It arrived!

Today I went shopping. I seem to be having Fridays off, these days since the school year has ended and I'm now working the maintenance program. I'm usually working 6:30am til 4pm Monday through Thursday and that's been interesting. Sometimes I've been driving a huge truck with a low geared manual transmission and sometimes hefting boxes. It's all good clean fun.

On my shopping excursion I spent plenty money though I didn't seem to get much for it. There was the usual trip to Harbor Freight followed by a trip to Walmart where I browsed filters, thinking about my new fan. After that it was a quick trip to Lowes (hiss, spit) where I hunted to find something akin to a junction box but it seems the USA isn't advanced enough with electrical parts to have junction boxes. In the end, it works out cheaper just to totally rewire the faulty socket with fresh wire straight to the distribution panel. Wacky!

Looking at filters, I was thinking of going back to my original idea of having the fan connected to a filter unit which is then connected to an air intake. I liked the look of the big circular filters that the shop vac has. I also like very much the flat filters that cars use. I'm quite tempted to use the same filter that my Xterra uses as the engine air filter. That's flat and fairly big. The shop vac filter has throughput as the big advantage though.

Arriving home, my fan had arrived. The first thing I did was to connect it to my battery pack whereupon it blew a powerful blast of air. By my new calculation, the 130 cubic feet per minute fan should replace the entire volume of air in the bus in just 7 minutes. Needless to say the 2.7 amp draw of the fan blew my 2 amp fuse fairly swiftly. Then one of my connectors disintegrated on my battery pack.

Today has been one of those days. Dark, heavy clouds, thunder and lightning and a headache that has lasted all day. I'm so lucky to be living here though. Where I came from originally such weather, headaches and the melancholia induced would last for weeks without respite.

The new plan is to fund a suitably universal filter that can stand a years worth of use then to build some kind of housing for it with a door that permits easy filter changes. A flat filter would give the least challenging set of problems and a rectangular case would be easier to fabricate. If the air were sucked down through the filter and the filter horizontal there would be little to no need to secure it in place as both gravity and suction would work.

As far as an air inlet goes, I still like my sink outlet idea but I believe I may have a better idea with a tube coming straight up with a strainer on top. They sell those! It's just a bigger air inlet.

No photos today. It was just too dark, wet and depressing.