No More Cooking Fumes for Phannie

In Red Bay, Alabama...

Off topic for a moment: You will notice that I include a small subheading at the beginning of each post identifying where we are. (This is admittedly not difficult to discern at the moment, for we have been in Red Bay so long that everybody who reads this already knows. Lord knows, we have watched local kids grow up, get married and have children of their own. Well, almost; I exaggerate only slightly.)  I began including these little location-identifying subheadings after reading so very many posts by other bloggers describing some event or attraction that I found interesting but unidentifiable as to where the writer was located.  Sometimes I am forced to go back many posts to get a hint of where they were when they were writing the post.  Most of the time, however, I just click on through, that bit of curiosity unrequited for all time. By being respectful toward you, dear reader, and always showing our location, I will hopefully not contribute to a similar frustration on your part.

Since we have finally exhausted our list of services that we wanted  done at Tiffin, we are now in the final stretch. We have a few more items that will be accomplished by local craftsmen who make their living performing work that overflows from Tiffin. In most cases, these services can be performed more quickly and less expensively than that available from the factory, and the providers stay very busy poaching among the generally well-heeled and captive motorhome owners.  At any given time, there are about 30 million dollars worth of motorhomes milling about this tiny town, and you can bet that something is broken on every one of them.  It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

On this day, we drove out to nearby Vina, Alabama to have Phannie's kitchen exhaust fan rerouted to the exterior of the coach.  For several year models, including ours, Tiffin elected to build their motorhomes without an outside opening for the kitchen exhaust fan.  The microwave/convection oven contains the fan itself and can be configured for the exhaust to be vented outside or simply to recirculate inside the coach after being pulled through a filter.  This latter arrangement was totally unacceptable because of the fumes and smoke that would naturally aggregate within the small confines of the coach.  As often as not, the smoke alarm would be set off if any serious cooking took place on top of the stove. 

Brannon Hutcheson owns Custom RV in Vina, and he was kind enough to squeeze in this small job among the larger ones that he has had booked for months.

Brannon Hutcheson cutting hole for kitchen exhaust

Microwave oven removed showing new exhaust port

Exhaust Port Installed

You will note that Brannon had to move the exterior light to install the exhaust housing.  In a couple of days, we will take Phannie to Chris Wright's body shop here in Red Bay to have the vent and the area around it refinished and painted.