RV Water Heater Troubleshooting Made Easy

To troubleshoot the Atwood Water Heater, the first thing we're gonna look at is make sure we have gas, we're gonna check the stove on the inside or the burner tap just to make sure we've got a flow coming in there, we've got a flame coming inside. The next thing we do, we wanna come out here and check voltage to the water heater, now we verify the inside we have at least 12 volts, we need at least 10.5 coming to this for this to open it up so we're gonna pull this off right here... Actually, I can go from here, just ground this, put this over here . Ground this, go into here is where our lead is coming into, we see we've got 12.08 so we're fine with that. So we're not gonna use this one anymore, we're just gonna take a quick test light like this, It's a lot easier to use, I can clip it right on to a ground source like this one here. So, now what we've done with this one, we've actually taken this probe coming in, this is supplying up to our control board here, we've taken this off just to simulate if we had a problem. So the first thing we wanna do is come in here and verify that I do have power coming into my thermostat in here. So if I didn't have power coming in here at this point then this link right here is probably a fusible link and it's probably been broken so I wanna replace that first, I wanna verify that I have it here and if I don't have it here then this is the problem, I may need to replace that. So now this one's good, this is coming into our thermostat in here, this is what tells what temperature we're gonna be at to shut it off with. So if I come onto this backside here, I've got power here and I should have power coming onto the backside here so we see that's good. Now, if I didn't have power coming to this side then this would be bad and I would replace this thermostat here. So what I'm gonna do right now before we even go any further 'cause I wanna show what this looks like, we're gonna pull this, there we go and this is just a little thermostat that I can take off, there's two little flanges on each side of this, I can actually take that out and get a higher thermostat so I can get hotter water. What you do with this is that you've only got six gallons so when you're gonna mix this a little more if I have hotter water in my tank then I use less hot water and more cold water and I have warm water for showering, doing dishes, whatever. So some people like to take that out and get a higher one, some people like take it out and get a lower one, they don't want quite that hot of water coming through there. So we're gonna take this, put it back on, put our lead back here , so then what I wanna check is if I've got and we've verified we have power here, power here. So that's coming through and it's coming up to my control board which is right here, that then is going to... And I'll show you what happens here, we'll plug this back in. So you see when that first started going, I gotta click out of this here and what's happening is we've got power coming back down to our coil here and this is gonna open this up. So if I don't have a click coming out of that, that means my coil is bad, if it clicks and it doesn't start, it could be that I have a plugged orifice inside here, it also could mean that I possibly have a bad valve. Okay, so next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna shut the LP off down here, and we're gonna look for spark in this area in here so if we got everything we just checked is okay and it's working fine, we've got power coming to this board and we have no spark down here then we've probably got a bad board, this coil in here. So we're gonna plug this back in. That will take a little bit, it's gonna burn off what's in the line. We see it sparking inside , and now it has an automatic shutoff so only tries it for a certain amount of time. But if that's sparking like that then we know that this is probably, we gotta plug valve or even the orifice if we're not getting gas into that assembly there. If we don't have spark in there, we wanna look for that too or if it's not going down into the burner assembly then our electrode probably is either bent or it's carbon grounding and then it's gonna have to be replaced. So, take a look at the system and verify it's got 12 volt coming in, ECO, actually we didn't talk about that. The ECO here, this is a limit switch basically, if for any reason this does not shut it off at a certain temperature, it gets to a boiling point, this is going to shut the system off rather than to ruin it. So we wanna verify we have power to these, that we have power going up to our board and get enough. If I pull this off, put it back in , clicks , we know that's good, tries to light, we've got spark in the inside. So just take those steps to troubleshoot your Atwood Water Heater.