Over a hundred!

Today the temperature inside the bus reached 100. As I sat putting connectors together the sweat was trickling down my back. Needless to say, after a while in the bus I was pretty hot and sweaty. This is exactly the weather I need forced air ventilation. My mind turned the problem over while I worked on today's project.

What I had planned was pretty straightforward. I was going to attach two single cables together in order to have just have two duals going to each battery in my battery box. I also had to extend the two single cables in order to have a dual of sufficient length. That was fairly easy soldering and I slipped some shrink sleeving onto the cables. 

The floor could stand some tidying as could the whole bus. Here you can see my cables in place and if you look carefully at the top of the ammunition box, you can see I've written 10AH on one side. The other side has 5AH. The rear fans which are CPU fans run off a 5AH battery. The induction fan will run off a 10AH battery.

I did more thinking about my ventilation system and decided to try everything out before diving in to make something that I might later decide not to use. That's several times I've spent time and money welding together things that for one reason and another I ended up not using.

I looked at my fan and decided I needed a hose to carry the air. I've already decided not to have an all in one unit but to have a separate inlet manifold, filter unit and fan unit. Looking around, the usual suspects didn't have much so I looked at the marine supply stores. Bingo! I found a hose for my ventilation fan. Without further ado, I jumped in my car and headed off to West Marine. Yes- I'm over a hundred miles inland and there's a ships chandlers not far from me! Weird but this is the USA where odd things abound.

It transpired that the hose is not really that robust. It's certainly not something I can leave permanently attached. It was $15 which isn't that horrible when I have to experiment anyway. Combined with a sandwich box and my Honda lawnmower engine filter, I knocked up a ventilation unit. 

I expect the filter to have to go fairly quickly. I think it's way undersized. I'm leaning more toward the  filters I was looking at the other day. Both the vacuum cleaner and the air cleaner filters have better throughput than the car engine filters. 

The goal is to put the filter end of the unit outside the bus and to pull the hose into the bus. It reaches 15 feet or so. With the door partly closed I should see fairly quickly how well outside air injection lowers the internal temperature. As I've said, I expect the filter to be the bottleneck which is why I expect to have to replace it with mosquito mash fairly quickly.

If the tests are a success then I'll get on with finding the right filter. I like the volume of air that will pass through a shop vac filter but it's hard to design a case to hold it. I feel an air cleaner filter may well be the solution. As far as tubing is concerned, it'll probably have to be plastic drainpipes.  For the moment though, my temporary ventilation system will have to suffice. There are too many critters under the bus for the moment. 

Having a cooler bus will allow me to get on with the next stage which is to go through the stuff inside, getting rid of the unnecessary junk. Junk builds up very quickly!