Double the power!

Most of today was spent hunting for a fuse holder. A while back I bought a fuse holder online. It took forever to arrive! Without Radio Shack around the corner, it’s quite a challenge to get hold of electrical and electronic components. Everything has to be done online and you know just how much I adore dealing with eBay and so on.

Speaking of eBay, I made a purchase of a security camera back in July/August. It never arrived though the seller pocketed the money. I went for a refund and immediately reordered from a seller in a different country. That was on September 8th. Apparently I have to wait until November 4th for the last quoted delivery date in order to file for a refund. I seem destined not to get my camera. Needless to say this is not the only seller giving trouble. I’ve been very lucky with eBay until now. I ordered something from a seller in India and that seems destined not to arrive. Look at this!

That’s such a bad score! I’ve never ever seen anybody with so many failures to deliver. 200+ failures to provide the goods and yet when I ordered, his score was almost perfect. I note eBay has not calculated his feedback percentage correctly. 200+ failures and 65 good sales does not equal 50%+ feedback. It is something like 20% feedback.

So currently I have two bad eBay sellers and both delivery periods end in about 2 weeks. Needless to say I’ve had six bad experiences over the last couple of months and can’t say that bodes well for my continuing to make purchases via eBay. Let’s see - I had one item just not arrive and two more about to be filed as not arriving. I don’t think there’s much chance of two items arriving after 5 weeks. A further two items were clothing. They weren’t of the size nor condition described. Then there was the infamous solar panel. I think the world is trying to tell me to stay off eBay.

Today I had, as I said, to hunt for my fuse box. That’s going to be used with my 12v electrics. It took a long time to find it but find it I did. Now I have a problem in that I need to connect all the spades on one side to a common rail. I recall having some female spade connectors that had no plastic on them whatsoever. Can I find them? The answer is no. Now what I could do is to hunt for a different kind of fuse box that has a common live wire. I’m not averse to that given that the current fuse box appears to have been put together by a monkey armed with nothing more than a mallet. Needless to say, it’s Chinese! My friend in the dark barbaric land they call France, did tell me there was a car in Britain that had the perfect fuse box. I’m not sure if it was a Vauxhall Corsa or not. Anyway, Chevy makes the same car under license here. If I can recall the model then I’ll look in Autozone next time I’m there.

It would be somewhat of a challenge to make the one end of that fuse holder into a common positive rail. In fact, it would invite a lot of soldering or a ton of crimping. That just seems like so much hard work to be honest when I can just find a better fuse holder. In fact the fuses don’t slip into this one particularly easily anyway.

It was harder to disassemble the old ventilation system than to construct the rest of the new one. I’ll have to put some kind of mesh filter over the intake. What that’ll involve is making a ball or cone that has mosquito mesh over it. That way the mesh should not provide too much air resistance.

Out of interest I tried running the vents in reverse and that worked quite well. I’ll have to see whether I want to run them in reverse on dry days and forward on wet days. I have a feeling they might suck more efficiently than they blow.

The plan is to install the fuse box and a timer so that the vents can be operated on a schedule rather than operated until the charge controller cuts the battery off as now. The timer will be a problem because the screw holes are smaller than my preferred self-drilling screws. That might necessitate a smaller size if such exists. I can say I’m not happy with my fuse holder. It’s not right. I can use it if I must but I’d prefer to use something suitable.

While I’m ordering or buying my new fuse holder (which I hope will take the same fuses that my bus takes), I’ll see about a couple of relays. One to operate my door lock together with my fancy keypad and one to work with my charge controller should the controller go bananas if I combine the negative of the battery with the negative of the powered circuit. These Chinese things can do wacky things and since the output voltage is uncontrolled, it really doesn’t make much odds whether I run stuff straight off the battery connection anyway. Thinking further, a simple switch that will allow me to reverse the direction of my two blowers also sounds a very good idea. That’d have to be double pole with three positions - on, off, on.

In case you’re wondering, the temperature in my bus today is 84F and 69% humidity. Outside it’s cooler. As soon as I get the ventilation working properly I shall be cool. This coming weekend looks like being cool enough to go underneath to complete my wiring too.

I think you’ll agree the back looks a lot better without flexible air ducting drooping about the place. It was fine in its place but wasn’t a great idea. I think reversible ventilation using two bilge blowers sounds a far better idea.

While I worked on my vents, I noticed my injected foam has expanded brilliantly and now holds the ducts perfectly in place. I’m not sure about how good it is for insulation but it’s bound to be better than an air gap even with a heat bridge.

Where now? Well, I suppose I need to buy my fuse holder and a pair of relays as well as a double pole two way switch. A small tube of silicone sealant would probably be helpful too. I’ll probably run the cables through the rear bulkhead so they’re out of the way.