North America

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O’Reilly Auto Parts WOW

I emailed O’Reilly Auto Parts to praise the weekend employees who made things right in the whole solenoid debacle.

A customer service rep emailed me back, thanked me for taking the time to say good things about their staff, and asked where they could send me a $50 gift card! WOW!!!!! Again, I did not email to complain, but to show appreciation, something I know customer service reps don’t get enough of.

The card’s in the mail and now I get to dream of what I can buy with all that cash.

Hmm… a socket wrench set? A case of oil for my truck? Ginormous crimpers if they carry such a thing? I wait a week for the truck AC repair and get the Freon? Ooh, they sell wiring! I’ve determined that my idea of using 4AWG is ridiculous and am going to use 10AWG; I can get a 75′ spool from them for $42.99.

It’s like I just won the lottery! 😀 Any other suggestions? 😉

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Two Good Electrical Days In a Row

Today is another day with more sun than expected. It’s chilly, but I’m not complaining!

I’m going to have the computer on charge all day since I’m in major backup mode. My MacBook Pro keeps crashing, so complete hard drive failure is imminent. I just need to decide on a new drive and order it; the choices are a little overwhelming. I want to make sure I have several recent Time Machine backups and two different bootable backups. It’s likely way more than I need, but with the current drive being only good for the dump, I want all the chances I can get to be up and running perfectly about four hours from the new drive making it here.

Power right now is at 88% and holding. I’m actually getting 7 to 8A in, so I’m breaking even. The more the batteries are depleted, the more efficiently the alternator charges them, so I’ll wait till about 4PM and then run the engine for a bit to make sure I’m at at least 90% capacity tonight and then I’ll aim for 100% tomorrow.

In other news, R and S from Colorado are back, so a beach party is imminent!

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Thoughts On Idling My Triton V-10 To Charge My RV Batteries

I don’t like to idle my vehicles, not even in cold weather. Idling my motorhome’s Triton V-10 engine for about an hour to charge my house batteries has just about been giving me hives, enthused as I am by this new-found charging ability.

Knowing that a little education goes a long way to calming my nerves, I did some research about the Triton V-10 engine and I now feel much, much better.

You can find Triton V-10s in buses, ambulances, and other service vehicles that frequently idle for long periods of time. I’m not saying that idling is good for the V-10, but it’s an engine that was built to withstand it.

Another thing that I should point out about my engine is that it has only 98,000KM on it (60,900 miles) and I have only put about 26,000KM (16,000 miles) on it in five years. There is no hope in hell that I will ever run see the end of the lifespan of that engine unless something really dramatic happens.

So the noise and the exhaust are going to still bug me, but I’m not going to let the alarmists freak me out anymore about idling my rig a few hours a week at about one gallon per hour.

As L said over lunch yesterday, that few hours a week won’t kill my engine and at about $3.50/gallon, I’d have to idle over 100 hours to get to the price of an additional solar panel. My stop gap measure to get the 5 to 15AH I’m missing on cloudy clouds  is just fine until I get a better and more efficient charging solution.

One thing I realised tonight, though, is that I can only use my engine to charge during the day because no one in the boondocks wants to be blinded by my running lights! I don’t even know if the running lights can be disabled and I wouldn’t want to anyway, for fear that I would forget to hook them up again.
Today wound up being a bigger power use day than I would have expected because of the computer kerfuffle. We wound up having a lot more sun than expected, too. So between the solar panels and about an hour of alternator charging total today, I’m at 93% battery capacity, which is just about where I was this morning.

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The Importance of Backups

My Macbook Pro has been a little flaky lately, so I ran disk utility on it early this afternoon. Surprise: the hard drive was in bad shape and needed to be wiped and restored from a backup.

Backup…

On shore power, I don’t think about such things. My UPS is always on and therefore so is my external backup drive. Time Machine backs up my system once per hour. When boondocking, I tend to be laxer about such matters, only backing up when I absolutely need to run the inverter for something else….

I froze when I saw that message. I know better than to run systems maintenance before not only a Time Machine backup but also a bootable SuperDuper! backup. When was the last time I backed up? Yesterday morning. What had I worked on in that time? Nothing I needed to recover. My email was still on the server and the only picture I’d uploaded to iPhoto had been shared on Facebook. A day old backup wasn’t going to be a huge loss. Phew!

I don’t know what’s involved in wiping a drive and then restoring it on a PC to bring a user back to the exact same stage there were at when the backup was done. On a Mac, you just select the Time Machine backup you want to use for the backup and then go do something else for a few hours. I’ve complained a lot about Apple lately, but after a frustrating afternoon on the PC, I can only say that it’s good to be home.

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Best Comment Ever About Class Cs with Overcab Bunks

Talking with my Franco-Ontarian neighbours yesterday, we somehow got on the subject of the layout of our rigs.

I told them that I could not live in a class A like theirs because they are too open for me and therefore feel very small. Some class Cs, like mine, are much more like an apartment with several rooms, so I can have an office and then use the overcab bunk to sleep.

The gal replied, “Oh, you sleep up there!”

And her husband wistfully replied, without a hint of sarcasm, “Man, I wish my RV had two stories.”