Month: February 2013

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Thinking About Saskatchewan

It’s hard to believe that I will be back in Canada in about 10 weeks. I don’t really want to think about that, but the fact is that I’m heading for rural territory with no idea of what services, if any, will be available to me. As things stand, I have no internet options whatsoever besides public wifi for Canada since I broke my ties with Telus. I’ve conceded that the only decent Canada-wide plan that would work for me is that offered by Bell with its Turbo Hub, so that’s what I’m looking at getting. I did email SaskTel to see what my hard wired options are and got a stock reply that had nothing to do with my question, as expected. I’d rather stick with a nationwide provider and mobile internet anyway.

When I bought my property, there was zero cell service in the village and for miles around. Now, I’m seeing coverage up to the limits of the community. This gives me hope that a booster would work. I contacted a company that puts together booster systems for folks in rural municipalities to see what they have to offer for my situation and at what cost. At this point, I’m looking at $300 for the Turbo Hub, plus about $70 a month for 10GB (remember I got FIVE GB for that price from Telus), so even if I end up forking out an extra $500 for a booster, I’m still well ahead of what it would cost to get a hard wired connection, if one is even possible.

I want to avoid landing without having a solid plan for getting online even if it takes a week or two to execute that plan. The loose ideaat this point is to get to my property and take a few days to meet the neighbours and establish a good enough relationship to determine if a summer there will be feasible. Who knows, the neighbours could end up being great and offer to sell me power, hard wired internet, water, and access to a toilet for dumping with a macerator, or they could all be horrible people who decide to run me out of town. I just won’t know till I get there.

It is encouraging to see that cell phone coverage map expand exponentially. I’m still seeing a big dead spot around my old homestead in the Gatineau Hills, but that’s no surprise. Saskatchewan is the second to last frontier in Canada (much more so than even Yukon, the NWT, or Nunavut, and just ahead of Quebec outside of the Montreal-QC City corridor)), so I’m gratified to see them moving ahead quickly, with their coverage map jumping in leaps and bounds.

I’m not looking forward to going back to Canada, but I’m slowly taking my head out of the sand about the notion of it. 🙂

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Looking At the Calendar

Until last night, I planned to pull out of here on or about March 7th and head to San Antonio. Looking at the weather from Dallas and points north lately, and across the continent as a whole this year, I suspect that spring will come late this year. Even though I want to give myself plenty of time to get back to Canada, I want to delay hitting iffy weather as long as possible.

The budget is tight, as it always is, and there aren’t a lot of free places like this in Texas where you can spend an extended period of time. I found a spot in San Antonio that will cost me $5 a day, so I plan to spend two weeks there. But if I leave here on the 7th, that puts me in Austin around the 21st and I haven’t found any free places beyond Walmarts and the like in that area. I wouldn’t mind bouncing around for a few nights, but that’s no way to live long-term.

All that to say that as long as no county officials come knock on my door and tell me to move on, I’m going to spend one additional week here and leave around the 14th of March. I’ve seen some of the other boondocking opportunities along the coast and I just don’t see any point in moving. Expenses here are super low, I have a full social calendar, and the weather has been good.

Being here another week will also loosen up the budget a tad for the trip north so that I can keep traveling rather than just try to get from point A to point B while spending as little as possible.

In other words, I don’t want to move and I’m glad I have a good reason not to. 🙂

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No AC

I had some trouble finding the low side port for my Ford Ranger’s AC system as it was not the super obvious one right by the compressor. Thank goodness for YouTube!

I emptied the can in while running Max AC full blast, but that did not convince the compressor to come back to life. So no toad AC for me as I have much more pressing things to spend money on. 🙁

I did succeed in using my new socket wrench set to disconnect the battery and turn off the check engine light (although I had to do it twice since 10 seconds wasn’t long enough). Here’s a tip: regularly checking the oil in your vehicle is a good idea. Forgetting to put the cap back on the oil port is not. 🙂

 

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A Little Restraint Needed

I woke up to a decalibrated battery monitor that claimed I was at 100% capacity and pulling in 13.0A. Both it and the solar array monitor claimed that I was at 10.5V.

My first thought? Damn, I need to do some carpentry.

I went outside and, sure enough, the batteries had shifted a little from all the wind yesterday (bad enough that I felt so queasy I went to bed at about 9PM after taking a Gravol to help me sleep!!!). The shift was enough to loosen one of the top butterfly-type nuts on the batteries. These are the ones that keep giving me grief, so I need to find a better option for them.

Anyway, the batteries were sitting at about 12.4V and a quick flick of the wrench got everything nice and tight again. I didn’t use much power yesterday and we will have sun today, so I’ll be able to recalibrate the battery monitor shortly.

After installing my new batteries in Suffolk, I restrained them the way I did my old pair, but I removed the wood when I got here to make it easier to keep tweaking the setup. I’ve now learned that it really doesn’t take much to move those heavy suckers and that they should be restrained at all times.

We’re supposed to have sun all week, so I am seriously considering taking the batteries out completely and moving the fuse and shunt to a more accessible location for checking connections. The hiccup is that I am severely limited by the length of my cables and I put the fuse and shunt where they are because there was no more obvious place to put them. So it might just be exercise for exercise’s sake, but I’ve conceded that my battery bank setup is never going work for me and will continue to cause me grief.

Anyway, not a huge deal this morning, especially since I’m very well rested. 🙂

 

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Slowly Understanding the Battery Monitor

I checked the battery monitor about an hour ago and I was still 20AH away from a full charge and only putting in 4A. Now, it’s flashing full!!!

I think I know what is going on.

The solar monitor gives me a reading at a given moment. I might be putting in 7A for a few minutes, but then the clouds come out and I start putting in 4A. I could end up averaging only 1A coming in for that hour despite that 7A reading at the beginning.

I think the battery monitor is giving me delayed information after the fact. That is, every so often, it tallies up what really came into the bank and then adjusts the amp hour total up or down. The computer is certainly sophisticated enough to do this.

Moreover, I woke up at about 24AH down and have been charging for 8 hours. The AH total has barely budged all day, until now, even though I was supposedly putting in about 3A all day. 3×8=24.

I wish there was a Xantrex LinkPro for dummies book. The information that comes with the monitor isn’t very helpful.