Library Day

After such a great day of skiing yesterday, the evening took a hard turn.

Around eleven p.m., I realized the van didn’t feel as warm as it normally does. I pulled up the Rixen’s MCS7 dashboard and was immediately met with a mess of warnings and fault messages. It took a while to make sense of what I was seeing, but by about one a.m. I narrowed it down to a fuel issue. The system was reporting fuel vapor readings of 0.0 and 3.2. Zero is never good.

This had happened once before, but earlier in the evening I had checked the fuel gauge and knew I was comfortably above a quarter tank. The only thing that made sense was the angle of the van. I was parked on a rightward slope, and I suspect the fuel pickup tube wasn’t getting what it needed. At one a.m., I drove a few miles to a gas station and filled the tank completely.

From there, I headed to a large, well-lit corporate parking lot so I could work without worrying about safety. I unloaded gear in the back and began cycling power to the heater, trying everything I could think of. Nothing worked. No ignition. No heat. After enough failed attempts, it became clear the system had gone into a lockout state. From what I understood, that meant outside intervention.

I packed everything back up, left a message for Rixen’s support, drove back to my usual spot, shut the system down entirely, and went to bed.

I slept maybe four hours.

Around six a.m., I woke up and decided to try one last time. I turned the system back on and waited. About fifteen minutes later, I heard it—the unmistakable sound of the burner firing. The heat came back on like nothing had happened. That’s when it clicked: the system must shut itself down when the heating element overheats, protecting itself until it fully cools.

With no real sleep and no energy to push ahead, I drove to the library, found a legal parking spot, and slept until it opened at ten. The Sun Tunnels would have to wait another day.

Just after waking, I got a FedEx notification saying a package had arrived far earlier than expected. I drove downtown and picked it up before settling back in for the day.

I spent most of the afternoon at the library reading about Utah. There was a copy of the 2025 Farmer’s Almanac on the shelf next to me, and I ended up going through sections on weather and long-term patterns. I stayed there until about seven-thirty, working on photographs, updating the blog, and refining plans for the Sun Tunnels the next morning.

That evening, I parked in front of Dan’s Grocery Store off Front Range Road and went to Flower Child—again. I ordered the same thing I’d been getting: the chicken Bolognese with vegetable noodles. It’s hard to argue with something that works.

After dinner, I picked up groceries at Dan’s for the desert trip ahead. The heat was behaving, the system was steady, and I headed back to my spot feeling cautiously relieved.

Tomorrow would be a fresh start.