A lil bit icky

Today I woke to an icky tummy. I suspect it’s due to having been rolling around on the ground under my bus where God alone knows how many cats, rats, squirrels etc have peed and pooed. Heaven alone knows what mold spores are under there. I know there’s one gigantic spider so Heaven knows what that’s been doing. You can bet your boots that’s been peeing and pooing. Oh for some hard standing!

After I’d recovered, I looked at heading under the bus to complete my work from yesterday but my aching muscles told me quite firmly that they weren’t going to countenance such an activity. Thus I scouted around for things to do inside the bus. Clearly completing the inside wiring was out as the underbody wiring hasn’t been fully completed.

Thinking again about the battery holder, there is a spot behind the differential in which I could install my battery housing. I’m not certain however, whether there’s enough space between the housing (where it would be installed) and the differential. It’s looking a lot like I need to install my battery housing elsewhere. I have a spot in mind but know that my welder just isn’t up to the job of welding it to the ribs. For that, I might just have to break down and get somebody with a better welder to attach it.

I decided to install my solid state relay. As that should, according to all I’ve read, have a heatsink, I scouted round and found the feet from the beds in the original conversion. One of them used as a heatsink was just about perfect since they were all curiously made of aluminum.

I can’t say I think an awful lot of the welding but on the other hand, it’ll be strong enough for what I need. A few minutes drilling produced two mounting holes for the optical relay and four holes to mount the thing to the wall of the bus.

A few minutes later, it was ready to install. The plastic backing was peeled off the aluminum contact on the back of the solid state relay. The relay was then bolted to the aluminum “foot” that was now a heatsink. I would have used thermal cement left over from when I experimented with Peltier coolers but couldn’t find it so after cleaning the heatsink I just bolted them together firmly.

Putting the solid state relay into the circuit was pretty straightforward and came with a promising surprise. I used some light wires to connect the control side of the relay to the charge controller and noted that as soon as I had removed the power line from my fuse box to the charge controller, the little warning triangle that had been puzzling me for the last year vanished. Clearly I’m not supposed to have a common ground. That’s utterly bizarre and one of the reasons I bought my solid state relay. Let the charge controller handle the charging and the switching but let my relay handle the power usage.

As can be seen, the relay power light is on. Just by pressing a button on my charge controller though, power can be instantly switched off to my relay. The charge controller switch can handle only 20A while my relay can handle 50A though I shall put a 30A breaker into the system just off the battery to stop over 30A being drawn.

Attaching the relay power supply to the charge controller was problematic. The cable is thick enough that I could not have a power cable from the battery connecting to the power cable for the relay and insert them both into the charge controller port. Splicing heavy gauge wiring is not very user friendly! In fact where I’ve spliced wires under the bus yesterday, I might revisit those splices and resolder them because my final soldered splice was far superior to the previous splices and far more durable.

As I’ve had to rearrange some of my wiring, I’m quite glad I’ve been using silicone goop to stick it to the wall. It unsticks fairly readily when needed. It’s thus just a case of peeling the wire off and scraping the leftover silicone goop off the wall. Dead easy.

I’m hoping over the forthcoming break when I get a whole 5 days of to be able to complete fixing my underbus cable joins, complete attaching the cable bundle I’m working on and at least make inroads into the second cable bundle if not fully install that.

In my optimism I have included an extra wire in all the cable bundles. I do that on purpose just in case I need to expand. Had I realized how much I would be expanding I think I’d have put a much bigger cable bundle from front to back in the first place. The extra wires in my current bundles are intended for lighting. Each bundle has 5 wires. The front bundle is to power my USB charger, my fan and to provide two wires for solar power then the extra is for lighting. The back bundle is for my fan, two possible light units (bathroom and bedroom) and a USB charger. I would happily have run the whole lot off a 6V battery and 6V charge controller but 6V solar panels and 6V charge controllers are highly uncommon.

The temperature was falling by 4pm so doing much else wasn’t really an option. Having said that, there really wasn’t much else I could do. I could have jerry rigged something for the electrics but when I’m not living in my bus that’s not quite so important. It will work when I get to it over the 5 day break. I did, however, work on my ventilation a bit more. As I might be removing the external bug screen in order to increase air throughput and increase fan efficiency, I’d made one onion dome to go over the air intake. I made a second onion dome today. I just recycled some of my plastic tubing from a previous incarnation of my ventilation system. Needless to say, though the cutting and bending went better today than before, the problem of dried-up pipe glue was worse. Today I just couldn’t get the glue to stick at all.

All I did was to take a piece of angle pipe since the open end of the angle that was not glued to anything would fit easily over the end of my bilge blower and cut the end off it then cut two rings of PVC pipe, slit them then heat bend the ends with my mini blow torch. Then pop them over the ring that I’d cut using the end of the angle pipe. Over those - when I get more pipe glue I’ll glue mosquito mesh. That will stop bugs entering. The fans should blow any bugs that do get into the duct work, straight out. In fact I’m toying with the idea of draft proofing a little by replacing my mushroom vents with articulated louvered vents but that’s just a thought right now.

As you can see, my technique has improved - I’ve not charred the latest plastic but it probably won’t notice that it is charred after the mosquito mesh is glued over it. I might also glue some fill-in sections of tube to even out the perimeter. That’s a job for another day though.