Bad Pump, Bad Service

Two bad pumps? Or only one?

If you run an Oasis hot water system on a recent Newmar coach, you have probably run into a bad pump issue. Usually it involves losing your domestic hot water. A workaround is to engage the summer bypass loop, a hidden switch located on top of a panel near the Oasis burner. The downside when using the summer bypass loop is that the zone pumps run continuously which causes heat buildup in the coach and it could lead to additional pump failures. Assuming, of course, that your unit uses the old style pumps. ITR changed pump suppliers sometime over the past 18 months or so.

When our pump failed the first time, ITR was very helpful in trying to help us resolve the issue. Ultimately they sent us a new design pump to replace the faulty domestic hot water pump under warranty.

We asked our dealer to install the new pump. This was during our 6-week adventure of the punctured oil pan of our toad and the random deployment and destruction of our front awning.

Owning a coach can be such fun.

Since we were stranded for so long at the dealership, we naturally tried our hot water after the dealer had replaced the faulty pump.

No hot water.

I informed the service manager and he told me that they must have replaced the wrong pump. No worries though. They will replace it with the right one.

And they did. And we had hot water. And it was good.

Until the pump failed again last week.

I called ITR. I was not a particularly happy camper. What is the mean time between failure on your new pump design? Why am I needing to change out a pump after only a couple of months of use?

Reluctantly, I paid $300 USD for another new pump and $100 USD to overnight ship it to our location.

But something was nagging at me about this particular issue. I told Lorraine that I thought the dealer did not replace the pump that provides the hot water with the new design pump. I told Lorraine that I thought the dealer took the old design pump from the other loop and put it into the domestic hot water supply line.

That is exactly what they did.

This is a picture of the panel that holds the three pumps before we changed out the faulty pump that supplies domestic hot water.

You can see the faulty pump circled in red. That is the pump that was no longer providing domestic hot water. That pump design is known to be faulty. You can see the difference in design by the ribs in the centre of the old pump. The pump circled in blue is the new design. Visually, it is quite different from the old design pumps. That pump provides heat to zone 1 in our coach. The other pump, hidden by my hand, provides heat to zone 2 in our coach. We rarely use the zone 1 and zone 2 pumps as we have roof mounted heat pumps and in-floor radiant heat.

Our dealer had replaced the wrong pump. They put the new design pump on zone 1 (blue circle). When we told them that we still did not have hot water, they took the old design pump that they had removed from zone 1 and they put that pump on the domestic hot water loop (red circle). As the old design was faulty, it was simply a question of time before that old design pump would fail.

It failed.

We left the blue circle pump with the new design as is. We installed the new design pump that ITR had just shipped to us in the red circle.

We now have two new design pumps in that panel.

Annoyed that our dealer did not replace the correct pump. Annoyed that our dealer put an old pump into the domestic hot water loop, a pump that we use daily. Annoyed that it failed.

But very, very happy to have hot showers again.