North America

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A Local Guide At Last

L and I drove into town this afternoon to buy fresh shrimp so he could show me how to do a shrimp broil. Surprise, surprise, the shrimp people decided not to open today! Dang! Our shrimp boil plans are postponed to Wednesday or Thursday.

We both had to go to Walmart anyway, so the trip into town wasn’t for naught (and it was really, really, really nice to have someone to carry the heavy jugs of water for me!).

L has been wintering down here on and off for 20 years, so he was able to point out a bunch of useful locations, including where to get my 30lb propane tank filled. I always forget how much propane the fridge needs, so my on board tank is just about empty. We’ll take my 30lber into town on shrimp day so I can hook it up.

Coming back into the beach, he pointed out something on the road into the village that made me groan: a laundromat! Dang! I didn’t have to drive to the laundromat in Port Lavaca!

He invited me to go to Galveston tomorrow for the Mardi Gras celebrations, but five hours in a vehicle with someone I just met doesn’t feel right, plus I have a big project due Wednesday morning. So I passed on that even though I was really tempted. And before anybody starts to get any ideas, he’s a much older widower with kids older than me! 😀

We both use a 150W panel to keep our rigs charged and he has the same problem as me keeping his laptop charged after so many grey days. His solution? The same as mine: charge the laptop in the truck (also a Ford Ranger) for a few hours a day. He says that he runs the engine for part of the time and then shuts it off, claiming that the draw from the computer battery is too small to drain the truck battery. I’m a little nervous to try that, but I just might… after moving the truck to the rig in such a way to make a boost possible if I need one! It takes two hours of truck running to full charge both my computer batteries. I did that this morning and will do that this evening.

We are beyond due for sun, but that won’t happen till Wednesday. *sighs* I’m sitting at about 70% battery capacity, so I am only running the fridge. L was an engineer for Boeing, so I’m going to ask him if he knows anything about solenoids and such. If so, I will wrangle his help to pull the RV battery, fix the solenoid, and get charging capacity back from my RV alternator. According to Harold Barre, that’s a very good method of getting the batteries to about 80%, and then you let the solar finish the charge gently so I know the effort and possible expense will be worthwhile.

Anyone know a good sun dance?

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Hey, Look At What I Have!

Can you see that box protruding from the left side of the fridge vent cap where the wire is going in?

I’ve been thinking about adding a solar panel and trying to figure out how to daisy chain it into my existing system. Research brought me across ‘combiner boxes’, which take the connections from solar panels, combine the current, and send it all to the charge controller. So once the original panel is installed with the controller and wiring, adding future panels is just a matter of plugging them into the controller box.

Damn, why didn’t AM Solar sell me one of those? 🙁 Or maybe they did? I should go up on the roof and check! Oh, wait, I took pictures of my installation. Ah ha! Oh, wait. That’s the vent cover. Hmm… I’m not sure. I need to get on the roof after all. No, stupid. They gave you a detailed invoice! Check the invoice and sure enough, I was billed for a ‘refer C-box.’

So adding a new solar panel will just be a matter of screwing and Dicoring it to the roof and plugging it into the combiner box! The job doesn’t seem as scary now! And I’m further motivated to buy from AM Solar, even if I won’t get the lowest price, since I’ll know for sure I have the right connections.

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Dancing On the Pier

Last night, social director S rounded up just about everybody on the beach plus some friends from Port Lavaca and got us all down to the Indianola Fishing Marina for an evening of live music on the pier to sort of celebrate Mardi Gras (I spent two weeks in New Orleans and I got Mardi Gras beads in Indianola, go figure!).

The marina is a tiny building that serves a small menu where you can grab beer ($1.50 a can!) from the cooler. It costs $5 to fish all day (and night) from the pier. I really want to go back there one afternoon. S and I can’t decide which place is cooler, the bar in Chicken or the marina in Indianola. It’s awesome to meet fellow travelers who have been to the same places you have!

Even though it had been kind of wet and gross all day, the temperature on the pier was very comfortable. Our food came quickly and then the music started.

We were being entertained by a local band, Highway 316, and they were good! They had people dancing almost immediately. S got me to join her, then a new neighbour, L, asked me to share a few dances with him. We must have looked like quite the pair, him who hadn’t danced in 20 years and me who has the rhythm of a stick! It was a lot of fun!

Another member of our group were a couple from Germany who had their RV shipped to North America and have been traveling for the past 10 months. They are heading home in March. They said their night in Indianola will make the top of the list of most memorable moments of their trip.

We didn’t stay too late, leaving around 9:30. I somehow got lost on the way home (how you can do that when the marina is literally at the end of the street from which one accesses the beach is beyond me), so by the time my GPS got me turned around and home, it was 10:00.

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Electrical Resolution. Really. Honestly. Truly. I’m Not Kidding. I Know I’ve Said That Before, But It’s Really True Now!

I spent some time last night chatting with Andy Baird about my problem and the more we went back and forth about it, the more I knew he was wrong and I was right. It was like graduating from a very difficult technical academy. I suddenly had the assurance to know that someone else might have a good theory, but I had the real answer.

He still thought that my fridge is somehow switching to 120V power even though I never put it on auto and that my monitor is wiring incorrectly and not showing the correct amps going out.

Using his water analogy, I rephrased my problem. I have plenty of water (power/amps), but not enough pressure (voltage) to use that power. I’m having a pressure problem. What causes pressure problems? Too small pipes (wiring) or clogged pipes (corroded or improper connections).

I stayed up late rereading the voltage drop sections of Harold Barre’s Managing 12 Volts and it said in more technical terms what I just said above. I had to check my connections again.

But by this point, I knew my connections and wiring were good. The problem was at the rig’s end. And then I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’ve often praised the high quality of the Glendale Royal Classic’s construction, plumbing, and appliances, but what do I bitch about? Everything electrical. For pete’s sake, my rig has a different wire colour scheme in the front and the back! And never mind the crappy non-existent battery compartment.

First thing this morning, even before coffee, I shut down power to the rig and got my hands on the wire that brings power from the batteries to the rest of the rig. It is very small, #12 or #14 gauge only, so that already told me that I’ll never be able to run all the stuff I want to run at the same time.

I tugged on the lug and it felt solid, but I wasn’t done yet. I snipped the end off so that I could have a look at the lug. You might want to sit down at this point because what I found was shocking.

Only half of the copper from the wire was crimped into the lug. The rest was just kind of smooshed around it and there were broken pieces. This was a factory connection. Even my bad connections were better than this one!

I exposed a fresh section of wire and crimped on a new lug, then reconnected everything and turned 12V power back on.

The numbers before I redid the connection:

Voltage with nothing on: 12.5V
Fridge on: 11.8V
Fridge and computer on: 9.0V
Computer only on: 11.0V

Now with nothing on: 12.5V
Fridge on: 12.4V
Fridge and computer on: 11.3V
Computer only on: 12.4V

I think these numbers speak for themselves.

Now, that I know every part of my system is good, I don’t have to worry if I see voltage in the 11s at night. It’s just that my rig simply cannot handle massive amounts of current at one time because it is underwired. So if I need to use a lot power at night, mostly to charge the computer or use the printer, I can turn off the fridge to get that extra pressure I need.

Everyone who has chimed in about this, Airmon, Dave, Gary, Andy, Croft and I know I’m being bad and forgetting people, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Even though I solved this, I couldn’t have done it without your help. Each of you was like a dog with a bone pointing the finger at one possible cause or another and I worked at each of those causes until I knew for sure that it wasn’t the answer.

I am going to eventually summarize this whole electrical saga into a series of static pages, but I promise, no more electrical posts for a good long while!

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Electrical Good News?

I came home this evening to a voltage in the low 11s and a battery monitor that claimed I was at 98% capacity…

I had a theory. I shut off the fridge… and voltage leaped to 12.5. I repeated the exercise after being home for about an hour and running a light that long. Still 12.5.

So the culprit is the fridge. For some reason, it’s drawing a ton of voltage.

If I need power at night to do whatever, I can just shut down the fridge, wait a couple of minutes, and do whatever. I still need to figure out why the fridge is drawing that much voltage, and I’ll start by tracing the lines to and from it. But it seems that I really don’t have the huge problem I seemed to have on Wednesday and I have a good clue on where to start troubleshooting.

Thank you to everyone who has been hanging in there with me and trying to help me resolve this issue. I’m getting close! 😀