The electrics work!

For about the last ten days or so it had been bitterly cold. So cold that working on the bus wasn’t really going to be much fun. Sure, I could have turned on my little electric fan heater but I try to use as little electricity as possible.

While things were frozen, some of my purchases arrived - and some did not. Generally it seems that stuff ordered from India, Thailand and Bangladesh seems never to arrive with my having to file for a refund with eBay. So, as normal some of my money is being held hostage until I get my refund and my final purchases. At this stage, the lack of a Radio Shack, ludicrously expensive as they were, is a hindrance.

The first thing done was to bury the contents of my onboard latrine since it had been used. The toilet was not smelling at all despite my having left it for a week and more. That proves my dry toilet system works. Heck, even if it has to be bagged and put in a sealed container after every use, it’s still decent value and very usable.

I can see that a very useful addition to the onboard toolkit will be a shovel for just this purpose. It’ll be way cheaper to bury the poo bag than to do anything else with it. I have to say poo disposal is more of a headache than anything else.

The plan today was to wire up the lighting (that I wasn’t ever going to install). My LED bulbs from China finally arrived and to be blunt they’re disappointing. In Walmart I got two other kinds of LED bulb. Some at 1.5W and some at 2.5W. The bulbs from China are 4.5W. In terms of brightness, there’s not as much difference between the bulbs. The big difference is in power consumption. Comparing the 130 lumen 1.5W bulb to my very expensive 350 lumen GE LED lantern (which should have been 3 times brighter), the bulb was far brighter than the LED lantern, lending more support to my theory that measuring LED brightness is not a good way of comparing LEDs. Lumens is how bright an LED is while lux is how much light is shone on a square meter of surface. It’s better to grade LEDs in candela. That measures against a known value - a single candle.

I have some spare L brackets so I decided to recycle them as lamp holders. The plan was to paint them then screw them to the wall. The bulb holders purchased some while ago that arrived recently would be simply glued to the bracket and the cabling installed. As it wasn’t that warm, the paint took forever to dry. While the paint was drying I got on with another project.

For a while I’ve thought that putting black foamboard in the window in cold weather would make the bus warmer. Thus browsing in Walmart a few days ago, it transpired that black foamboard was $2.75 a sheet as opposed to the white already in the bus that was just 88c. Clearly coloring one side of the foamboard looked better value and indeed it was. One 50c container of black acrylic paint covered just over two foamboards, painting just one side. That allows the same foamboard to be flipped for hot or cold weather.

Expecting the paint to attack the foamboard I was careful to paint just one board. As it dried fairly swiftly without obvious damage, I followed up by painting another one and a half before the paint ran out. Clearly I need to spend another massive 50c on more black acrylic paint.

The front windows look pretty good with black board set up inside. The white looks pretty bland but on the other hand effect is what’s needed not looks. The black dried swiftly and seemed to be impervious to water.

Moving on from painting, the paint having run out, it was time to seal the two cable inlets I’d installed. That really didn’t take very long. It was fortuitous that I’d bought more silicone sealant when in Dollar General a few days ago. The silicone seal tube in the caulking gun was dried solid. The new silicone seal did the job brilliantly so now everything is well sealed - from above and below.

Having sealed everything it was time to connect the cables to the charge controller inside the bus then to head under the bus to connect the cables to the battery. That was the job of minutes and was followed by puzzlement. The display on the charge controller was blank. Pulling out a digital multimeter from Walmart proved even more puzzling as the display showed random values, changing seemingly at random while not being connected to anything. In the end my Harbor Freight multimeter came up trumps. It seems that somehow the battery had been installed back to front. Thus, switching the cables going into the charge controller solved the problem. Red is negative and black is positive. It was just way easier than pulling the battery and turning it around. The display came on showing the battery voltage at 13.1v.

These are the mounting brackets. One is purple - it’s not an exact match to the opulent purple galley but it’s close. One is pink - again, not at exact match to the cosmic pink bedroom and the third would be lime passion but for the fact I just plain forgot to get green paint. When those are dry (and the grey one painted green) I’ll glue my bulb mounts to them and install them on the bus walls. The internal wiring is going to be pretty straightforward and my three colors of wire will make installation a snap.

I bought some LED garden lights from the dollar store some days ago. Those have very nice, very small tops that look as if they would make ideal lampshades. Nobody seems to make lampshades small enough for G4 bulbs but then nobody really expects anybody to use a G4 bulb for anything other than a night light.

The rectangular $2 top looks more usable but both look potentially useful as lampshades. In combination with the frosting spray they should be really quite excellent. It’s doubtful whether they’d stand up to a halogen lamp but at this point I think I’m committed to LEDs, sadly.

All the LEDs I bought have been graded as “warm”. I compared them to my LED lanterns anfd the LED lanterns now look like a very unpleasant blue. Indeed they now remind me of one of the CS Lewis stories in which the characters were in an underworld illuminated by a cold blue light. Blue is, as I’ve said on many occasions, not conducive to a good night’s sleep. Thus for a home, it has to be a warm looking light.

One thing I’d like to do is to install more 12v lines but the fuse box isn’t big enough. I could do with probably another 5 lines. Needless to say when I planned what I have, I consistently underplanned despite trying to overplan. I’ll try to complete things as they are. I can always expand and improve later. For the moment the plan is to complete the lighting then to wire in the fans. The box for my bedroom USB charging panel hasn’t arrived yet.

Two switches arrived a few days ago. Those will work for two of my lights. They were intended for connection to my battery power and the solar power so that it could be shut off with two switches. Unfortunately they were not really suitable for the heavy gauge cable from my battery. That will have to be a different kind of switch. Thus, I’ve ordered two more boxes but aluminum this time. They will be used as housings for switches controlling the output of the solar and battery.

Having hunted for all-in-one surface-mounting switches, it seems that they’re just too hard to find. Those that I found are good but were more expensive than just buying a box and mounting an ordinary switch on it. I have a ton of ordinary switches having purchased a load of stuff from Radio Shack’s going-out-of-business sale. So, still stuff on the way before I can complete the electrics. Fortunately most should arrive by the end of January.

I’ll get as much done as I can this weekend with the electrics though I might end up putting them off to do during my 4 hour lunch-breaks from driving school busses for a living. It might be an idea instead since I can easily attach cables one at a time and circuits one at a time, to install the water inlet if the weather is reasonably warm. That needs me to get under the bus and that’s a weekend job as it’s a messy job. This weekend is a 3 day weekend since there’s some kind of USA holiday going on, on Monday. I’m always a bit baffled by USA holidays, not being originally from the USA.