The Big Short

The shop I work at has been undergoing a huge remodel so I haven’t been there as much as usual lately.  I have been working on some of these non-shop odd jobs like the security upgrade I just finished and a few other things.  But tonight I was sort of in the vicinity so decided to spend the night here for a change.  It is much quieter sleeping in this industrial park area surrounded by residences than it is next to the train tracks or on a busy street in front of one of my usual haunts.

It was funny though.  There were some very smug hipsters working on building out a stealth camper at the shop tonight.  I stopped to observe them for a bit.  They had some big money into their project.  A newish high top, all white and shiny.  I would have loved to have that kind of budget for mine.   With them, however, observe was all I could really do.  They already knew everything so there was little they could gain from me.   I was looking at their sloppy insulation job.  Un-faced ridged foam on the ceiling with large open cell expanding foam between the pink foam and the frame members.  No vapor barrier!  Just 1/4” tongue and groove (of all things) over the top.

What happens when the puck lights get too hot in the
summertime. They melt.

I had hopes maybe they were building it to drive south and stay where it is sunny and seventy all the time.  …Alas, no.   It is staying right here in this cold climate.  Here is the thing, built this way they are going to have huge condensation problems.  Living in a steel box, the enemy is water.  Humans wash with it.  Cook with it.  Eat with it.  …and expel it on their own.  Think about your breath outside on a really cold day.  You think all that water vapor isn’t coming out all the time?  Or the steam coming off a plate of food being heated in the microwave. That water vapor is going to migrate itself right through all those cracks in that tongue and groove, through that open cell insulation and to the cold steel skin of the van itself.  There you will either have a mold problem, a rust problem or both.

What they should have done was put up a layer of plastic film.  I should have done this too even though I used foil lined insulation and metal taped all the seams.  I still get some condensation.  Second, if they wanted to use the tongue and groove beadboard they should have done an underlayment of painted plywood.  A lot of the information online is written by people who are smart enough to not live where I do.  But, that climate difference allows them to do it wrong but get away with it.  Here, when it is bitterly cold, this problem is going to be huge.

The newly built and very heavy duty side door
curtain rod holder. But the screws go into where
many wires live.

A second problem in the Hipster van, their puck lights were placed tight against the pink foam.  No way for them to dissipate heat.  The only good side of this are likely the light will overheat and be ruined fairly quickly.  Or, if it actually progresses to some fire, at least you don’t tend to sleep with your lights on.  They should be alerted to the smell and the smoke as long as they are there.  But these lights need a little bit of air gap.  Again, my foil lined foam helps me here but this is a summer problem.  Imagine how hot it is beating in the sun.  Now imagine you hop out of the van some morning and forget to turn off the lights.  They are gonna get damned hot.

I never claimed to have made no mistakes in my project.  I spent last weekend fiddling with one that will continue to haunt me, but that I got working for now.  How it manifested itself was the main two overhead ceiling lights stopped working.  I noticed this problem as I was getting the van packed up for The Wife and I to head north for our annual parents only camping escape.  First things first, I checked the fuse box and indeed did find a blown fuse so I made to replace it.  When I plugged the new fuse in it blew immediately.  So I had a dead short.

The thick heavy wire that I thought was a good idea.

At that time, I thought I knew exactly what had caused it.  The day before I was in the process of building a new door side curtain rod.  The one I installed the previous year was Walmart crap and I knew it wasn’t going to last.   I was right.  I think it was the fourth day of use we had some visiting Canadians in the van.  On the way out they got a little caught up in the curtain, breaking the thin plastic of it’s attachment point.  Of course no one can be as sorry and deeply apologetic as a Canadian who has damaged one of your belongings.

Since that time the year before I had a plan to build something better but of course time passes.  A year in fact.   It was just days before our departure this year when I got going on the new version.  I purchased a two inch copper coupler from the plumbing department and did an initial job of flattening it in a vice.  Then, flattened it even more with a hammer and anvil.  To this now flat hunk of copper I soldered a 1” copper cap open side out.  I drilled four holes in the corner of the flat part.  Then I affixed this unit to the frame of the van with some self tapping sheet metal screws.

Even pulling the switch out was very difficult due to
how thick and inflexible the wires are.

Those screws went into the frame where I have run a lot of electrical wires.  I didn’t notice at the time but I was sure what had happened was one of those screws tapped it’s way right into the wiring causing the short and now preventing my lights from working.  To me, that was the only logical explanation.  But the trouble with fortune telling, often it is wrong.

I didn’t get my curtain rod built.  Partly due to this new electrical problem and partly due to not having a metal cutting blade for my band saw.  My design idea hinged on cutting half an inch off one side of a 1” copper elbow so it would fit in closer to the van.  I didn’t have a way to do it straightly.  I can tell you for sure it can’t be done with a sawzall.

So then time passed again until this past weekend   From time to time I have prodded around the area of where I attached the rod bracket I had made.  Feeling in the frame holes to see if I could determine what wire was hit.  I was so sure of myself I didn’t really look into other causes.  The trouble was even though I couldn’t actually reach them, I couldn’t feel any wires in the vicinity of where I thought the pointy end of the screws would be.  I was confused.

Wire nuts are great but as I discovered, only when
joining the same types of wire.

Over the weekend I dug in.  I opened up the box where the switch is located next to the side doors.  I figured from this point I could test the wires with an electrical meter and find what wire was grounded.  What I found instead, once I got the box opened up and pulled out was even more confusing.  The wires tested good. I popped in a new fuse.  The lights worked fine!

I had been living without overhead lights for about two months at this point.  Not like a huge, huge inconvenience in such a small space with other lights. …Not to mention the long summer days with light pouring in the ceiling fan dome.  But yeah, I was kind of disgusted with my lazy ass self for not checking into it more earlier.   I turned the lights back off and put the switch box together.  Flipped the switch to turn the lights on.  Poof!   Another blown fuse.   Ahhhh.  I see.  I have learned something.

Here was my mistake.   I did a lot of reading before I did any building.   I read that bigger wire was better for DC current.  You get a lot less voltage drop when you use larger wire for longer runs.  The longest run I had was this one, from the fuse panel to the front of the side door and then to the floor to ceiling shelf and then to the lights.   I just happened to own some heavy gauge wire that I bought two houses ago.  Some #10 three conductor with ground.  House wire, solid core.  I thought this would be perfect.

This wire was not perfect from the very beginning.  Just to give you a bit of background.  Wire comes in two types.  Sold core, which is one strand of copper in the gauge you purchased.  It is heavy and inflexible.  This is the kind of wire you have in your house, running through the walls. The second type is stranded.  Take a whole bunch of little thin copper wires and twist them together to make up the diameter of wire you need.  Stranded wire is very flexible.  At home it is the wire that goes from a light or appliance to the wall plugin.  Its flexibility allows it to handle plenty of bending and abuse.

So there I was, trying to bend this thick heavy wire around corners in my van.  It was hell to get in place.  But now, a year and a half later I am discovering a new problem.  The short, that causing my fuse to blow was because this stiff wire was rubbing against the side of the switch box.  In the course of time, the insulation rubbed off and now I have a bare spot on the wire.

What I did to fix it was cut the wire back and run a short, three inch long bit of stranded wire from the end of the cut to the switch.   It wasn’t an easy job because using a wire nut on two stranded wires, or two solid wires, is easy and works well.  But, with one of each, not so well at all. I don’t know if this is going to cause me more trouble in the future or not.

So no, my build has not been perfect.  I have made mistakes.  I am sure there are mistakes yet to reveal themselves.  There are mistakes yet to be made.  But I do listen.  When I find another van dweller, I am all ears.

I feel just like Top Gun

I really wish life could be calm and simple.  Growing up that’s how I always imagined it was going to be.  Every day I wake up and… (you know, after a little coffee first), I always think it is going to be a great day.  By the second cup my feelings on this might even be apparent to my close family members.  But being this way puts me at a disadvantage. It kind of boggles my mind, and I have a tough time wrapping it around the fact it isn’t always so for others.  Whether it is the age they are living through, gender, body chemistry or electrical short, they don’t wake thinking the same. I am not saying all those planned great days turned out to be so.  A few of them over the years have royally sucked!  But most day-afters, I still woke with that same optimistic hope.

I really think my whole attitude stems from a friend back in college who brought to my attention an Enzio Ferrari quote.  Reporters were questioning him about the rear view mirror design on the new Ferrari Testarossa.  He scoffed at them and said “What is behind me is of no consequence” (—No, film fans, this pre-dates _Gum Ball Rally_ :-)  )  I loved that quote and took it to heart immediately.  Maybe too much, The Wife, might argue.   I dunno, I don’t think so but you are entitled to your opinions.

You can see the problem.  There are few places
where you can line up eight holes for screws.

The short version of our life is, I haven’t been in the van much these past couple of months. These past couple of weeks I have been living a hotel life in a smaller_than_my_normal city.  A city that only has two Indian food restaurants.  It. Is. Tough.

But tonight I am back in the city.  Sitting in one of my usual pubs.  Walking to it I get to cross a park with some lovely piped in string quartet.  I stopped to listen for a bit.  The temperature tonight is perfect for walking.  The bar is usually quiet on a Monday night but tonight it is fairly busy.  Only three empty tables.  The room is large and they have added acoustic tiles to the ceiling so really the noise in here is not too bad.  They have two waitresses of note and I am happy to see either of them on duty when I walk in.  Were it not for these two, the bar business would suffer.  They are the only two who work in this place that possess the servant’s sixth sense.  They know what the customer needs and they know when the customer needs it.  One of them looks like Megan Fox (a genre I married and it continues to make me weak in the knees :-) ) the other, I kid you not, looks *exactly* like Roz, the floor manager, in the movie Monster’s Inc.  They are both great at their job!

The first install, which looked so
perfect.

Between all the other crisis I am living in right now I have gotten two very important van projects done.   One other is coming along nicely. The first is I got deadbolt locks installed on the side and the bulkhead doors.   The side door was tricky.  I have some rust on that door and I am worried about making it worse if I insulate it.  I have elected instead to think more in terms of blanketing the inside.  I don’t have anything over the metal of the side door.  In a way, this allows me to be sure I am attaching my lock to the steel of the van, but it was certainly tricky to find a spot where most of the holes lined up with steel.

I actually had to install it twice.  What I discovered after the initial install was the bolt would extend slightly out as the door swung.  So it would catch just on the very edge of the opposing door, preventing full closure.  Of course it wasn’t as easy as just moving the bolt side over a little bit for all the afore mentioned reasons.   I had to move both pieces and raise them up about half an inch just so I could get everything to line up.

The bulkhead door bolt was much easier to install.  I discarded the catch side of the lock.  The bolt side I attached it near the bottom of the bulkhead door.  Once it was installed I then marked the floor around the circumference of the bolt.  Then it was just a matter of drilling an 1/8” oversized hole into the floor.

The bulkhead deadbolt.

I have to say, when I was done, I felt immediately more safe.  In my work, I have been the preacher for a long while.  For years I have said “Security through obscurity is not security, it is luck” but I have never really lived by that talk. I have been lucky for a long time.  But I have to be realistic to my situation.  I am not parking in Mayberry. With the window screens in place and the deadbolt, it will take a while for someone to break into the back of my van.

The reason I am happy it will take a while ties in with the second thing I got done.  I got the siren installed.  Under the floor of the van I mounted an ELK Products 30 Watt Siren Dual Tone Indoor/Outdoor Siren that I picked up from Amazon.  This siren is 120db, which is one heck of a lot of noise.  The human pain threshold is 110db.  In terms of shear loudness from a chart the google brought me to, this sits smack dab in the middle between a chain saw at close range and a military jet taking off.

From the relay to the siren I used
16ga extension cord. At the splice,
several layers of heat shrink tubing to
keep it all dry.

The underbody install was not exactly what I wanted to do but space under the hood is super limited.  It is made to be outdoors but I realize this is a little harsher than the manufacture intended.  I mounted it to the underbody, facing the rear wheels.  I have it pointed somewhat down, hoping any water it might collect will drain out.

To control the siren I installed a covered switch at the top of the floor to ceiling shelf.  Number one son asked me, “A covered switch, you mean like the fighter pilots?  Cool!!!” I have been wanting to use of the these ever since I bought a bag of them.  A setup like this is the perfect use case.  I do not want to bump this switch at the wrong time.  The cover will totally prevent accidental discharge.

The covered switch is the only way to activate the siren.  This isn’t about some break-in automated security system.  This is all about making the bad guy go away when I am already inside.

The relay, just a little box under the hood that makes all
the magic happen.

The siren uses quite a bit of juice.  Here is something you need to understand about wiring this stuff.  The voltage is sort of like the water pressure of an electrical system.   An automotive system is 12 volts.  So to put that in water terms, your water pressure ain’t that great.  Not near as good as the water pressure in your house.  But think about that time you strung four garden hoses together to water the trees out at the back of your lot.  It took forever didn’t it?  At times, when someone was running water in the house, you were thinking you could pee faster than what is coming out of the end of that hose.

Back in van terms, if I had to run a wire all the way from the battery up in the front back to the switch, then back to where the horn is mounted.  Well, there is your equivalent to stringing four garden hoses together.  …And the pressure ain’t great. You can kind of fix this problem by using thick wires.  But, thicker wire is expensive and hard to work with.

Pointed rearward.  Just behind my floor vent.

What I did instead was use something called a relay, which is available at most auto parts stores.  --Or should be.  The first auto parts place I went to directed me to dimmer switches and turn signals.  Not the same thing.  A relay is sort of like a remote control for a light switch.  I mounted the relay up under the hood.  Relays themselves take almost no power.  So I was able to run a thin wire from another circuit in the floor to ceiling shelf to the switch, then on to the relay.  On the other side I ran a wire from the fuse box to the relay, then on to the siren.  Stringing the wires was work.  Actually doing the wiring was dead easy.

With these series of installs last night I slept great.  And, after all, isn’t that the point of this whole project?

Nothing Good Happens at 3AM

The Wife and I spent last week at our favorite campground. To say I am less than motivated this week upon my return would be the under statement of the year. I lengthened the vacation some just so I would have only a three day week to hate life itself, rather than a full first week. Still though it is rough to leave almost two weeks in my lover's arms.

Additionally complicating my life, I don't have the van this week.  I’ll get into that in a second. But it really hadn't occurred to me how much I have let my couch network languish while I am living the van life. Wednesday morning on the drive in those realities presented themselves.

The good Doctor is off riding his bicycle across the United States….for whatever reason I will never understand.  It all seems very tiring to me.  I rode the North/South cross country route on a motorcycle one time and it like near to wore me out.  To pedal it?  Oh hell no.   I mean, Amtrak will let you do the same thing and you never have to break a sweat.

The true object of everyone's interest.  Yes, I drove the
van, thank you very much for asking!

Other friends are vacationing as well and then there is the one I have been promising a van tour who became hard to reach after I mentioned I was in the family van this week.  I guess the van has become my identity.  These days when I show up at parties people say, “hey Joe, great to see you!” as they are looking over my shoulders, “Did you drive the van?” with the first real excitement in their voice. I give a lot of tours.

It was amusing during the time we were camping because we ended up meeting a couple who we hung out with a bit over a couple of days.  Both of them in the education business, they had the natural curiosity of the genre.  He was a self admitted construction clutz and yet he was interested in every detail.  Shooting me rapid fire questions at first, settling back to random mid-conversation “how did you do this…?”  Or, pointing at a missing LCD panel, “what goes there?” questions as the four of us lounged inside.

She asked me the only question I have ever been stumped by in the almost two years of this project.  It was when I was describing the temperature probe network. At one point she said “why would anyone ever think of this?” I told her it is very important to know the temperature under the van for cooling purposes…and she got that, but again asked “yeah but why would anyone think of thinking about this?” I was genuinely surprised to get a new question.

It was at this point I had a choice.  I  could admit to being the obsessed tweeker my friend Craigie refers to me as, or I could throw it in the compliment pile. (I must be some sort of f-ing genius!) I chose the latter (of course) but replied, “too much free time.“

During this week as well our time at the campground overlapped with a genuine fan of this blog and project.  The heater salesman I have referred to in previous installments comes to the campground this same week as well. I talked to him about the project last year but he had not yet gotten his van tour.  It was interesting and reminiscent of the blog three blogs ago.  —Where my readers know as much about my project as I did.  He was interested. He wanted to see it.  But at a certain point we both knew I was grasping for details not already posted here. He knew the published story front to back.

The reason I am not in the van this week though is a touch on the scary side.  I had someone (maybe) trying to break in on me the last night I was in town.  It was about three am.  I woke up, likely because I heard a noise.  I realized I could hear a voice, or voices.  Now the van has a pretty extensive camera system.  I can use it to see all around the parameter.  But, I had that camera system disconnected because we were going camping the next day.  The Wife wanted to put her bag on the shelf where the camera hub usually sits.  I figured I didn’t need it taking a bunch of pictures of myself and others walking around a campground anyway.  So I had disconnected the cameras and cleaned up the shelf the night before.  The cameras were off.

I installed them!

Now when you are sitting someplace blind, things can be scarier than what they really were.  In hind sight, I am actually less sure about the break in part.  The night in question (I have always wanted to write that phrase) I was in the back corner of a parking lot I use often.  To me, I thought this parking spot was perfect.  It was out of the way.  I would park somewhat narrowly into the second parking spot in.  Making it rare then that anyone parked next to me, in front of my side doors.  Parked this way it was almost like I had my own private deck outside my doors.  The parking lot I am in is about three city blocks long.  At the far end is a convenience store.   At the back, outside of my doors is some ten foot chain link fence, then the railroad tracks.   The end oposite the convenience store there is no fence and the land drops away in a gully.  There is a fairly sizable homeless tent village down in there along the tracks.  Also at that end, a bridge and some stairs in the corner of the lot funnel all the pedestrian traffic from that whole little walking distance neighborhood across the middle of the lot.

I thought my spot was perfect because it was out of that foot traffic.  But what I didn’t account for was other people would find this spot its attractive as well.  My van, made it even better for them. They could hang out back behind it and do whatever they wanted.

So I woke up hearing noises and voices.  I couldn’t hear very well at all but I knew I didn’t want to move the side curtain or they might see motion.  In fact, it was more complicated than that.  I didn’t want to even touch the side curtain.  The night before I had gotten my new side curtain from The Seamstress and we had a mix up on how the magnets were sewn in.  It was just barely holding up.  I did not want it falling down making the whole inside of the van visible to whoever was outside.

I listened at the floor hole, but I couldn’t tell how many people there were.  In the end, I feel like there was only one.  I have deadbolt lock for both the side door and bulkhead door but I don’t have them installed yet.  There just have been other priorities.  I gotta admit, when I was laying on the floor, ear stuck down the vent hole, unable to hear over my own hyperventilating… Well, at that moment, those  priorities seemed a little wrong.

I kinda was getting a handle on it after a few minutes.  The practical side was starting to kick in.  I was beginning to think, “how am I supposed to go back to sleep with this joker outside?” So I must have been calming back down.  Then I heard a noise like maybe he was pulling on the door handles.   …Or maybe he stumbled and fell against the side of the van.  Or, maybe he moved his bicycle a bit and it scraped against the side.

Anyway, whatever happened the panic button got pushed big time.  I opened up the bulk head door and slid into the drivers seat.  What I should have done at that point was open up and slam the door.  The bad guy would have said “Whoa!  I didn’t even hear that mofo walk up on me!”  Of course no one is a genius at three a.m. either.  I just started the engine.  A guy popped forward to look through the passenger window and then dashed back.  I heard some noise again, I was thinking he was making a last ditch effort at breaking in.  What he was actually doing was grabbing his bike before I ran it over.

I drove about three blocks away.  Pulled into a street parking space and crawled into the back.  About an hour of unwinding and I got back to sleep.  Lemme tell you what, I was a groggy unit at seven oh four when my alarm went off.

I am going to have to do a couple of things to the van this weekend.    I need to get the side door dead bolt lock installed.  The bulkhead door is less of an issue, but I will try to get that one done as well.   The back doors, when I am in my primary lot, are pretty safe.  I back right up to the fence and those doors are not really openable.  Still I don’t always park where this is the case so I will put a chain with a padlock across the back doors. I have burglary screens for all the windows but I have resisted putting them on so far.  I like being able to pull the blackout shades back and seeing outside and I think I would lose that.  I will do some more planning on that.

Window screen in place.  I now have
burglar bars!

Finally I ordered a siren.  I will mount it under the van somewhere.  I also have a bell that I plucked out of a dumpster a couple of years ago.  I haven’t tested it but it likely works.  If so I will put both of these units on switches so I can flip them on from my bed.  It will give me a chance to use a couple of the red covered switches I bought a while back.  I would sure feel better if I could make a whole bunch of noise.

The last thing, I need to re-evaluate my parking protocols.  I need to think less about my own convenience and more about security.  I need to park between two vehicles whenever I can.  If I can only have a vehicle on one side, make it the door side.

I have a friend who has a refrigerator magnet that says “Oh god, please let this not be another learning experience.” This project has been a continuous flow of them.  But, I confess, I have learned a lot via this thankfully harmless incident.

The First Heat Wave

Back when it was minus twenty four degrees, I complained.  Sure.  Everyone does. But I don’t think I complained very much because I knew this time was coming.   It is crazy that less than a month ago I was contemplating snow delayed travel plans and this past weekend was in the nineties.  Today, my first day back at work from a holiday, it was ninety three in our big city.  But it was never really a sunny 93, more of a hazy muggy one.

This morning when I arrived I forgot to open up the roof vent.  But, really it wouldn’t have made that much difference if I had.  About eleven it was pouring.  The roof vent would have closed and the fan shut off when it sensed the rain.  Then it cleared enough so I could grab some lunch before it rained lightly again.  By four it had stopped raining and cleared to a haze but the van was in the shadow of our office building.   I popped out and opened up the roof vent.  At that point the ambient air temperature was still about ninety.  The van was actually cooler inside than the outside temperature.  I was temped to just leave it sealed up but then in the end, opened it and had the fan blowing at 85%.

The square cut out of the poly-iso foam
to expose the plywood underneath. 

About six thirty I was contemplating my dinner options.  Everything I brought today was still frozen so I was contemplating a walk.  That got dashed when I stood from the cube farm to check the weather.  Not good.  I came straight out to the van it was already sprinkling when I arrived.  Inside, it was warm but really not bad.

I have the ability, via some temperature probes and some little process control computers (that I will get to in a later post),  to know a lot more about my environment now.  I just finished heating some dinner in the microwave and it is eight thirty in the evening.  It has been off and on raining since I came out.  Prior to that, the cabin temperature of the van was eighty degrees.  Cooking raised that temperature by two degrees.  But, the outside temperature is a wet seventy.  If it ever stops raining I am going to be able to kick on my roof vent and drop my inside temperature right down.

If it would only stop raining…

Here is the tape tab I attached to the
square of insulation.  This will make it easy
to pull the insulation out without damage.

This weekend was a hot one as well.  Record temperatures and muggy.  Despite that, I had a job to do.  The one I had driven The BV home to perform.    As I mentioned in my last post, or to condense here; 1) I have to be able to access the tops of the batteries four times a year.  I have to visually inspect the fluid level and test the specific gravity.  2)The buggers are heavy, and for energy efficiency, on as short of wires as possible.  Their mobility was both limited and difficult.  Therefore some type of top access panel needed to be constructed.

I pulled the mattress out and brought it inside the house. -This one step was the bulk of why the job was happening at home.  The single most valuable investment in the entire project, I wanted it well out of harms way.

Underneath the mattress I have the panels which will become my under-bed vent system.  Until such time, this is just the most convenient place to store them.  Under that I have one inch of poly-iso foam insulation.  Then, three quarters of an inch of plywood.

Starting out was really the difficult part.  I had to figure out where the batteries sat and then transfer those measurements up on to the insulation of the bed.  I cut a slightly oversized hole in the insulation.  That part was difficult because the utility knife I have only cuts a little over 3/4” deep.  I ended up using a ginsue knife from my cooking drawer to make the final 1/4” cut.  My friend Craigie has one of those nice extendable blade utility knives.  That would really be the way to go.

Here is the lip that will hold the access
panel door in place.  This is only glued in.
I could have shot some brads in as well
but that would have required battery removal.

When cutting this foam to cut a block out, you have to cut a relief.  That’s a second cut, about an eighth of an inch outside your primary cut on two adjacent sides.  When I dug out this relief, the inset cut square of insulation could be lifted up out of the hole.  I wrapped the edges of these squares with wide metal foil tap. I also put foil tape tabs at each end of the squares.  These tabs will fold up over the top but make it easy to pull out the foam square in the future.

Now it became serious.  It was very, very important to not cut *any* wires while cutting the plywood.  I set my circular saw depth to barely cut though.  But then I also checked it out closely underneath.  I had one screw in wire clip holding one of the wires coming from the solar charge controller.  That clip was about in the middle of my proposed door.  I removed it.  That allowed that wire to drop out of likely saw blade harms way.  At the back I have a second shunt on the line going/coming from the inverter/charger.  I hope to some day record my high voltage appliance electrical usage separately from my twelve volt.  —Data geek, remember?

"We're in a tight spot!"

Once I had the foam out, the wires out of the way and the saw depth set, I was ready to cut.  And I did.  For almost two inches.   Ah yes.  Old house.  I used the saw to cut some lath and plaster in its last use.  I had to divert to the hardware store for a new blade.  The circular saw cutting was really fairly minor.  Only a few inches on each side, but it is way easier to control your depth of cut than a jig saw would be. 

I undercut the corners just a bit.  Leaving the square hanging.  Then, after a double check to again make sure no wires would be affected, I used a portable jigsaw to cut the final little bit in the  corners.  Once I had the doors cut out I used them to trace an oversized hollow square out of quarter inch plywood.  I made it a little over an inch wider on three sides, a touch narrower at the back because it was butting up to the divider wall between the battery compartment and the rear storage, behind the drawers.

You can just see the battery cap.

Once cut out, I glued it in place under the bed —Uh, that is after another trip to the hardware store.  Any project worth doing requires at least two trips to the hardware store.  My glue must have frozen in the great New Years freeze-up.  Back when I ran out of propane over Christmas break.  Back from the store with the glue, I clamped it all in place.  It was a tough job getting all those clips and clamps around in such a small space.

Of course I forgot to take a picture of the finished product.  But, in all of this I never did check the fluid levels so I will have to be in there again in a couple of weeks.  I will get some pictures of what is involved in the process.

The two battery access panels out and the glue-in lip
in place with clamps holding them.

It was an exhausting day though.  Temperatures in the nineties and lots and lots of climbing in and out of the van to check cuts, clearances, etc.  I think I drank about ninety ounces of water and sweated it all back off.  Plus, I used it as a juicy rationalization for consuming about half a jar of kalamata olives later that night.  ...I had to replenish my salt, didn't I? :-)

It is currently a little after eleven pm.  It has been raining fairly steadily (excepting for the periods where it was pouring) since a little after six thirty.  Tomorrow night, when we have forecast more of the same, I am going to park on higher ground.

Battery Access Version 2.0.0

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago but then never pushed publish.  It is crazy how much the weather has changed since I wrote it....  Back at that time I was saying "Yeah, remember that snow storm in the forecast this past weekend?  Six inches of fresh snow? Never mind about that, it was almost seventy today." Tonight I am sitting in a bar with an outdoor patio.  It is purely crazy to be living somewhere you can be drinking beer in a t-shirt looking at a snowbank from the bar parking lot plowing that must be twelve feet tall.  Purely crazy.

I have come to the conclusion I have made another mistake.  This one though, this one is going to be a tricky one.  You see, The Wife was the one who said I should build it a different way.  And she’s the very devil when it comes to matters of me being wrong.  In my defense though, I have some sound scientific principles behind the decision I made.  If I was, say twenty seven, I wouldn’t even recognize the problem I have.  Sadly, I am not.

Here’s the deal.  To maintain my cabin batteries in top condition I need to check their fluid level in each cell of the battery.  Additionally, in my case since I had that wiring problem, I really should be checking the specific gravity of the fluid each time with a battery testing hydrometer.  This should happen four times a year.  Each battery weighs 62 pounds.

The battery tucked in under the bed.

What my plan had been was to place the batteries on some polypropylene squares and slide them out each time I needed to.  I figured some 3/8” plastic with some rounded corners would not bend with the weight and slide around pretty easy on the steel of the van floor.  I hadn’t quite figured out how to keep these sixty two pound bricks from sliding around all the rest of the time.  --Like when I am driving down the road and take a corner a little too fast.  I was hoping to work that all out once it had become a problem.  But when I was planning these plans I also hadn’t actually seen a van up close yet.  Once I did, I immediately saw why these plastic slides wouldn't really work.  The van floor isn’t the smooth waffle around the outside parameter like it is in the middle.  It has seams with rubber calk coatings.  No way my plastic slides were going to work in this environment. They would stick to the calk.

I ended up just putting the batteries right on the floor.  They are pretty solid there.  Even though they are not attached down at all, they still don’t slide around.  They are still movable if I need to drag them out like I did a couple of months back for the re-wiring job.

Snow storm that week, ninety this week.

Here’s where The Wife got involved.  She suggested I build battery boxes with access down through the bed.  She suggest I make an access panel I could get at with the mattress out.  The problem with that idea from a safety perspective is when you charge lead acid batteries and particularly when you do what is called equalizing them.  The equalizing process charges them at a high voltage.  The purpose is to remove a film which builds up on the lead plates. The batteries actually boil during this process.  In this case, the steam that is coming out of the pot as it were is pure hydrogen gas.

Remember high school chemistry and the big chart on the wall?  Hydrogen occupies the upper left square.  The significance is this gas has little tiny molecules and it can seep into the smallest of cracks.  Propane gas is both significant larger in molecule size and it is heavier than air.  Any propane I leak in the back of the van will escape out the floor.  Hydrogen on the other hand is lighter than air so it will try to work its way up into the cabin.  Let me switch you from Chemistry to History.  Remember the Hindenburg?

So it was for these scientific reasons along with my opinion of the labor of pulling the mattress out every three months just so I could test the batteries seemed like too much work. I ended up just pushing the batteries back in place and told myself I would pull them out as needed.  The next eight months passed real quick as I shuddered each time I thought about doing the fluid level check.  The batteries were not critically low when I finally did get around to it but they certainly were not great either.

I have come to the realization I am going to have to build the hatch through the bed and confront the gas leakage with some weatherstripping.

At the same time I have come up with an idea for reducing the under mattress condensation problem. I covered this a few posts back with a long list of my possible options.  What I settled on was building something myself.  But since that time my design has changed.  I was thinking of using some strips of 3/4” plywood as spacers, then some 1/4” plywood on top with holes drilled in it.  Then, the mattress on top.  I was never really happy with this idea.  I felt like the mattress would only really dry where the holes were.  I just wasn’t so sure about the area an inch away from the hole.  I was concerned I would still have mold growth.

My new design puts the thin plywood on the bottom.  I would still use the same spacers but stapled to the spacers I would stretch some #4 (1/4”) hardware cloth.  This design would allow airflow almost everywhere.  It will be strong enough to not sag and let the foam block the channels.  I think this will work perfect.  Likely the building of this setup will be one of the next blog posts.

Stop, You're Cracking Me Up

It is a Tuesday but since I was doing something else last night, and I like the chicken sliders, I am sitting in my usual Monday night haunt.  I was unaware Tuesday is Karaoke night.   And not like good Karaoke.  More like late night on the Love Boat style.  I fired off several disparaging texts to The Wife, even taking the time to look up and send the _Anguish Face_ emoji.  Of course I had no sooner gotten done and a woman came up and sang an amazingly passable version of Tina Turner and _Proud Mary_.  It didn’t last long though.

April here in the frozen wasteland of the north.  The middle of April in fact.  I know this because I can look at the calendar app on my device and read the date.  Yet I had to shovel twelve inches of snow this past weekend.  This spring I did a: “Here son, let me give you my old snow blower for free!  …And can you come back and blow me out once in a while?” Quite frankly if it hadn’t have been for that The Wife would be lining up a bagpiper for my wake today.  …And telling her boyfriend they no longer have to sneak around.. ;-)  It has been a crazy year. We have plans to go out of town this weekend and where we are going is predicted to have six inches more starting the day we leave. “Ugh.” There is just no other way to describe it.

The pump as it was mounted, way in the back.  The new
pump I will mount much closer to the front where it is warmer.

I worry it is going to be one of those “flip the switch” years where it is thirty four and random snowflakes on Monday and eighty six on Thursday with ninety eight percent humidity and that lasts until mid October.  Going from the haunting cha-ching of the heating gas meter rapidly turning right straight into the electricity sucking AC season. But so far it has only been cold. Colder than expected over the past weekend as well so I arrived back to a van empty of propane.  When I left on Friday I debated turning the heat off completely.  I have been doing that the past few weekends just to save a little propane cost.  As it turned out I am glad I didn’t.  There isn’t a whole lot left in the van to freeze  but I hate surprises.

I did a double tank exchange at Johnny Menards, using the self service machine. It worked fine the first time, but then tried to give me an empty tank for the second one.  Customer service had to get involved and they didn’t seem the least bit surprised, telling me this happens often.  I am really glad it wasn’t the middle of the night after the store was closed.  That would have then sucked.

The under counter sink in its above mount configuration.

Then there is a moment in Karaoke where a burly guy gets up and sings an amazing rendition of _Poor Unfortunate Soul_ from _The Little Mermaid_.  Wow.

Last week I did some digging into what is going on with my water system.  I thought I had gotten lucky with the whole dead battery/freezing up/getting towed debacle  which happened over Christmas break. I wrote about it a few posts back.  (If you haven’t read that story, eh, that’s ok.  Don’t bother. Nothing to see here, move along.) Thinking everything was ok, I put water into my freshwater tank and turned the pump on but got nothing.  Pressurizing the system a little bit by blowing air into the water tank got me a leak somewhere in the vicinity of the pump.  To really track it down I took it all apart.

What I found was I was not so lucky.  My pump had a crack going across the top of it caused by the expansion of water in it when it froze.  I did some checking into replacement parts but they really don’t seem to be available.  I guess we live in that disposable world.  A $72 pump was shot.  That sucks.

The crack in the pump chamber.

I did a little more checking around this time buying a replacement pump.  The one I had was a Shurflo 4008.  Top rated, but since the moment I opened the box I was a little shocked at its large size. It measured 5.5 x 4.75 x 11.5 inches.  Half a cubic foot.  Not something you normally think of in your house but I just think, “great, only 283-1/2 cubic feet left.”  It suddenly becomes significant. The new pump, a Flojet 03526 also purchased off of Amazon, is going to be 9 x 4 x 4 inches.  It should be noticeably smaller.

Involved in this whole pump change out, I am going to move my sink to an under-mount.  That was my original plan, but was persuaded against it by my friend, Craigie.  The trouble, he said, was the Paperstone countertop.  It was so hard, glue wouldn’t stick and you couldn’t really attach screws.  So there was no way to firmly attach a sink to the bottom side of the countertop.  And you know, in a normal kitchen, I am sure he is correct.  But what I have is something different than normal.  I don’t have stacks of dishes in my sink, I only rarely have one or two.  I don’t have a sink full of water and even if I did have, I bet it wouldn’t be much more than a gallon.  I never wash any babies.

You rub its spine of course!

So with all this going for me I think it can work out.  I am going to build a wooden frame to hold the under side of the sink and increase the glue surface.  This ties together because at the same time I am going to move the pump into this sink area.  Maybe suspended from the sink frame by some rubber straps.  Plus, I have some ideas to sound proof it with some auto body sound deadening material. I just need spring to come so I can go park in Craigie’s driveway and schmooze him into helping me with using a router to cut the countertop to fit the sink. ..I buy the pizza.

A woman who should have been told she couldn’t sing years ago singing KISS _Beth_.  Gahhh.

I am always on the search for someplace to go and something new to experience on a week night.  Last night I went to a bar that has a monthly Harry Potter trivia contest. I discovered this event a few months on Facebook.  It was one of those deals where I thought, “I know what a horcruxe is.  I should do this!”  It was kind of like that time I thought I should enter a Jesus look alike contest because my son described me as looking like Jesus in a red truck.  My Lord.  No.  I guess I don’t really.

Chapter name and book?  Uhhh...

Back at the time I found it, something came up and I couldn’t go that night, or the interceding months but last night worked out.  It was really a pretty amazing experience.  This is a bar filled with ~400 people who have forgotten more Harry Potter knowledge than I will ever possess.  Do you know Luna Lovegood’s mothers name?  How about I show you an illustration and you give me the chapter name and what book it is from.  People were in costume.  Wands were frequent.  I have to go back.

The Fix Is In

I guess I should apologize for the last blog post. The Wife, who usually does my final proofreading, described it best when she said “This is too boring to finish.“ She was right. It was a long slog to put out all that technical information on my power consumption.

The trouble with doing something new, something no one has really done before, is you spend a lot of time learning. You spend a lot of time saying “I hadn’t really considered…” and “I must not have thought this all the way through..” That’s just the way new projects go. Or at the very least that's how mine go. There are year round van dwellers and there are van dwellers who live where the latitudes get big, but I’m the first person I have found to be doing both at the same time.

The charger hooked on one end means
the first two batteries get charged, the
second two, not so much.

I was bummed out by the whole realization of the wiring problem. It made perfect sense when explained. You can look at the diagrams I will post with this and see the problem. In my mind, how I thought of it was like I had two copper bars at the top and bottom of the batteries in my figures. Logically (discounting how things actually work once you add in physics) I looked at this and said “everything is all connected together. This will work.” I assumed it would make no difference how it was all physically connected together. To me, batteries are magic anyway.

What actually happens though is electrons get “pushed” into batteries. By hooking up the charger the way I did, on one end of the chain, the electrons couldn’t get pushed all the way over to the batteries on the passenger side. The further complication is batteries are fussy things. Do it a little bit wrong and suddenly you have done some battery damage. That's where I am now. I won’t really know how much damage until a little time passes.

Here, the charge has to go through
both batteries.

So yeah, I found out I had a problem, now what? I explain again later what springtime here is like but the short version is, it’s cold here. I knew this was going to be a multi hour job. There was no way I was going to be able to do it outside. I cast around a little bit in my big city but my resources are scant and my vehicle is tall. Giving up, I got in touch with number one son to check around his redneck buddies for someone with garage that could accept a nine foot clearance vehicle. I think it took him all of a couple hours.

About two miles from my house lives a former race car driver and friend of my son who has a tall shop complete with hydraulic car lift. All I cared about was it was warm. The dead animal skulls, well I guess that was just frosting on the cake.

Where antlers outnumber people.

The process went pretty smooth. My son was curious about the whole project so he was there to do the heavy lifting. Quite honestly though I was scared. Only twelve volts, yeah, but you can't shut it off. It has to be wired live. With cables as thick as my fingers they would transfer a lot of energy in a short time. They would make one hell of a spark if I touched them to anything other than battery or wood.

This ability to rapidly discharge is what makes these deep cycle six volt batteries perfect for the task at hand of running a microwave. It is also the trait that would burn a hole in a wrench if I touched it to the metal of the van body while I was tightening a connection. ...And here's the thing, those are the best things that can happen if something goes wrong. Batteries can explode, spraying hydrochloric acid, under sparking discharges like that. Talk about something that would ruin your day.

I love a shop where there is a foos ball table raised to the
ceiling by a pulley system and Bambi looks on.

If you suspect you might not be up to this level of work I encourage you to hire it done. If you do it yourself, be very, very careful.  Know where both ends of your wrench are. 

I had to undo each connection and had to be very careful to keep track of every single wire. They can't be simultaneously disconnected so at times I had some live wires hanging in space while I disconnected the other end.

Eventually we had them all out and sitting on the floor. The prior week I had also purchased a lead/acid battery tester. These units resemble a syringe with a rubber bulb on the top. To use it, open a top cap of the battery and dip the hose tip into the battery acid. Suck up enough liquid to bring it up to the mark and read the number the needle points to.

This cell reads just at the bottom of the "good"
it will be interesting to see how it tests in
three months.

Another important safety note. Get battery acid on your clothes and it will burn a hole through them. Get it on your hands, if you wash it off with soap right away, it won't hurt too bad. Get it in your eyes and it pretty much sucks to be you. Gloves and eye protection would be a really good idea.

Running the tester, my numbers were not great. Bottom edge of the green for most of the cells. Solidly into the yellow on others. With what I hope will be some proper charging now they should recover somewhat. I plan on a schedule of checking the fluid level and testing the batteries four times a year. It will be interesting when I read it next to see if they actually have.

I don't mean to make it sound like everything went perfect. Have you ever noticed that sudden genius ideas seldom work out? The problem was it was dark in the back of the van. I forgot to bring my portable trouble light to setup behind me. The one the shop had didn’t seem to work when I initially tried it. But I knew the van had these great LED “garage lights” I had wired up and told you about several posts back. All I needed was a way to power them when the van was unplugged. This is where the apparent genius idea rears its ugly head. I had a car battery charger. If I hooked it to the van circuits I could power the van and its LED lights from this charger. Hindsight research the next day told me car battery chargers put out about 15 volts, I burned out my 12 volt garage lights. They were cheap, I think less than ten bucks. But it took me a whole afternoon to wire them up.

It ended up taking me two days to get everything hooked back up and running. I did try to take a little extra time and soldered the connections. In van wiring version 1.0 I crushed the connections with a hammer. But doing it that way is asking for corrosion to form in the gaps between the wire and terminal end. I had a limited quantity of heat shrink tubing big enough to go over these wires but I used what I had. That will help with that corrosion problem as well.

Eventually though it all came back together. When I made the final connection and flipped the switch the lights came back on and I was happy. Now we will have to see how it goes and see how the numbers look when I next read them. I am hopeful.

One exciting development in my van world involved getting in touch with one of my former landing spots from the couchsurfing period of my life. Back at that time she was an aspiring photographer and in my former life I was the technical expert for my big city in that business. I talked hyper focal distance and the inverse square law and she provided the couch. It was barter at its finest.

Propane tanks and batteries pulled out.  Ready to
start the rebuild.

But for over a year now my need of couches had been greatly reduced. I dropped out of touch for a while but over the past couple of months we have been trying to line up our schedules. Crazy how two people can be just busy enough it took us that long to make it happen.

When it finally did, she had lots of news. Love and loss, world travel and finding the only craft beer fan on a whole continent. Buried in all that was an application for my project. She was all but leaving the world of photography, working now as a seamstress for a costume and cosplay Etsy company. Interesting. I asked her if she took custom work, thinking actually about a project that could make me a hero with The Wife. Her reply, “Everything I do is custom work. Why, you need something for the van?” Need something for the van? Wow… Yeah totally. Developing…

Testing and making sure I don't mix up the order.  I think
it best to put the batteries back in the same way they came
out.  Not to shuffle them up.

In other news, even though friends who live in other parts of this country are experiencing spring, we here are not. A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the van, its body gently rocking from side to side. I was riding out my first true northern blizzard inside the van. About thirty years ago I had to sit one out for a couple hours in a nineteen seventy-three Chevy Caprice. This one, with my feet in front of the furnace and a nice hoppy IPA, was undoubtedly nicer. The weather outside though was much the same. A pure white-out. My mother used to love to quote a local radio weather forecaster who always explained “Lots of B.S. out there. —That is the official national weather service designation for Blowing Snow” She used to say it the same way each time, and laugh. I think it was the dirtiest joke she knew.

I had the van pointed north and there was a very strong east wind. As a friend of mine recently said, “the kind of wind that puts whitecaps in the toilet bowls out here on the prairie.” Parked this way the double doors leak a lot of air. This air doesn’t just come in around the doors but all the frame members on the east side had a light breeze coming in. Given this leaking, the van cools down fast after the furnace runs. There have been lots of nights this winter that have been colder and saw less furnace time.

Phase one of the storm over, an hour later I would have
barely made out the van at this distance.

I pondered walking downtown that night and totally would have if I would have had my serious winter coat on board. I have this Eddie Bauer parka from back in the days when that company made warm clothing instead of designer labels. I think it was rated for eighty below zero. You really can’t wear it unless it is single digits or colder. Any warmer and you have to wear it unzipped. I keep it in the van over the really cold times but it is huge, taking up way too too much space. I took it home months ago.  So equipped, I love big cities during snow storms. It gets so quiet and the roads so abandoned. You can walk in the middle of the streets because there are no cars. At times like this I love the quiet beauty of cites. It’s fun to see the hard core pubs that stay open no matter the weather. Because no matter the weather, they have customers.