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.