In practice on my own car, the sensors gave false low pressure readings. I'd go hunting around each tire to see which was low only to find they were all at the correct pressure. Then one by one the tire pressure sensors began to die. I heartily wish the receiver would die too. I get a horrible bleep or series of bleeps in cold weather telling me nonsense about low tire pressures.
There are two aftermarket tire pressure systems. The first is a screw-on cap that screws onto the valve stem. Three issues exist with these. The first is the extra weight could throw the wheel off balance though this is highly unlikely. The second is a poorly secured sensor could cause air leakage. The third is they could fly off, causing injury. In terms of effectiveness, they're highly likely to be as ineffective as those that come with a vehicle.
The second type fits inside the tire and replaces the standard tire valve. They need professional installation which drives the price up. Depending on manufacturing quality, they could disintegrate inside the wheel, damaging the tire or causing a blowout. They could change the wheel balance too. In terms of effectiveness they're highly unlikely to be any more effective than those supplied with the vehicle.
My experience of tire pressure sensors is of false alarms, unreliability and general nonsense from them. The best way to check a tire is visual inspection and pressure checking before every trip. The best way to check for low pressure during a trip is to notice changes in vehicle handling. As for sudden low pressure events, those will be noticeable way before any pressure sensor tells you anything. You should be reacting to a blowout rather than looking at what some pokey little screen tells you!
Like automated traction control systems, tire pressure management systems are ideal on paper but in reality are the stuff of nightmares. As an example, the traction control on my car defaults to on so I frequently don't turn it off. 99% of the time, it sits there and does nothing. When traction is actually needed, the first spot of wheelspin cuts power to that wheel. Again, it's nice on paper but horrendously dangerous in practice. As an example, going up a snowy road, the wheels locked up because of spin and I slid backwards toward a junction. Fortunately I knew it was that insanely dangerous traction control, switched the blasted thing off and thus regained control. The other day, driving down a muddy lane, one side locked up and thus I was spun crosswise to the traffic. Switching it off allowed me to regain control. If there was some way of disabling that deadly dangerous device permanently, I would have done so already.
So, my thoughts having seen some discussion of the benefits of TPMS I saw online are pretty well null. My experience of TPMS like LED lighting devices and Android devices is marred by miserable failure. At this point I'd like to point out that the only Android device that lasted more than 12 months was my Nexus 4 cellphone. And that became pretty useless after just 3 years. My iPad Mini 2, however, has lasted me over a year so far and cost about what my Nexus 7 cost me but has thus far outlived it. I therefore do not expect TPMS to be at all worthwhile and will not waste my time nor my money installing it.
Today I tried to track down the short in my electrical system. Thus far it has proven hard to trace. I'm beginning to suspect since pulling all the fuses in the fuse panel before reinstalling them that it might have been something I installed that's causing the problem. Now that would be very strange because everything I installed has a brand new switch, connected to the positive rail. Those switches are all in the off position. That pretty much kills that suspicion. It merits further investigation!
Playing around with the bus turned on, I tried my screenwash and found both screenwash jets need to be adjusted slightly. While testing them, the screenwash ran out. Thus I pulled out my gallon bottle of screenwash and refilled the container. I could hardly believe it took just half a gallon! I had to really hunt to find the screenwash filler - which was unlabeled. I found the radiator reserve tank, the brake fluid tank, the power steering, the transmission and the engine oil so by process of elimination I found what I was looking for. And wasn't it in an easy place to reach!
There are things I can do inside the bus but the heat is literally killing me. I can get to the bus and sit in my chair but more than that little and I'm exhausted. It's 91F in here right now with the door wide open, one solar fan in action and the window mesh placed over the window. That brought it all down from 95F. The big extraction fan does seem to work but I doubt severely that it removes the quantity of air that it claims. In order to calculate that I'd need to employ an anemometer. That would be a straightforward matter of cutting a cardboard cone to match the size of the anemometer propeller and putting the cone over an exhaust vent when the extraction fan is running. Then I'd double the result since I have two identical vents.
I keep thinking longingly about some form of cooling and will probably keep thinking about it until next summer. The interesting thing is that when my extraction fan kicks in, I get a cool breeze from my window screen and from the open front door. I'm guessing that the fan is doing something, even if it's not doing everything I had opted for. I am loathe to spend $180 on a used portable unit though. A window unit would be the ideal but that would involve carving up one of my windows which I don't want to do. Either that or it would involve mounting it somehow under the bus and putting in some kind of duct work.
Thinking about my in-the-window mesh vent, I realized that my original plywood powered vent wasn't too far off the mark. That, I could not properly secure to the window - it had to be propped up but it worked well enough. Thinking about going further, it might be possible to make a mask that would fit on the outside of the window measuring 24 1/8 inches by 12 with some kin d of soft foam padding for half an inch between the window and the panel. That could be secured on the inside of the frame by some adjusting clamps. It would be rain-proof and the mask could have plexiglass paneling with a powered vent inserted on one edge. With careful placement, a solar panel could be placed on the inside of the glass to power the fan! I have some leftover CPU fans that would be ideal for the purpose. Left semi-permanently mounted, it would not be hard to fix a rain shroud over the inlet vent nor a mosquito mesh. It would reduce light and the size of my window but on the other hand, it might do away with the need for air conditioning in an environmentally, non-permanent and friendly way. It's definitely worth a shot. I could weld a steel frame together fairly readily, having the equipment on site. Indeed, using a simple O2Cool fan (recycling one I've already cut up), I could even have the fan to switch between forward and reverse. Indeed, properly riveted, even aluminum strip could be used - with the advantage of being lighter and rust free.
I spent most of the day fiddle-fiddling or as my late aunty would have called it "fiddle-farting". One of my windscreen wipers was out of alignment very slightly so I adjusted that then noticed the wiper blade of the other was slightly canted so I fixed that. The hex nut on the washer turned out to be too big for a 7/16 spanner but too small for a 1/2 inch spanner. That means that for some ungodly reason it's probably Metric. At a quick guess, I'd say something like 12mm. Sadly I don't have a metric spanner set and can't use sockets because of the nozzle.
I'm a bit stymied by the heat. During the summer this wasn't much of an issue because the humidity was lower. During one of my brief spells of energy, I went outside and looked at the windows, concluding that putting a vent in place - even temporarily - would be very difficult. The windows have not been well mounted by Carpenter - indeed at least one of the back passenger windows is actually crooked. None of the windows are perfectly mounted in the centers of the apertures. I get rather the feeling that there was some pressure on Carpenter to complete busses quickly rather than making them of high quality. Indeed the welding debaucle from one factory proves this. For those that didn't know - some Carpenter busses were made with faulty welds to the roof supports. My bus didn't come from that factory but what that means is that in the unlikely event of a car landing on the roof from a bridge, the roof would cave in to the bottoms of the windows. Obviously a car must have landed on a bus for them to find that out. Clearly it was a problem with one guy who was doing the welding.
Regarding the window panel, I'm tempted despite the difficulty to have a go anyway. There's also the possibility of putting in an induction unit like I was considering in the first place when I built something that would take a smaller CPU fan. Equally, I could go for one of the smaller portable AC units. I just don't feel like doing the amount of work needed to mount a window unit under the bus.
The sum total of achievements today, not much. I did get to think out my ideas more clearly though. Basically, the problem of AC is twofold. Firstly there's the case of where to vent it and how big the vent pipes have to be. Secondly, it takes 120v AC and my system has an amperage limit of 30A. With a fridge, water heater and microwave then something will have to be switched off in order to run the AC. I've also read very mixed reviews of portable AC units and it's hard to discern which reviewers can't understand the instruction book and which received a faulty unit. It is hard to overestimate the number of idiots around. I am also limited by the diameter of the exhaust vent from the unit. While I can probably put a 6 inch diameter hole in the floor without any issue, bigger might be a problem. Indeed, my biggest hole saw is just 4 1/4 inches in diameter. A bigger exhaust tube would have to be split and rendered as multiple 4 1/4 inch or smaller exhaust pipes. An eight inch pipe would need two 4 1/4 inch vents. I'd want to vent through the floor and the skirt at the side of the vehicle too. The pipes would also need to be lagged since these dehumidifiers exhaust a lot of heat. It's all doable. It'll just take time and need me to get under the bus for large portions. That's not really going to happen until the cooler weather makes the critters hibernate.
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