Should I hoist the plague flag!

Today was my first free day in a few weeks. I’ve been busy all week driving schoolbusses for work. Some days have been more exciting than others. I’m not really talking about the bad driving of other road users - that’s pretty much standard. I’ve come to expect drivers to pass my bus, cut in front and then take an exit lane, braking sharply while not actually using their turn signals. No - more exciting than that. This week there was a punch-up on the bus and my aide got punched as he tried to separate the parties. As a fairly stoic, older Afrikaner, he was pretty cool about it all. I took five minutes to get my mind back to what I’m supposed to be doing after the run completed by completing paperwork.

So today I’ve been battling a bad stomach, probably caused by breathing the germs of the children on my bus. It’s a hazard of the job and it always seems to catch me on weekends. Maybe I should just hoist a plague flag over the bus when I drive it?

I started by admiring my handiwork from the other day then got on with installing my new fuse box and the timer purchased some weeks ago. That involved a trip to Lowes where I was smart enough to buy #6 bolts as well as #8 bolts as it turned out that both needed different sized bolts to attach them to the wall. The fuse box took #8 and the timer took #6.

When I ordered the fuse box, I counted the fuses I was likely to need, carefully. I could double up on some if later I need to add extra things or perhaps simply add a second box. Maybe even change the box for a bigger one. So I have 8 fuse positions. They are for:

• Bedroom fan (0.5A)
• Bedroom Light (1A) - not going to be installed but could be.
• Bedroom USB charger (7A) - not going to be installed but could be
• Bathroom Light (1A) - not going to be installed but could be
• Galley USB charger (7A) 
• Galley fan (0.5A)
• Galley Light (1A) - not going to be installed but could be
• Electronic door lock controller - This is just an idea at present.

There is a possibility that if I add a flush toilet that I might also need a macerator pump. That’s something that I’ll face if and when the time comes. I’d thought also about how to put a waste tank together for that and came to the conclusion that rather than buying a pre-made tank, I could simply weld one together from mild steel, paint it fairly thickly inside and out with rust preventative paint and see how long it lasts. It would be more likely to develop pinhole leaks rather than suddenly depositing the entire contents on the ground. Those pinhole leaks would be ample warning that I needed to build another or scrounge a plastic tank.

I wanted to test my switch to see if it does turn things on and off as it should. Thus I hunted out my voltmeter. Uh Oh. I already have one dead voltmeter. That’s an analog meter I’ve had for years. I replaced it with a digital voltmeter that just goes bananas. I turned it on and it gave me all kinds of wild readings - readings that were constantly changing despite nothing being plugged in. I remembered that had been discarded for that reason. I pulled out my newer Harbor Freight clamp meter and that too gave me bogus readings. So I hunted and found a Walmart analog meter that I haven’t used because I’ve not been impressed with its accuracy. It would be very easy for the less intelligent individual to come out with carte blanche statements decrying the meters on price, origin or condemning the user’s skills. In fact that’s the kind of retarded statements I’ve come to expect from those addicted to forums and the internet in general. The sad fact is it really doesn’t matter how much one pays for many of these things. The components used to manufacture them all come from the cheapest possible source. A few years ago, the Pentagon discovered many of the chips used to make control circuits for missiles etc were made in China. That raised somewhat of a stink until they found out just how hard it was to source things not made in China.

Let me tell you of a little trick manufacturers like to play. They will buy the ready assembled circuits for their electronics and the casings for them from China. They will then put the electronics in the casings in a Free Trade Zone warehouse and sell them to the unsuspecting public with a “Made in the USA” sticker legitimately applied.

Going back to forums, I quit contributing to one a while ago because it was getting too stupid for words. The fantasy that was being paraded as reality was so reminiscent of the bad driving I see daily that it makes me wonder about the intelligence of the general population. I had stated quite clearly that I did not consider it worth returning. My last ever post on the board was quite specific...

Now normally I would not bother returning. Out of sheer curiosity to see whether they were in fact stupid enough to respond, I checked without wasting my time by logging in and indeed there was quite a torrent of nonsense. It wasn’t worth reading so I quietly closed the page, reassured that I had not erred in my summation of the forum users’ intellectual deficiencies. Maybe forums should all have a plague flag in the forum header?

Returning to the matter in hand, my problem is going to be locating fuses of the right values. I rather suspect I’m going to have to regard a 1A fuse as being acceptable for my 0.5A fan even though it allows double the current. It will blow at a short circuit but not if the fan starts running hot and using too much current. The common values seem pretty high so I’ll have to hunt online for the specific values I need. That’s not a huge issue - it’ll just mean I’ll have to have spares just in case as the motoring shops carry only regular car value fuses. I made sure when I bought the fuse box that it would take the same size fuses as the regular fuses on my bus. I’m not keen on using multiple different kinds of fuse. In fact several of the fuses in the console that I installed are in fact round glass fuses. Those will be replaced with blade fuses eventually. When I tried inserting a blade fuse into my new fuse holder, it went in sweetly. The holder bought via eBay that took weeks to arrive and cost about what my new holder cost, I’ve never managed to get a fuse to slip into it despite it being the right size!

Eventually, I’d connected all the wires up and put a 12v test battery on the system. The first thing that happened was one of my red LEDs lit up to show me that the fuse I was trying to use had blown. Now that’s a very handy feature of my fuse box! So, having connected everything, I was rather disappointed that I could get no response from the unit.

Hunting for the instructions to my rather non intuitive timer control unit took quite a while but they were illuminating when discovered. It seems that I should have pressed the c/r button 4 times in quick succession to unlock the unit. Why in Heaven’s name the manufacturers considered that worthwhile I have no idea. Just one of those bizarre things the Chinese think up I guess and probably this is why their nickname is the Yellow Peril.

Eventually my bilge fan sprung into life. Now I have to connect the other bilge fan to the controller and I shall be able to have both running simultaneously for programmed periods. I believe I programmed the controller to be active for 10 minutes every 60 minutes. Given that the fans use 5A combined and displace 130CFM of air apiece, that should, given that they only blow half that through my mosquito mesh, be around 1300CFM of air displaced or the entire of the air inside the bus and then some. The only way to discover whether that’s true is to get a flatulent individual to emit their noxious vapors in the cockpit then stand behind the bus and wait for the stench to arrive! Seriously though, some kind of theatrical fog might help. At the moment the rear panels that charge the small battery responsible for my unit produce just 20W or to be realistic, about 10W. In one hour they will produce 0.83AH of power. In 10 minutes the fans will burn up 0.83AH of power. That pretty much equals out.

I didn’t get done as much as I’d have liked but I got done pretty much what I set out to achieve. I’m pretty sure when I get the underneath wiring tied up properly and the connections underneath finalized that Eric will be well impressed. Tomorrow I’d like to work more on the underside. I’ll admit to being concerned about the strange, unidentified and broken cable attached to (or not as the case is) the acellerator. I’m thus hesitant about driving my bus more than just around the yard. Perhaps I should spend tomorrow tidying up my wiring and putting some form of connector in so that I can connect the underbody wires straight into the system. Great care will have to be taken with the solar panel connections. In fact I might just put some fuses as well as my diodes into those circuits.