Some leaks and pondering the future

For the second time in my recollection, it appears that my water heater acted up the other day. I had the day off on Friday, so was milling about the homestead. At one point, I stepped down from the bathroom and the carpet said *squish*. This happens to be direction in front of the refrigerator, which is directly over the water heater. I opened the cabinet housing said water heater to find its cardboard box totally soaked. This happened once before and I dried the area up, but applied to real fix. Same thing in this case: the carpet is now dry and I haven't noticed any further issues. Still, I wonder about what I would find if I were to cut open that cardboard box and peel away the insulation surrounding the water heater. How much trouble am I asking for by not replacing it now?

As for the future, I'm trying to figure out what I'll do for housing when I find myself a job in the St. Paul area. Nothing's definite in the employment field yet, but I'm looking pretty actively. I've also begun perusing for houses, apartments, and mobile home parks that allow RVs. It'd be nice to be ride of my house here in Manhattan before taking on another domicile, and considering the winters up there it also seems like it may behoove me to sell the RV and find something a bit better insulated. I really don't have much use for a 5th-wheel and truck if I'm not going to be living in it fulltime. Don't know how much I'd get back out of them, though, and would want the sale to at least pay off the remainder of the loan. Much more will become clear once I get a bonafide job offer, though, so I'm going to try not to fret about it too much until then. I could foresee the need for a storage space here for the RV, perhaps stuff from the house (if I can sell it), and other odds and ins for a bit. I'd be really interested in paring down my earthly possessions to what I could fit into my car and a U-Haul trailer it can pull.

Time to learn something about batteries

Finished up in Ark City a couple weeks ago, but when I was packing up and getting ready to move, my hydraulics merely puttered and said, "nah." A quick hook-up via jumper cables from the truck battery to the RV batteries gave me the capability to pull the slides in, but the front legs still refused to budge (needed to life the front end of the RV to fit the truck and hitch under it). The jumper cables were hot to the touch, so I opted to run into town for some industrial strength (2-gauge) jumper cables, which set me back almost 50 bucks. I hooked them up, and though they didn't get warm, they still weren't providing the necessary power. A light blinked on in my head at that point and I returned to O'Reilly Auto Parts for a 12-ton hydraulic jack. With it, I was able to *carefully* life the front end of the RV, get the truck in place, and lower it back down ready for pulling.

The batteries are the smaller "24" size, and dated back to 2006; which, according to the dude at O'Reilly, means old in the case of deep cycle batteries like this. Now that I'm parked in Emporia, I want to take them in to the battery shop that hooked me up with acid for the motorcycle battery. I'd like to test them, though don't really doubt that they're old and shot; then want to gain some education on deep cycle batteries prior to replacing them. I was rather surprised that -- even though connected to shore power -- the hydraulics of the RV would not work without at least some assistance from the batteries. I wonder what else will go dead when I remove the two of them for testing.