Help with how to operate my HWH

riven1950 wrote:
The manual says to operate on electric turn the little black switch on in the outside compartment. It has been on all the time. We have been turning on the wall switch inside when we need hot water and it has worked. Today when I turned the wall switch on the gas burner lit, which is good I guess cause the water was hot quickly, but the way I read the manual it should be on electric with switch in that position.

Your Suburban SW6DE is a gas water heater equipped with an optional 120 vac heating element, either function of which could be controlled inside the trailer providing Coachmen chose to install a tank monitor panel that has switches for both gas and electric mode. A pic of this tank monitor would really help but from your description it sounds like Coachmen just installed a panel that controls only the WH's gas mode, in which case you would have to turn the electric mode on/off via the rocker switch accessed from outside the trailer. I had this same setup on our previous KZ Spree so I installed my own illuminating paddle switch inside the camper that allowed me to leave the outside switch turned on permanently and instead control the 120 vac heating element function from inside the camper. Our current Coachmen Freedom Express has an Atwood WH and the tank monitor does have two separate WH switches, one for gas, the other for electric, so I can control both from inside the camper.