Just wondering if anyone else has had a problem with their RW furnace barely getting warm air? We have had the furnace recently replaced at the factory and still having the same problem.
Boy our Redwood furnace would burn your feet if you stepped on a metal register. It heated up the trailer in a hurry.
We have only required the furnace a couple of times, but when it comes on it blasts heat.
There should be at least 4 floor registers in your RV.
1 in the Bedroom
2 in the Living Room
1 Small one in the Bathroom
(You won't have any ducting near the thermostats because if you did, the unit would short cycle - so no vents in the hallway or near the front door typically).
You will also have basement ducting to keep your tanks warm.
Having said this, it is very likely that you could have one of several possibilities:
1) The ducting has pulled apart blowing all of your air into the basement (instead of the coach).
2) The ducting is pinched causing a reduction of air. Although, if this were the case, you would likely have your unit trip out on over-temp.
3) Your fan motor is not working properly.
If everything sounds "normal", and you have limited flow at all duct registers, I would lean toward ducting being pulled apart either at the furnace itself, or in the plenum or in the basement ducting. You will have to pull the underbelly down to see where this might be.
Once you get everything up and running, you might find (like us) that the front bedroom gets hotter than blazes. We have to damper down that vent considerably. This is not really a good idea as you have to have a certain amount of air flow to prevent the unit from over-temp and tripping. If you close down the front bedroom like we do, you may want to consider adding a duct in the living room or basement. Then when you damper down the front, the heated air will not back-pressure into the unit and cause the over-temp condition.
Only thing I would add to above is that you do t want to drop the belly pan to get to the ductwork. Need to pull the street side basement wall to get to it. I would agree that something's probably wrong with ductwork. We're currently in upstate New York (only for two more days, but of course it's snowing now ......) and right now it's 22 degrees outside and inside we have 71 and comfortable. As said above, when the furnace has been on a while, don't step on the vent plates as they get pretty hot.
One thing to look for on the furnace is if one or more of the "knock outs" got removed and didn't get a duct hose put on. Most of your flow would then be going into the basement.
Would agree on most of the above. Also make sure that you didn't accidentally block the return air from getting to the furnace. Furnace requires a minimum of 55sq inches of return air. If you blocked the return then you might not have enough air to circulate. Also what Piper Guy said about checking the back of the furnace for ducts that might have been pulled off of their collars on the plenum end of the furnace and that you don't have any of the knock outs removed that don't have a collar and duct where there should be one or a plate to block the openings. All openings need to be covered or used to properly exchange cold/ heated air or the short cycling can cause the furnace to over heat and shut off.
Chris 2012 36RL
X4 on the heater ducting. I think on our heaters the burner is either on or off, so it seems that some kind of cold air entry into the duct work would be the most likely cause. Keep us posted with what you find.
Thank you. Randy at the Redwood service center checked and corrected all our duct work. He also opened up more cold air return. We are looking now at the thermostat and talking with coleman.
The burner is either on or off, so if it is producing hot air out the exhaust that plenum heat has to be going somewhere.
Is it warm all the time, or at certain parts of the cycle? The furnace is designed to blow air beyond the burner cycle to capture the remaining heat out of the ducts, which is ridiculous because these ducts don't retain heat, but regardless if that cycle runs too long it will actually start blowing cold air. Our Redwood was fine but our Montana would blow until it got so cold the thermostat would kick the burner back on and that furnace never stopped. I never did fix it, but always hated it.
The first two times it comes on it will run fine, but then it shuts off. When it comes back on it will only run cold air. Then it might have warm air next time, and cold the next. We are in the process of checking the thermostat now as they have just replaced the furnace. Very frustrating.
Well we finally did get everything working good as far as the furnace problem.. Found some minor issues with wiring in the thermostat. One question now. The bedroom gets so hot and we have heard it is not good to partially close it down. With the temps at night getting in the low 40's we do use the furnace because the downstairs is cooler. Does anyone else have this problem and what is the solution for the bedroom? Thanks in advance.
We have the same issue. We close the bedroom and bath hinged doors (36RL) and leave the sliding door open along with the closet doors all the way open. It helps to the point we have a small desktop heater to keep the bedroom around 68 degrees F.
Assuming you have a heat pump and probably a fireplace, run the heat pump unless going below 40 degrees. We run the fireplace and that limits the heat pump usage. We have found that electricity (at least here at $0.08 per KW vs $2.09 gallon) is cheaper than propane (and a lot more convenient). If you know your are going below 40, go ahead and move to propane with the fireplace to supplement heat.
If you have a heat pump and it gets below 40, it is supposed to kick over to propane automatically if it gets more than 2 degrees from your set point. But, it's pointless to run the heat pump below 40. There is not enough heat (or equipment) to pull heat from the air below that.
Well we finally did get everything working good as far as the furnace problem.. Found some minor issues with wiring in the thermostat. One question now. The bedroom gets so hot and we have heard it is not good to partially close it down. With the temps at night getting in the low 40's we do use the furnace because the downstairs is cooler. Does anyone else have this problem and what is the solution for the bedroom? Thanks in advance.
Oh I definately throttled the bedroom down on our Redwood 36RL, or it got unbearably hot up there when it was bedtime. I just replaced most of the furnace vents with adjustable ones from Home Depot.
I would disagree that there are any issues adjusting airflow. These RV furnaces are direct vent, so no worries about combustion air or exhaust, and the return air is the huge space behind the basement wall fed from many places so it would be difficult to restrict that. Throttling supply in the bedroom is only going to push the air to the living room and basement which is what you want.
Well we finally did get everything working good as far as the furnace problem.. Found some minor issues with wiring in the thermostat. One question now. The bedroom gets so hot and we have heard it is not good to partially close it down. With the temps at night getting in the low 40's we do use the furnace because the downstairs is cooler. Does anyone else have this problem and what is the solution for the bedroom? Thanks in advance.
Oh I definately throttled the bedroom down on our Redwood 36RL, or it got unbearably hot up there when it was bedtime. I just replaced most of the furnace vents with adjustable ones from Home Depot.
I would disagree that there are any issues adjusting airflow. These RV furnaces are direct vent, so no worries about combustion air or exhaust, and the return air is the huge space behind the basement wall fed from many places so it would be difficult to restrict that. Throttling supply in the bedroom is only going to push the air to the living room and basement which is what you want.
Without getting into the exact numbers, you can only push so much air down a tube. There are questions about how straight the runs are, what size they are, and how big the duct is. There are limits without adding additional openings elsewhere.
If the heat has nowhere to go, the chamber will get hotter than it is supposed to and the thermal overloads will shut down the heat. There needs to a certain amount of "flow".
I discovered that our bedroom is also extremely hot. Obviously, this is yet another issue Redwood has not overcome with good engineering (or lack thereof). In our 38GK, there are (2) 4" ducts that were crumpled up that feed the bedroom. Still, the amount of air flow was incredible. The bedroom would be 90 while the living room was 60. Then, I removed one of the (2) 4" ducts and re-routed to the living room. I straightened out the other for better air flow. It now balances out the temperatures a lot better and I still damper down the bedroom. At night, we like to sleep in cooler temps anyway.
