AI helped me find one bad wire so we had hot water in the desert

We get all the way out into the middle of the desert for this trip, and... no hot water. Which is a problem because I like my showers, and cold showers are not something I'm willing to pretend are character-building. So, yeah, I wanted that fixed.

Our RV is old. It's a 1998 Holiday Rambler that we remodeled when we bought it, and it's actually in pretty good shape, but old is old. It's basically an ongoing project. We'll fix a few things before a trip, take it out, and then somewhere along the way the RV will politely introduce us to the next thing that needs attention. At this point we've kind of accepted that as part of owning it.

We'd actually lost hot water once before, not long after we bought the RV and started renovating it. Back then it just... started working again. So we figured maybe we'd done something wrong, maybe we hadn't turned it on correctly, whatever. It was working, so we stopped asking questions. Very scientific.

Then on this trip, the hot water disappears again. And while I'm looking at it, I move this sleeved section on one of the wires and the igniter suddenly tries to start for just a second... and then stops.

That's one of those moments where having AI on your phone is incredibly useful. I can take a picture of the board, take a picture of the wires, show Eric what I'm looking at, explain what happened when I moved that wire, and then work through the possibilities one step at a time instead of randomly replacing things and hoping for the best.

From the pictures and the fact that moving the wire made the igniter briefly come alive, Eric pointed me toward an intermittent connection instead of a part that had just completely failed.

So I worked through it step by step and eventually tracked it down to one wire. One. I pulled the connector off, trimmed away the corroded section, put a new connector on, and after that the water heater behaved perfectly for the rest of the trip.

And, yes, the immediate victory here is that I didn't have to take a cold shower. But the bigger thing was that I didn't lose half a vacation day to it. I didn't have to make fourteen trips into town buying parts and guessing and taking things apart. I fixed this tiny connection, put the tools away, and went back to actually being on vacation.

That's one of the things I really appreciate about using AI this way. It's not always some grand futuristic thing. Sometimes it's just, help me solve this stupid little problem so I can go back outside, look at the desert, and enjoy where I am instead of spending six hours arguing with a water heater.