Another dreary day!

The old refrain still applies - I’d like to have done this today but...

As work ended at about 1pm for me today, the schools having a half day and my day thus being truncated into two driving sessions with a two hour gap in the middle, that meant the rest of my day was free. Had the weather been cooperative and had I not got the remains of something akin to flu then I’d have been working more intensively on the bus. Last weekend as you might have guessed was a dead loss wiped out by the flu.

So, over the last week or two some small new things have arrived. None are in any way spectacular. I still have to get under the bus to complete attaching and soldering some connections on the wire from the bedroom to the back of the bus. I now have the cables for my battery and still have to weld the battery mount together. I have a clearer idea of how it’s all going to fit together now though.

Today I was going to butcher my .50 cal ammunition box to make it into a battery holder for my two 7AH batteries. I started gathering bits to put into it - a fuse holder, a switch, a USB charger and a 12V socket plus a voltmeter when my brain suddenly screamed how much would this unit cost when completed. I have no idea but I’m sure it would be fairly expensive in parts.

It was then that I realized that as this is something I’d probably want to leave outside to charge from a separate solar panel, it would make sense to be as simple and cheap as possible. I located my 12V and USB unit that I bought from Walmart and decided after that I didn’t much like as it had a 12v power socket and that I wanted everything in my bus running off batteries to be USB (aside from my fans and possibly potential lights).

Thus I simply glued the socket to the top of the battery and added spade clips to the ends of the cables. Switching is a simple matter of removing the clip from the terminal. Recharging is simple too. Remember my old 5W solar panel? That has crocodile clips that will clip nicely onto the battery terminals.

That’s an earlier incarnation of my panel - used to run some PCB fans as an experiment. The whole benefit is that if I leave the battery with the USB/12V connector glued on top outside, nobody is likely to steal it because it looks to rednecky DIY. Similarly that little solar panel is pretty inexpensive.

A fuse would have been nice but I’m unlikely to overtax the battery by using it for USB devices. The 12V socket is handy for my 12V socket mounting voltmeter. This is all light, cheap and easy to use and replace. The plan is to use it to power my new 12V remote camera (that arrived a week or two back).

I thought about working on the internal wiring for the bus but decided against as the portable battery thing sounded a more fun immediate reject. The idea is to put the small panel to charge the battery over a few days then to check the battery voltage. I’ll then put the camera onto the battery and see how the voltage drops over say 24 hours. Maybe it’ll all work together nicely as a security system. I don’t know. It’s a thought and I want to play with it.

The weather over the next month does not look good for working under the bus. It’s cold and sometimes wet. I’ll have to wrap up warm and roll underneath one dry day - possibly during the Christmas holidays. I want this project done so I can start using my bus for fun trips etc. I’ve already learned how to drive a bus and can fling longer, heavier busses around the roads like they were mere toys. I can drive them all - busses with sloppy steering, sloppy brakes and hardly any acceleration or power as well as busses that work perfectly. That’s the miracle I achieve most days at work!

One by one my goals are coming to fruition. I got my bus. I built my bus into a home. I’m finishing up the solar electrics right now then the code lock to the door before adding instant hot water and a water inlet. I’ll have to find a new faucet for my sink since the old one has vanished somewhere. It would even be at the bottom of the bathtub that lies forgotten in the yard. The bathtub I stripped out of the old conversion.

The beauty of being where I am is that nothing is ever truly thrown away. It’s dumped in a pile in the yard and then when bits of it are needed or it is needed, it’s usually possible to rescue and revive it. There’s plenty sheet steel from old fridges, old washing machines etc. Sometimes things just don’t seem to have an immediate use such as the old solar panel that I bought off ebay that didn’t work but as the guy said keep it and refunded me, that just got used for target practice. Old microwaves don’t have anything in them worth keeping either. Sure, the transformers and the capacitors might be worth salving but the steel is so thin that it’s not really worth contemplating doing anything with it.

Where I worked in the summer, one person found an old microwave that was going to be thrown out, took it home and found it didn’t work so they took it to a scrap merchant and got something like a dollar for it. It was a far bigger microwave than any of those. Was it worthwhile? Not really. The price of steel is so low that it makes more economic sense to put things out the back and let them rest into the ground than to take them to sell. Dumping them in an official tip isn’t even an option as that’d cost money that could be spent on better things while these things dumped on the land here are harming nobody.

As the glue is still setting on the top of my little battery pack, there’s not really a load of point in trying to get it working. Each time I tried, the glue moved and the charger connectors moved. I’ve got them just where I want them right now. The instructions even say 24 hours till cured and 72 hours til maximum strength. At least I found a use for one of my four small batterie!