little bit too big I think and because I can see through I know I'm not going to drill into anything all I have is my little unibit right here I'm just gonna widen that Grill just a little bit [Music] that right there very simple now check this out through just right there and the wires come out the back and now it just sticks out the bottom reading the temperature of the room like a thermistor is supposed to do at the wall thermostat all right now let's do black to white like we had before and red to Brown and now this thermistor has been relocated from the controller up here through this harness through the ceiling down the wall right to there last video I showed how to wire up the microair thermostat so I don't have to do that again okay so we got that wired up basically just regard my wiring color but it's still going to be purple to purple green to green red to red and blue to Blue if you just match the wiring colors up to that point there so we do have everything in control so now if I turn the battery disconnect on come over here we're starting to load up that's good so it says that it is 96 degrees inside which should be the temperature reading right there so let's go ahead fire up the generator all right microwave on so we have power inside here 's ahead and come to the thermostat remember there is an app you can control it from your phone but I already showed that in the last video and I don't need to show it again so I have it in cool mode fans in auto there's only one zone look at that except for 72 degrees and it says it's 96 degrees right now cold air is just blowing out right here because the plenum's not on I did have the thermistor right here if I take the end of it and it says we're 96 degrees right now and then I just hold it in front of the cold air just like that and we come over here see the temperature's dropping down there yeah it's already too cold I bring it back in front where we want to measure the temperature look at that we're creeping back up again so we are successfully now reading the room temperature at the thermostat for both the furnace and the AC I don't know why furion and lifford couldn't figure out how to do that this technology has only been around for about 150 years I feel like here's my next point is I have to put everything back together again but I will show you guys real fast and Scream Capture of me controlling the thermostat here it's difficult with only one camera but I'll just go to the uh screen capture here okay we go to the Gray Hawk one because I did already uh set this one before so I can change the mode so you have cool gas Auto Dry fan only back to cool and of course I can adjust the temperature at this point too from the screen we're still reading 89 degrees inside if I move that thermostat in front of the cold air again we should be able to see it uh drop in here very short there you go oh look I already I already set it off that was very fast let me go ahead and warm it back up again so that was kind of fun that got cold pretty fast oh look at that 87 degrees it's going to be turning on again very shortly that's why we did this so that we didn't have short cycling and more importantly like I said in the uh earlier video the biggest problem a lot of people were suffering because uh heat isn't a problem for everybody in the world unlike me uh when the furnace is running the hot air is coming out of the floor down there but it never got cycled around the thermistor up there so even the new furion upgrade kit would have just had the thermistor located at the thermostat right here only for the furnace mode had nothing to do with the AC mode so it didn't really solve my problem anyways either way if I was going to keep using this furion system I was gonna have to hack it just like I did all right let me go ahead and lower the temperature some says it's 89 degrees which does seem about right it's actually starting to cool off here in September now finally of course don't forget you can go to settings right there you can uh schedule it you can put in auto mode we can let's see go to next do the Wi-Fi network so you can control this thermostat from anywhere in the country as long as or anywhere in the world as long as you have Wi-Fi at the thermostat and at your phone look at that we could change it to Celsius for the rest of the world please on one all right so we got it firing back up again it did have that time delay so the thermostat isn't trying to turn the compressor on and off continuously because of a short cycling but I think I'm very pleased besides making a mess and having to do the job for uh countless times at this point with how it's going to perform now I just have to put it back together again so I'll just get this uh paneling butt back together get all my Staples out of the way and then maybe I'll regret doing it but I really do think foaming up the holes with this Loctite minimal expanding foam right here we'll release some stress on the wires seal off Heat game and it's like Loctite uh foam does seem to have set up a lot faster and more right there just make sure you don't try to reuse that again and keep it away from anything fabric inside once you're done with it don't ask me how I know that it's not worth trying to save seven dollars on the cost of that just buy another one next time but also unlike the great stuff as this stuff sets up if you were to brush this it doesn't deflate like the the great stuff does you know just get this put back in its place staple that back together but the AC's been running this whole time but still set for 66 degrees it says it's 89 degrees inside hasn't turned off yet almost like this is uh the right temperature now I mean I do have a new uh fun tool should we try to play with that one real fast just to see how rough that thermistor is now all right it's pretty good investment I needed to that other times forward looking infrared let's try it all right so 86 87 89 says it is look at that get my hands out of the way 89 degrees what does this say uh you guys can't read it but I can read it it says 87. it's pretty good we didn't change the uh the readings that much at all and I'm sure these things have pretty uh how do I put it I'm sure these things have a pretty decent uh tolerance to them they might have one or two degrees off anyways from the factory kind of fun to play with this isn't it let's see my hand oh I left the handprint there all right that's kind of fun pretty inexpensive link it up to your phone turns your phone into a forward-looking infrared there's the camera for it I've had this uh for a while now I enjoy every part of it it's a lot of fun to play with all right let me just get this thing put back together now and we'll finish this up [Music] okay now we just have to feed these wires back in there without losing this guy feed my thermistor through that little hole I made just like that I think it looks pretty slick like it's supposed to be there I'll take a zip tie right here I'm going to lock it down so that that harness can't fall off driving down the road and get lost in the wall put it back on the wall now through its little mounts wow a lot easier to read too I can tell you the owner it's gonna be happy to have this one on here compared to this one they had to get a little flashlight in order to read the screen because I guess it doesn't light up either it's another one of those great great designs furion but this is going to be very easy to see at night now too and you can go to the settings screen right here and go to brightness and you can do more or less brightness on there and then the sleep number right there after not touching it for a while it'll go down to brightness number one look at that we're still 93 degrees inside because it's pretty hot outside but the AC hasn't been short cycling so I'm calling it a success might as well go ahead and clean out these filters I rinse them off couldn't be easier so why aren't you doing it I'll put on these filters I just cleaned pop the little pendulum cover back on snap it into place I still do like the appearance on the inside and the outside I just can't figure out for the life of me why furyon made such a strange decision when it comes to controlling that roof AC because remember the AC unit itself I've never had a problem with it hasn't leaked it's cooled the entire time it's just the control that uh hasn't been operating for me so honestly if I knew what I knew now would have gone with a fury on from the get-go um I don't know maybe I would have gone with a GE for all I know but um the Atwood is a good unit like I said I don't really like the big thermostat that's on it uh I did put a video out on the Atwood AC once before either way I would have run a harness uh on some people that already have a Coleman roof AC you can just retrofit it with the uh furion unit on top which is very quiet and sleek and good looking and reliable and it can use your existing Coleman thermostat there is that possibility too I didn't have that option and there was no chance of me reusing the 20 year old carrier controls and of course I still had to get a plenum to mount the AC with anyways because the old carrier plenum wouldn't have worked on the new AC whether it was a Coleman Dometic or furion do I wish I would have known what I know I do wish I would have known that this has maybe been one of the most expensive AC jobs I've ever done in my life I'm pretty confident I lost at least a thousand dollars doing this job oh because uh furion after uh five or six years of beta testing still haven't figured it out the new microair touch thermostat should work out very well for the new owners and I think they're gonna be pleased with that too all things being equal I think this technology should be incorporated into almost every thermostat at this point I still have a lot of doubts about modern Coleman and Dometic ACS I just the motors shouldn't be failing as much as they are failing recently but hopefully this has been a pretty good rundown of the problems you might find or run into with a furion roof AC I can really only hope that uh furion and Lippard decide to change the controls to make a lot more sense but now we all know better that's uh took me three videos to make this roof AC work and that's way too much time but thanks a lot for watching guys I hope I answered all the questions that were in the comments in the last two videos try to get out there and enjoy this beautiful fall weather that's coming up before it gets too cold bye now I won't say that when I was uh speaking to the director of technical support at Lippert that they were not very helpful uh they were actually more concerned about who I was talking to on the phone and how they could make those the workers I guess respond to my needs better uh I didn't find that to be very useful to blame the workers that were doing their job and doing their job very well they helped me out substantially and I had no problems with the people answering the phone just with the design and the engineering of this system when I expressed that to the director of technical support in customer service I think at leopard they got quiet and didn't respond to me anymore so chances are I won't ever be sponsored by Lippert or furion which doesn't surprise me because I don't have a lot of nice things to say about them most of the time [Music] how's that propane still still even the new upgraded system and I start out this another and now I'm starting out the third video uh trying to explain what I'm and I've only pulled half the RV apart it feels like which is a very easily just like can you guys see that but just now so I can give it a fair Shake uh and that is an absolutely beautiful morning on the Santan Mountain Preserve here wow

Channel: AZ Expert

Views: 24,963

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Id: SL3I4zdGZm0

Length: 32min 23sec (1943 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023