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.

You'll Get a Charge Out of This

Sometimes getting a kickstart back into blogging is all I need.  Sometimes it is as simple as some random heater salesman writing to me, saying he is on the edge of his seat, waiting for a new blog post.  I have spent my life always making it a point to respond well to flattery.

“So how is the van project going?”, you have asked…

Where I left off I had just gotten the charge controller wired up. The solar panels were about to start producing. I was writing that whole story in January, but when it actually happened was late fall 2017, six months ago.  Lets jump forward in time to now…

Something I was always bothered by was how little power I seemed to get out of my batteries.  I have four Trojan T-105 6v deep cycle golf cart batteries for a total of 450amp/hours (ah), or “a usable 225ah” of electricity. (Because whatever you have in your batteries, you can only use half their total capacity without damaging them)

Two and a half watts of mood in
the back of the van.

Let me put that into perspective.    If I have everything turned off, just the stuff that monitors the battery condition, the thermostat for the furnace, all the little LED lights on the USB charge ports.   I am using .16 amps of power 24x7.   So I take that .16 times 24 hours in a day and I know monitoring consumes 3.84ah.  The van could run it’s basic monitoring equipment without charging (not even solar) for roughly 58 days.

I am sitting in the van right now.  It is night and I have the joyous sound of a train going by my back window.  I have the white overhead LED “puck” lights on.  I got the mood-light’n on in the back.  I have my iPod plugged in.  I do not have my laptop plugged in.  —I don’t usually. What this all means is right now, with this stuff added in, I am using .81 amps.  If I had to take that times 24 again, it would add up to a much more significant 19.44ah but still, that is eleven days.  With the lights on continuously.

But that never happens.  Usually I have the lights on for about an hour.  I do some stretching.  I work on a few things.  A little music.  If I have a network connection my current obsession is SimCity Builder.  Then I crash out for the night.  Lets just say that takes two hours.  Take .81 times 2 which equals 1.62ah.  Add that to the 3.84ah I use for monitoring and that is 5.46ah a day.

We aren’t quite finished yet.  The furnace runs.  When it does, I add another 2.68 amps.  Which again, compared to some LED puck lights is significant, but it doesn’t run all the time either.  Right now, unbelievably the furnace is still running in April.  The typical run-time seems to be twelve minutes.  But, as far as how many times in a day?  I don’t really have that data.  That will vary with the outside temperature. Tonight it ran for the twelve minutes and off for thirty-five.  It’s a balmy 21 degrees out there because we are weeks into spring.  Back when it was really cold I never thought to run my stopwatch and get the numbers.  I would believe, for the sake of argument, it ran twice an hour.   By next year I will have some things in place to track both the exterior temperature and furnace runtimes.  For now I just have to guess.

A 1.6 watt LED "puck" light.

I am going to round the math a little.  It makes it easier to explain to you, plus I don’t have to go to the bother of displaying my ignorance if I do it wrong.  Remember, its ok to round your numbers but *always* round pessimistically.  Lets say that furnace runs 15 minutes instead of 12.  Fifteen minutes is a quarter of an hour, but it runs twice in an hour.  So I take the 2.68 amps and divide it by two, and get 1.34ah it uses.  To calculate the use in a day I take it times 24 and I have 32.16ah.  I need to add the 5.46 from the previous step and I have 37.62ah

Now we are really starting to take a bite out of those batteries.  The 225ah of battery power divided by 37.62 a day.   I should be getting six days.  Again, this is with no charging at all.  Like I don’t actually have 520 watts of solar panels on the roof.

I have a computer network, I was trying to run it 24/7 but that was consuming 1.76amps or 42ah a day.  In the fall with the still abundant sunshine, that was fine.  But once I started watching the power meter a little closer it was the first thing that had to go.

The control panel for the inverter.  

Let me explain a little what the computer network is, just to give you a little peak ahead. I have a Raspberry Pi (single board computer) based camera system to keep an eye on what is going on outside.  I have been meaning to post about that but only have that one partially written. I admit the computer network wasn’t well designed power-wise, and I was running it 24x7, but I thought I had power to spare.  I shut it off. 

The second thing to be turned off was the inverter.  That’s the little box that turns the battery power into 110 volts for a microwave or coffee pot.  It only really needs to run when I am using one of those appliances though.   I only ran the microwave once a day unless it was full sun.  If it was cloudy, with a cloudy forecast, I didn’t run it at all.

But even with cutting all these corners, I could run the furnace and minimal lighting four cloudy days and the power meter percent charge would be in the low 60s.  Most of January was very cloudy here but I would typically get some charge every day.

When I am collecting solar, this looks great.  When it
drops to 70% as soon as the sun goes down, not so much.

I don’t have a refrigerator. Those things are total pigs even in the wintertime. So I am lucky there. I do run the microwave and that consumes tons of power as well but I only run it about ten minutes a day max. I don’t really have those numbers because I don’t have the monitoring stuff setup on the 110v side.  I also don’t have any exact data on how much I took in from the solar.  I just wasn’t ready to gather that information yet.  Given these facts coupled with some gut feelings, I felt like mathematically I should have had enough to run the van for ten days without even being especially careful. When I was actually living it, there was no way.

So that’s where it really just hung most of the winter.  It just wasn’t right I didn’t think.  But I have never lived this life before.  Batteries are not as efficient at low temperatures so I was thinking maybe that was the reason.  Then there was the fact I couldn’t do a whole lot anyway.  I didn’t know anyone with a garage that could fit the van’s height with the ladder rack and it was flipping -20 Fahrenheit outside.  So I just sort of limped along.

Just over 200 watts coming in off
the solar panels on a typical cold
January day.

Lurking in the back of my mind though, I suspected I had done something wrong in the initial battery wiring.  At the time though I really didn’t know who to ask.   When I was doing a bunch of research during the beginning of the project I found several companies who sold equipment. Those companies would not give me any information on how to wire up what they just sold me.  They would only tell me to hire an electrician.  I get it.  Liability.

In late January and early February we were going through a long multi day cold patch and I was burning propane like crazy.  There was one stretch where I went through a 20 lb propane cylinder in six days.   Sixteen below at night, getting “up to” -10F during the days.  Inside I stayed as warm as I wanted to pay for.  I would keep it set to fifty during the days when I was gone, then turn it up in the seventies when I was there in the evenings.  Back down to fifty at night when I was under the covers.  All in all it wasn’t bad. Surviving a winter in a van like this will be a story I will get milage out of for years to come. I had a few problems, the water tank froze up. I will cover that in a future installment.  I am going to have to do a little redesign there in the spring.  But the only thing was, it was bright and sunny every day. The solar numbers should have been looking fairly good.  I really shouldn’t have been having power problems but the batteries hovered around the 70-80% mark.

The frost line on the batteries.

One night I was doing a propane tank exchange and I noticed something odd about my batteries.  The two batteries on the drivers side appeared frost free while the two on the other side seemed frosted from the liquid level down.   Now in the van, theoretically the two sides *should* really be equal.  They are both in the back, under the bed, but I realized also there could be a ton of environmental factors that could be causing a slight temperature difference from side to side.  Even at eight below if the drivers side was parked in the sun, it *might* just be a little warmer.  If my insulation isn't quite as good on that side, I could be leaking warm air into that space from the interior of the van, etc.  Like I said, tons of reasons but I was really concerned. I started thinking maybe the batteries were not getting charged as well on that side and I was getting some freeze-up.

Just to give you some background information.   A fully charged, strong battery, won’t freeze even here in the frozen wasteland in which I live.  The strong battery freezing temperature is -76F air temperature and so far this winter (or any of the other winters in my lifetime) the air temperature hasn’t gotten quite to that point.  Windchill, sure we hit those temperatures every few years but windchill doesn’t matter.

With the frost showing up, that indicated to me I might have some freezing going on.  A sign the battery was weak and not fully charged.

Since the initial van research time I have moved more into the marketing phase of this blog I have found some new sources of information.   I found an internet forum and posted a summary of my situation and question there.   Within a couple of hours I had the answer I couldn’t find before.   I had in fact wired it wrong.