It was cold Tuesday morning. Not mind numbing, bone chilling cold, but Florida cold. I was going down to New Smyrna to to address an issue with the heater. I have been having issues and we had some issues properly diagnosing why I was having problems. The iris valve which lets in outside air and must be open to run the heater was not always opening.
My heater is part of my auto climate control. The iris valve is controled by the system through a servo. We had narrowed it down to either the controller board or the wiring. The company had sent a controller board for us to swap out as we had looked at the wiring and saw no obvious defects.
The heater is in the nose and while most stuff is really hard to access on the Baron and requires a lot of screrw removal, the nose is held on by 3 fasteners and a safety pin (A big metal one, not the thing used in sewing). It goes on and off in less than a minute. The controller is hidden under the nose baggage floor and that requires removal of lots of fasteners. Luckily the controller has a connector so it is easy to swap once you get to it. Swapping the controller did nothing so we put the original back after wasting too much time and started looking at the wires again.
Back on the subject of cold, it was low 40s when I got to the airport. It had been 40 overnight. My new hangar has great insulation and today the low temp inside over the last 24 hours was 59 degrees. It made preflight nice and after pulling out, and getting in, the cockpit was nice, not warm, nice. Usually it is cold soaked and your hands freeze on the controls. It also made warm up just a bit quicker as I was starting 20 degrees warmer.
The flight down was pretty with the sun low on the horizon. It was a bit windy for arrival but mostly down the runway. The cold air was also nice, I climed to 6000 in 4 minutes in a gentle cruise climb. I even had a big tailwind.
After looking a bit closer we found the servo wire to the computer had a connector which when jiggled in a certain way made the iris valve go the wrong way. After fixing this everything tested good. I fired up and headed over to self serve to top off, I had 3 hours left but the price was good so why not. As I was approaching a tanker truck pulled up and blocked the pump. A few months back I had shown up for gas and the tanker had just arrived and taken the pump out of service.
There was no Notam so I asked ground and they did not know what was going on. Luckily there were two airport ops trucks and I motioned to the lead guy and pointed to the gas pump. He gave me a thumbs up and had the truck pull up a bit which gave me room to slide into the fueling area. The truck was the Jet A shipment so I was in luck. After topping off, I fired up, took off, retested the heater in flight and it passed. YEAH!!! Then it was a long slog up the coast with those same winds on my nose. Soon enough the plane was back in the hangar.
This was my last flight of 2025. I did not get to fly as much as I wanted this year but am looking forward to 2026. I have a flight set for January 1 so hopefully this will start the year right.
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