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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 is just fine until I get a better and more efficient charging solution.<\/p>\n
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.
\nToday 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1242,635,5,1039,3,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-magnolia-beach","category-north-america","category-rving","category-texas","category-travel","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}