Do you own a Jayco Heritage caravan or something similar?
Check out the modifications we did on this Jayco Heritage!
We are working on a Jayco Heritage. It’s quite an old van. They’ve just had a GVM upgrade on it. The owner’s taking it up to Port Hedland. He is going to live in it for a while and then retire and travel around Australia on it. So he wants to carry a bit of weight.
What Needs to Be Done
There’s no gas badge or anything on it, so we’ve just got to bring it up to today’s standards with all the stuff in it. But most of the appliances are all right. The gas valves need to be changed over to the yellow gas approved ones. Also, the gas bottles inside the box, the vapour barrier isn’t all the way to the ceiling. So instead of trying to get that to seal, which is a very difficult job, we’ve done quite a few of them, so we can do them, but they’re just hard to do, the owner wanted his boot space back, so we’re going to mount the bottles on the A-frame at the front there. And we just put a gas bayonet in for a marine grade barbecue with the flame failure device.
Gas Leak
We’ve set up the front for the bottles and everything, bolted all that in, fabricated that all up. So that’s all good and working, but we haven’t touched the gas side of things yet. We’ve removed their old regulator, got that out completely. And all we’ve done is just put it on test, and there was this super slow leak somewhere. It was annoying.
We took out all the gas valves, replaced all those, and then we could start isolating things. So isolated all the appliances, the fridge, the stove, and the hot water system. Tested it. It held okay. And then after that we put them all on again, tested it and it started dropping. And then we started isolating each appliance, and then it just came down to the fridge. Somewhere in that fridge was leaking because as soon as we turned the fridge off, it would stabilize and stay there. So something’s going on with the fridge and this is the kind of thing that just blows hours because you’ve got to try and find it.
Locating the Leak
The door over here was glued on because it was missing the little screw here. So this is the fridge line here, and this is where it comes in here, and we thought it could be this fitting here. But then, when we sprayed a little bit of water around here, it’s just sort of glinting. So there’s a slight little leak on that, inside the fridge. It’s so small, so minute, but again, unsafe. So the only thing we could do is just isolate the fridge, but we might just take this cover off here, just to see exactly what is that thing.
Looks like it might be a little gas cock or regulator, but we’re not sure. This is quite an old fridge, so we’re just going to sort that out. A little bit annoying because we could have been sticking bayonets in and welding things on and that, but now we’ve got to muck around trying to see if we can sort that out. So it’s one of those things. You’ve got to be safe. This is the type of thing that just blows out because each time you’ve got to retest again and let it sit for 5-6 minutes and then document it and all that sort of stuff.
Leak Fixed
All sorted, thank goodness. The bottle holder’s come up really good. So we just used some 40 by 40 three mil galvanized steel and we folded a special way underneath, so there’s bolts that go into the chassis this way and also from the top. And also we used automotive glue, like adhesive to seal it down. So even if you take the screws out in the future or they do snap, even though we don’t think they ever will, it still won’t come off anymore. And then we’ve used eight mil bolts to bolt down the holder and the two bottles. The two brackets are bolted together. So yeah, really rock solid, and that worked out really well.
Just a real shame that they had a gas leak. We were lucky we could actually see it, because if it was one of the joints up in the fridge, then the whole fridge has to come out and that would’ve been a pain. It was painful enough that it was leaking at all. But all it was, they used to have a gas cock, that’s what they used to call them. They looked like a bit of a funnel with holes in it and you have to grease them up, and once that grease goes, it starts to leak out. They have the same gas cocks in stoves and ovens and stuff like that. So they’re all over the shop and luckily that was the one that was leaking, so we just took that out, serviced it up, put it all back together and it held up really good.
The Result
The bottles are moved out to the front of the van now, out of the locker, which is good because it’s a real pain to seal it back to that door. Super safe out the front there. Also, the guy asked, “Can you make sure I’ve got enough room to put a 150 pipe in there?” So we had to make sure that we could bring those bottles forward enough so they could still fit a pipe in. And then he gave me a call and said, “By the way, I ran out of time, will you able to fit that pipe for us as well?” So we stuck the pipe on, two 150 couplings on the end of it. And we made it two meters long. He didn’t get back to us about what length he needed. That’s why we didn’t glue the ends on. So if he wants to make it a bit shorter, then you can just pop those off, cut 150 or whatever you want off it and stick it back together.
We put the stickers inside and everything for the cooker and the location LPG badge label, gas compliance label, bayonet label, all these labels we’ve got to put on. So she’s all ready to go now and he is going to pick it up tomorrow, and this one’s going up to Port Hedland.
Interested?
If you’ve got an old van that needs to be compliant, try and see if there’s a badge there somewhere because then it means we don’t have to change too much pipe work or anything. These ones had new gas valves and everything installed, but they’re all good now. If you need our help, give us a call. We’ll be happy to help.
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