Feeling Low (Energy)

There is no two ways around it. Sometimes van life gets me down.  Take tonight for instance.  I am low on power.  It has been cold again and my engine battery seems unable to handle it.  I went to start the van last night so I could move to another part of town. I got one weak roll over.  Not enough to fire, and that was it.

Today over lunch hour I pulled the battery out again and brought it into my cubical to warm up and thaw out.  Always a cold finger freezing job when it is near zero.  Other people have a plant in their cube.  I have a DieHard.

Additionally, my house batteries are really low.  We had a nice clear and sunny Sunday.  But there was a foot of snow on my solar panels.  Not much collection happened that day.   Prior to that, and since, it has been cold and grey.

A thawing DieHard on my office floor.

When batteries get weak they can't handle the cold well.  They freeze and don't hold much power.  That is a bit of the cycle I am in here as well.  Even if I plug in to charge, if the batteries are half frozen they won't charge much.

I spent part of my workday today doing some research on small propane heaters.  It seems like I am going to have to somehow heat the house battery space.  But figuring out a way to do this and not get battery acid fumes inside the living space seems the trick.  But at the same time I have to come up with some solution that doesn't suffocate me by burning up all the oxygen in my small space.  So far I have not found the right answer.

I looked at the Little Buddy by Mr Heater.  The size was bigger than I really wanted but the area it wanted for clearance from flammable materials was the real deal killer for my situation.  I just don't have that much space.  There was another small propane heater that screwed on to the top of a one pound cylinder.  But it was built to point up at a 45 degree angle.  No way to change that and really I need to point down 45 not up.

Here is a way to feel even more crowded.
Stack up a bunch of boxes.

What I have done tonight is pull my slide out drawers and have them stacked by the side door.  I won't be warming the battery space but at least the space next to the batteries.  Hopefully that will be good enough to make some difference.

Right now is the lowest I have ever run down my batteries.  You shouldn't run them down to even 50% and I am sitting at 51%.  Some battery damage is likely to occur.  Tomorrow I have to get some sun or I have to get someplace where I can plug in and charge up.

All of this stuff is the harsh reality of van life.  Particularly cold weather van life that can get a person down.  Sometimes it just plain and simple isn't fun to be living in 63 square feet when it is -11 inches away, outside my steel walls. When a few other things go wrong, it all starts to pile up.

At least there is no shortage of white stuff!

Wait, It Gets Worse

So when I last wrote I was a day past the second coldest day of my lifetime. I was home for the weekend. I had the boiler running.  The house was warming up, the family was happy and everything was looking great. 

I was naive.

On Saturday I did my morning inspection and realized the house temperature wasn't really where I expected it to be.  We keep the kids-side of the house thermostat set to 59 degrees (they will work through our parenting in therapy when they get older) but this morning it was 55.  Sure, even with the really great furnace we have it takes hours to raise the house temperature by a few degrees but once there it does a really great job of holding it.  When I saw it was low I had an ominous feeling.

A radiator with a hairline crack running
almost the full length of one fin.  Research
tells me this can be filled with JB Weld.
It seems like a good summer project.

That feeling intensified when I got to the basement. The boiler panel read PR_0.  I have seen that once before. It means Pressure Zero.  Somewhere in the system there was a leak.  To find it I turned on the fill valve and walked around.  It didn't take long.  In a small room off the basement garage where it is our understanding the driver used to live, back in a time where our house employed servants, there was water gushing from a radiator.  It was a foot long split in the cast iron.

At this same time pressure on me was intensifying to get the water working in the kitchen sink.  This is also the families source of filtered drinking water and talk was happening about maybe the need to buy bottled water.  Something I consider fine out of necessity for an event but six people in a house can go through an environmentally unconscionable amount of bottled water in day to day living.

I had been running an electric heater in the sink basin for a few days, but it had just been so cold it couldn’t seem to un-thaw it.  I began to suspect the freeze-up was not actually in the basin but in the garage below the kitchen.  When I did further inspection I found that not only to be the case, but in a way it was lucky because the pipes, old fashion CPVC plastic had split and broken.  Both the hot and the cold.  If it had thawed out in the basement I would have had a real mess. Now added to my task list was re-plumbing the kitchen.  As much as the family wanted a working sink again, it wasn’t going to be a quick fix and getting the heat back on took precedence.

The Pex tubing where the radiator used to sit.

What I did to get around the radiator problem was to just bypass it.  I installed a 3/4” Pex line from the radiator input to its return.  Tightened the whole thing up and moved on.  The basement room would no longer have heat, which is going to cause us more trouble in the bathroom off our bedroom.  The plumbing there will be even more prone to freezing that it already is.  But at the time I didn’t know any way around it.  Since that time I have done more research and discovered a product called JB Weld.  A two part epoxy putty with enough flexibility to stay water tight through the expansion and contraction of the radiator.  I might write more about it later when I actually apply it.

There were two dead cars in my driveway.  I had to replace one battery and brought the other in to thaw out.  It was a long day but by the end of it I refilled the heating system with water.  Got the pressure back up.  Everything was holding water.  The house was beginning to warm up.  I had one bedroom prone to air bubbles in the system that wasn’t heating yet but I was feeling pretty good.  This whole freeze up was behind me.

I was naive.

The cold water pipe to the kitchen sink.
Lucky for me this pipe was still frozen.

Sunday morning I knew everything was fine.  I lounged.  I drank coffee.  I relaxed.  Basking in my confidence of surmounting every difficulty.  About ten we were planning lunch for the family and I went to the basement to grab something from the deep freeze.  What was that sound?  Gushing water?  Is someone running the wash machine?  I opened the laundry room door and discovered my state had added a new lake over the course of the evening.  Lake Laundry. The boiler was back to showing PR_0 and I had new problems.

When things freeze up, they take a very long time to unthaw.  What I didn’t realize is when the pipes froze they had large plugs of ice inside them.  With the basement just barely above freezing it took a long time for those ice plugs to thaw out.  When they did, the heating water could get to places it hadn’t been able to the day before.  Those places all had pipes that had broken in the freeze.  In my case, the cold water return pipe for the radiator in the garage had three broken spots in it.  In the process of discovering that I found the cold water pipe going to the laundry sink was cracked as well as both traps in the drain.  My wife had been bothering me to replace the sink for years, it looked to me like just as good a time as any.

I love how the Pex tubing can be color coded.

By Monday night with the handy plumbing assistance of my youngest daughter we had everything running again.  We used Pex tubing for all the new plumbing.  I drained out the radiator in the garage and determined it had not frozen.  For now that radiator is bypassed as well.   I will plan to hook it up in the summer as another heating zone.  A new laundry sink has been purchased.  We bought a two sided sink and I have cut out the center divider so we can use it as a dog washing station.  And, we have framed in a stud wall in the laundry room so we can insulate it this summer after I remove the window and replace it with some glass block.

So this freeze up was huge.  Record setting cold temperatures made for a record number of problems.  But I guess we got through it.

I love Pex tubing.  It is super quick to work with.  Really
easy to add things later.  And can handle freezing!

The sink with the center divider cut out.  

Trouble On The Home Front

I make no secret that I live on the frozen tundra of the northland.  The last few days the outside temperatures have been nothing short of brutal.  Meanwhile I’ve been cozy as all get out in my Big Van.  Going through a 20lb propane tank in about three and a half days.

Part of the reason for the rapid use is it has been too cold to even go do anything. Rather than walking downtown to visit a pub or go see a movie, I have just been just walking to the van and determining it is too cold to go back out.  So every night I am just hanging out in the van. Running the furnace and needing to keep it…sitting around playing guitar, doing some writing, or van planning... temperature rather than being able to lower it down to the sleeping under a pile of blankets setting.  So yeah, I am burning more propane.

Minus ten below floor temperature
under a few layers of sweatshirts.

The coldest outside air temperature for two nights was around minus thirty two degrees Fahrenheit.  Fairly calm the second night but the first night was very windy too. The BV was rocking! Like I said, sitting up on my bed I was plenty warm.  The floor though was cold.  Particularly in spots.  By the side doors, which as it turned out, were on the windward side.  Around those doors it was very cold and drafty. I put my big coat on the floor in this area.  That helped a lot.  Under my table, which is at the back of the side doors, I threw down several sweatshirts.  Later in the night I checked the floor temperature back there and it was minus ten under those shirts.   I had no idea sweatshirts were such good insulators. 

I thought this was cold.  ...This
was not cold.  It went down another
five degrees.

By the back doors there always seems to be a gentle breeze on my face when I am sleeping.  These two nights of course this breeze has teeth.  I took to wearing a hooded sweatshirt as part of my night attire.  I woke up at one point and felt my nose trying to determine if it could be getting near frostbite temperature. …I don't think it was but it was cold enough for me to decide to roll over.

All of this must sound really miserable, but it is just my life right now.  I look it all as an adventure, and as Bilbo Baggins would tell you, adventures always have some rough patches.  Nasty uncomfortable things, adventures.

But my van life is only half of the life I live.  At the opposite end of the spectrum from the sixty three square feet I live in five days a week is the sprawling manse I live in the other two.  A big old one hundred and ten year old structure I am sure on my deathbed will be the pinnacle of cool places I have dwelled.

When the salty road ice freezes on your tires.

As I lay sleeping one of those awful cold nights my phone rang at four AM.  When I saw the caller ID I knew this could not be good news.

The Wife said the kids were complaining about being cold in their rooms earlier when they went to bed. But what can you expect?  It was only two degrees shy of the coldest temperatures I had ever lived through.  Given the size of the house, we are cheap how we heat it.  The kitchen and our office/bedroom we keep around seventy.  But the rest of the place, including the kids bedrooms we keep 59.  Add wind and sure they complain some.  She didn't think anything of it.

It was the four AM call to nature when she remembered she had not reopened the dining room doors.  Those doors hide the thermostat and we have discovered in the past will throw off the whole house temperature.  She walked to the other side of the house to open them and discovered the kids were not lying.  The house temperature was 43 and the furnace was not running.

We did some debugging over the phone to no avail.  You know, the normal stuff you try.  We power-cycled it a couple of times.  She got some boots on and went outside to check the air intake and exhaust for obstruction.  No joy.

Low sun cresting just over the fence top
at eleven in the morning.

This didn't seem like a situation that would wait until the weekend so I took a day off.  I have a friend who is a plumbing - heating guy and so I am able to call him up for some advice from time to time.  He suggested the trouble was in my flame sensor and told me how to go about pulling it out and cleaning it.  I had to call him back a few minutes later when I pulled the sensor out and a gush of water came out of the hole.

So here is what happened.  The basement got very cold.  As in very, very cold. The condensation pipe coming out of the bottom of the boiler has a trap in it just like a sink drain.  I suppose that keeps bugs from climbing up inside the burn chamber during the summer.  With the cold basement temperature the trap filled with water froze up.  The condensation could no longer drip out.

I hooked up an electric heater to blow on this area while I was cooking supper and about an hour later it drained.  I still cleaned up the flame sensor before I put it all back together.  But then the boiler lit right up.  It took about five hours to heat this barn back up.  Two rooms aren't getting any heat.  I expect the radiator pipes might frozen.  Now with the heat back on they should thaw out.

What a condensation tube trap looks
like and how it changes your life.

That was one crisis abated.  The kids bathroom was frozen up. That is a common occurrence.  It freezes up if it gets below twenty.  In fact we joke we can tell you the outdoor temperature based on what plumbing is frozen in the house.  Still though, setting new records breaks new records. 

As I sit here tonight four of the five bathrooms are frozen up.  The kitchen sink both hot and cold and the laundry room are all without water… So I will have a busy day of it tomorrow and look forward to warmer days ahead.

The flame detector re-installed in my boiler.

A Brass Monkey Night

Tonight is forecast to be -25F.  My coldest previous van sleeping record was -16 one night last year.  I was actually kind of disappointed because we had a minus twenty-two night but it was over a weekend and I was comfy in my bed at home.  I think I will be OK.  I keep telling myself propane tanks work down to -44 so I should be fine.  I have actually considered running a pipe back to my propane storage area that so I could blow some heat back there if I really had to. But really a better idea would be to just get a hotel room (with a hot tub!) if it actually gets that cold.

This past weekend I spent some time rebuilding my plumbing system.  I have a background of house building and so that previous experience warps me for doing what I am now. When you are building a house you want it to all look pretty.  You hide all the pipes in the walls.   Doing that doesn't translate well to van life at all. The outside walls of the van get pretty cold.

It takes pulling out the sink to service any
of this stuff.  Things to consider in the
next design. (file under mistakes)

I was having trouble with freeze ups.  Every time it would get down to single digits… an event that occurs fairly regularly in this god forsaken frozen wasteland in which I live …my water pipes would freeze.  Over time I discovered if I pull out my bottom pots and pans drawer they would thaw back out in a few hours.  It wasn't a hard freeze.  No damaged pipes.  Just an annoyance.

When you are building, as I have learned, in a van you are heating the center space. The air in the middle. Anything not touching that middle air though gets pretty darned cold.  So my pipes, tucked back behind the water tank, got to be closer to outside wall temperature.  Low double digits.

The fresh water tank in contact with the
very cold floor.  No wonder it freezes.

The fresh water tank I purchased had multiple taps on it. I was just hooked to the back ones. My first step was to unhook the old pipe going from the tank to the pump. Luckily I thought ahead when I originally built this.  The pipe had a coupler about mid way. Removing the pipes was as easy as just undoing that coupler.  To keep my options open I cut the old pipe a bit shorter and capped it.  Then reinstalled it back at the coupler.  If I ever need to hook up to that spot again at least it is there.

The other thing I had thought about as a design change, I wanted to lift my water tank up off the floor.  To have an air gap.  Again, this is just as I mentioned, I am heating the interior air.  If the tank is sitting in contact with the floor, it will become floor temperature.  With an air gap, it will have a buffer against that.  I should even be able to circulate air into that space using a thermostatically controlled fan.  I used two strips of one inch foam insulation, one under each side to make this air gap.

Auto sound proofing.  It is adhesive on one
side, you just have to heat it to pull the
paper off.

The next job was to move my pump upward and out somewhat.  Previous to this rebuild The pump was mounted to a half inch hunk of pine (that warped).  Then the pine was attached to the wall of the floor to ceiling cabinet with a folded cloth napkin that I think I stole from an Indian restaurant in-between. This napkin was meant to reduce vibration noise.  To that end, I think it worked fairly well.  But it was thicker than it needed to be.  Putting the pump very close to the sink and in general just looking sloppy.  I replaced the pine with some 1/2” plywood.  The napkin with some auto sound proofing mat.  This is the stuff the wealthy teeny boppers use to keep all the boom-boom-boom from their over priced sound system in their car.  It worked great for this pump job and it is loads thinner.

Then on to the piping.  The tank has to have each tap drilled out before you can use it.  I drilled a 5/8” hole, trying to be very careful to not get any of the waste plastic bits inside the tank.  Then I ran 1/2 CPVC pipe up over the front of the tank and pointed it toward the new spot where the pump is attached.

The tank up on blocks.  No longer in contact with the floor.

Here is where I tried to do something again where I had failed before.  Back when I first did the build I purchased a water filter.  It isn’t for flavor, it is just a large particle filter.  So if I refill my tank from some camp ground and there is sand in the water, it won’t damage my pump.  Before, when I got the filter I installed it the day before The Wife and I went on a week long camping trip.  Mistake.  Never install something major the day before you go on a trip with your other half.  It won’t go well.  The second day into the trip I was re-plumbing to remove the filter because it didn’t seem to be working right.

You can't see this real well. But I
warmed up the CPVC pipe with a
torch and bent it to create a custom
hunk of pipe.

The same thing happened when I installed it this time.  I think some how, some where, this filter is allowing air to get sucked in.  The pump won’t stay primed and the faucet would sputter and blow air, splashing water all over just like the last time.  I don’t understand it but at least I wasn’t on vacation.  I guess I am going to give up on the filter idea.  Hell, with my record, the van will run out of propane again and the pump will freeze and crack long before it dies of sand poisoning.

My last part of the project was to move the tank vent backward, closer to the pump.  The tank has to be vented.  And I wish I could find some smaller vent filter.  But this works.  Before it was sticking out a bit too far and prevented me from building an attractive cabinet face.  Moved back, as I have it now this won’t be a problem.  One thing I did that was a little bit special for this is I heated the pipe up with a torch and then bent it to create sort of a pair of custom 45s.  This isn't something I could have done if there was water pressure on the pipe.  But for a vent it worked just fine.

Here is everything all put back together.  Next I will be
building the cover to go over all this and makin' it
look all purdy. :-) 

All it all it was a good two day project.  It will work much better than what I had.  Maybe still not good enough to protect me at -25.  But I would think it will get me down to zero with no freeze ups.   Next week I am hoping to build the fan and front enclosure to do the air circulation and protect me further.

Keep warm van lifers!

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.