RVing

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Attending the 5th Annual Willow Bunch farmfest

This afternoon L and I joined up with C&C, Laura, and two ladies I met on the wagon train to attend the 5th Annual Willow Bunch farmfest, an outdoor concert put on by the musical Campagne family. Of all the acts, I best recognized Carmen, a popular French-Canadian children’s folk singer.

The event was so much fun! The music, a good mix of anglo and franco tunes, was excellent. I enjoyed listening to all the French chatter around us. L loves going to music festivals and had a blast.

For dinner, there was the option to buy ginormous grilled bison burgers with sides of coleslaw and wild rice salad. Charles had me try his burger and to my immense surprise, it was nothing like beef, which is gummy, rolls around in your mouth, and leaves a lingering taste. I decided to have one of my own!

For someone who doesn’t like red meat and who has had perhaps five portions of it total in the last fifteen to 20 years, eating that entire bison burger was quite a feat! It actually went down very well as the meat is very dry and crumbly and actually doesn’t have that much flavour. It is just very hearty. Dressed with tomato, onion, cheese, mustard, and relish, it felt more substantial than an equivalent-sized chicken burger. It wasn’t quite ‘yummy’ as I would have put some onion and garlic in the meat itself, but I really enjoyed it and had no trouble eating the whole thing. I’ll be danged! The venison on the wagon train went down well and now so has bison. Maybe I’m more of a game than domesticated meat person….

The only thing that spoiled an otherwise enjoyable evening was the weather. It was COLD, which is NOT normal for this time of year. Those of you who have read my blog for a while might notice that whenever I land somewhere, they have weather that is NOT normal. I may be cursed. 😀

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Opening the Awning For the Very First Time

Yesterday was the day to FINALLY open my awning for the very first time. It has been rolled up tight for at least five years. I don’t know when was the last time the previous owners opened it.

(This post gets interrupted with a knock on the door by someone bearing toast and a Thermos of hot coffee to fortify me for the transcription day ahead.)

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Lots of people over the past few years have promised to help me open the awning but chickened out.

Between L’s experience with his own awning and Dometic’s instructions, we got the sucker open!

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I am not convinced this is something I will do often as it is very heavy and unwieldy, plus I am concerned that I wouldn’t be able to close it quickly enough.

It is in surprisingly good shape. There is a pinprick hole where the door got opened into it and also some discolouration from mould and mildew. It smelled terrible.

I washed the underside with a strong vinegar solution and then L lowered the awning (with me doing one side to understand how it works) and got started on the top for me. You can see how the very dark streak at the top faded quite nicely.

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I had seen a previous owners’ pictures of the awning where I would have sworn up and down that it was inexplicably black and red striped. This purple and pink would have matched the decals when I had them.

Sitting under L’s awning this week made me really appreciate it as you can sit outside even if it’s raining lightly. Heck, I could move my drying laundry under there if I had to.

I just don’t like having to worry about a gust catching it and ripping off half the side of my home!

While I worked yesterday, L also dealt with some of my weeds and fixed a weak spot in the fuel line to the genset. We went out for canasta in the evening. I’m not sure what he’s got planned for today as I have a lot of work to do, but there was a mention of salmon for lunch and we are going to a music festival with C&C and Laura in the evening. I guess those retired engineers know how to keep themselves busy. 🙂

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More of a Remote Stop Than a Remote Start

I just cleaned up Neelix’s litter box area and, as usual, my beloved pig, er cat, had spread the litter all around. Since the shore power cable was still hooked up to the genset I decided to see if my generator still works so that I could vacuum up the mess, rather than use the inverter for power.

Since the genny was cold, it refused to catch using the remote starter. I went outside, closed the choke, and it started immediately. Woohoo! Now that the exhaust is fixed, it’s actually rather quiet and the vibrations aren’t too bad.

Vacuuming done, I just shut down the genny from inside. What a luxury!

I am going to really enjoy using my new-old toy. 🙂

The only too bad thing about the genny is that the hour metre doesn’t work. L let me troubleshoot it yesterday until I needed some technical help cleaning terminals and making new connections, but we’re at the limit of his knowledge.

I know there is a bad connection and on which wire, but we couldn’t find the source in the rat’s nest of wires behind the starter. I pulled on one connector and the positive lead for the remote starter disintegrated, which really discouraged us from further poking around. In the grand scheme of things, not having the hour metre isn’t a huge deal.

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My Electrical Setup Is Starting to Feel Convoluted!

I have an older RV without a transfer switch. I have a hard wired 30A cable in a compartment. It can be plugged in three ways:

1) to a shore power outlet
2) to the generator outlet
3) to the inverter outlet

My main power source is the inverter with the generator being my backup and shore power being a treat.

It is going to quickly become a pain to have to go outside to unplug the shore power cable from the inverter outlet and plug it into the generator outlet. Moreover, my electrical panel default position is a bunch of breakers off, so I have to switch them on before running the gen set. It is not good to use breakers as on/off switches with any sort of regularity.

So it looks like it’s time to consolidate all of that and get a transfer switch. I am looking at my options and see that most offer only two sources of power rather than three, and most are automatic. I also see that some electrically-minded folks have designed their own systems. I’d love to go that route.

What I am envisioning is something that would plug into both the genset 30A outlet and the inverter 15A outlet and into which I could plug the shore power cable. It would also give me an option of which circuits to have live.

The device would be accessible from inside and have a manual switch that would let me pick either the generator or the inverter, but would not start either automatically. So I could put it to inverter, walk to the living room, turn on the inverter, and only my inverter-friendly circuits would come on. If I picked the genset, I’d walk to the kitchen, flip on the remote generator starter, and all my circuits would be live.

Another thought is that surely a 30A splitter must exist? Something I could plug my shore power cable into and which I could then plug into two different outlets, only one of which would be live at a time?

I’m obviously not an electrically-minded person. 😀 But I’m starting to think I need to find myself an RVing forum so I can find some electrically-minded people to bounce ideas off of.

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Non-Working Remote Starter on the Generator

I wasn’t going to worry about the remote (kitchen) starter for the generator not working until I realised that the hour metre also wasn’t working. I went under the sink and discovered that a connection for the starter was loose and one for the metre was broken. L said he can fix the broken connection since he has his soldering equipment.

That left the starter. He went off to take a nap and I tightened the loose connection. I pulled out the multimetre and got 14.4V at the switch, which told me it was getting power and that the problem was at the generator.

I went outside, pulled the cover, traced all the wires, figured out which one went to the generator start button, disconnected it, cleaned off the corrosion, reassembled everything, and went inside.

Soon as I hit start, there was a rumble outside. Now, the genny won’t start since the choke needs to be manually activated, but this gives me hope that a bit of solder will get the hour metre working. No. Wait. I just started the genny from inside! OMG!

I feel pretty accomplished. 🙂