Fallacy of Treating symptoms vs root cause

An embarrassing troubleshooting lesson learned today -- actually I know this but took the easy rode to almost bigger problems.

There has been an off odor on the boat since we have been at the marina and running the AC -- yes temps are a high of mid 80s here. Karen had cleaned the main bathroom shortly after we got here and I thought she used some in appropriate cleaner but she claimed she didn't. This morning I traced the odor to the air coming from the AC duct. I checked the filters on the AC unit and it wasn't bad but I noticed the condensation pan was full -- had not been draining. It drains into the bilge. Normal troubleshooting would have you looking at both ends of the drain hose. The end in the bilge is very difficult to reach so I worked from the AC unit. With some difficulty I removed that hose and blew into the end. I met some resistance then it blew free -- Ahhh problem solved. I put it all back together.

After cleaning some dust from the AC unit cavity and the battery charge compartment and cleaning the cooling fins o n the refrigerator compressor I started to wonder what happened to the "stuff" I blew out of that condensation hose.

Hmmm I checked the bilge and was aghast to find it full and overflowing. Well that addresses another question in the bank of my mind in that on the long run from Vero Beach to here the bilge pump had never run. Usually it runs once or twice a day when underway do to the cooling from the packing gland on the propeller shaft. I thought the zero count was a good thing. No it was actually an indicator of this problem that I overlooked.

Now it made sense.

I now troubleshot the bilge pump and checked the Auto mode switch first --- AAAAACK it was in the off position. I turned it to AUTO and it quickly drained the bilge. This is the root cause of all this unnecessary work I did today but more importantly prevents a bigger problem of the bilge overflowing and spreading that water all over the low lying electrical cables. This was narrowly adverted.

Whew -- embarrassed but happy the issue is resolved.

Note that the bilge switch is located just above the old inverter switch and I must have hit it accidentally when removing the old inverter and installing the new inverter in Vero BEach like 3 weeks ago.

The only problem here at the Old Port Cove Marina has been the courtesy van. We called twice yesterday and left voice mail that was never returned. I finally reached a driver at 4pm or the end of the shift and they said it would run at 8:30am today. We were there but no driver. I called and left 2 voice messages and no reply. I went to the office and they said the driver was sick and it wouldn't run today and it doesn't run on Sundays. Hey no apology and that's just the way it is. I was surprised. At a minimum a return call should have been sent or at least change the VM announcement that it would not run and not to leave a message that would never be replied to. Then again this change to our plans gave me the time to troubleshoot that odor that lead to a LARGER Problem.

I guess we try UBER tomorrow.