Blanket on the ground

Come and look out through the window 

That big old moon is shinin' down 

Tell me now don't it remind you 

Of a blanket on the ground

Finally after almost 4 years of working on and under my bus I figured out a way of staying somewhat cleaner. I threw a $2.99 Harbor Freight tarpaulin on the ground. It makes such a difference. Now I can slide more easily and I don’t lose things like nuts and washers in the sand under the bus. I can even throw it on wet ground and stay dry. I wish I’d thought of this years ago.

What with my day job I’m pretty busy. I leave for work at 5AM and don’t actually return until something after 5PM. Though I’m actually at work from 5:25AM to 4:45PM I don’t actually get paid for 11 hours despite the fact that I should be. I drive a school bus from 5:30 (5:25 if you count my morning checks) until 8:30 then I have to sit around until 10:15 when my next run starts. There’s no way I can go to do anything for two hours or less that would make money. Essentially it’s dead, wasted time. My next run returns at 12:PM and again I have to sit around until 1:45PM which is when I start my afternoon run and that ends at 4:45PM. Again, I have around two unproductive hours. So my day isn’t actually as long as it sounds. I get about 8:45 of paid work and the rest should be paid because I can’t do anything with it and don’t even leave the premises.

So, I don’t generally have very much time during the week in fact let’s say no time to do anything. Saturday is usually a recuperation day and Sunday a catch up laundry day. I have however managed to squeeze some time in over the last few weeks to do something.

About a month ago I decided to make another battery hanger. Not to replace my existing hanger but to complement it. I’d found that using my brand new Duracell battery from Batteries Plus Bulbs I was getting the same poor results that I was achieving with my old Harbor Freight battery. That led me to suspect that the problem is that the battery does not like putting out more than about 2amps. The symptoms are the same. If I have both extraction fans on then between them and my door unlocker (which is constantly powered) I’m using around 3.92A. Under that load, the battery voltage drops rapidly. Turning the load off, the voltage recovers rapidly. Thus I suspect that while the battery will hold 35AH, it does not like to disgorge that at a rate fast enough for me.

My solution to the battery problem was to build another battery hanger so I can put my Harbor Freight battery back in place but in parallel with my Duracell battery. Now I’d been convinced to use a brand name battery by people that had decried everything from Harbor Freight as being cheap trash.  Some Harbor Freight stuff does not last that long but then some stuff I bough elsewhere did not last too long either. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what brand is on it - it’s all made by the Yellow Peril and arrives in American in a shipping container. It is (I hope) unlikely that my battery solution will not be the correct solution.

Today I threw the tarpaulin on the ground and went under the bus to install my new battery hanger. Using two power drills - one with a nut spinner and one with the drill bit - I got the task completed in under an hour. The next stage will be to install the wiring but before I can do that, I have to wait for parts to arrive.

I had to put the new hanger a bit closer to the side of the skirt than I did with the previous hanger due to the proximity of the exhaust. I don’t expect heat from the exhaust will hurt the battery but I wanted to keep as great separation as I could. It’s secured by 8 bolts of 5/16 inch diameter. Those should hold  3,900lbs each for a grand total of 31,200lbs or to put it in perspective they’ll hold the weight of my bus. The weight they will be holding is the 10lbs or so of my battery hanger and the 20lbs of my battery. That’s a grand total of 30lbs and the safety margin is something like 1,000%.

In this picture you can see both battery hangers - the new one in silver at the top of the photo and the old one in white at the bottom of the photo. They’re slightly different in size - I had only a Harbor Freight battery when I built the first one and while it holds the Harbor Freight battery nicely, it’s a bit tight on the Duracell. Though they’re both allegedly a U1 size, the sizing isn’t exact. When I put the wiring in, I’ll switch the batteries around.

I have almost all the bits needed for the wiring. I’m missing the fuse holder. I was going to put a breaker in place under the bus but I decided a fuse would be way better. I have some self-resetting breakers I will be using. The manual reset breaker would have been a problem in that I’d have had to go under to reset it and in the event it tripped from the motion and vibration of the bus, it would have been annoying. A fuse solves that problem as it won’t vibrate into an off position.

If the extra battery does not solve the problem (though it will use up my spare battery), my next solution will be to modify the solar input at the back of the bus. I’d been planning a solar input at the back but that was to charge the solar batteries. What I think I’ll do is route it, using a relay and a resistor through to the fans. That way when there’s sufficient voltage to run the fans, they’ll run directly from solar panels. The resistor will just make sure the relay doesn’t trip and switch the fans on until there’s sufficient power in order to prevent overheating the fan motors. Relays are way cheaper and easier to replace!

The major headache is the ventilation system. That uses by far the most power. This is the only reason I have my two portable 30W panels. The rest of the bus systems will work very happily on my existing 35W of solar array.

As those of you who are familiar with my bus know, I have a penchant for humorous yet sinister destination signs at the front of the bus. I quite like my first sign that said “Fort Leavenworth Death Row Express” and I have one now that says “Fort Leavenworth Prison Choir”. I am on the lookout for other interesting signs to put in the window. I did like the idea of putting “Marine Transgender Football Team” but I kinda like the Fort Leavenworth connection. Suggestions? The comments are always available for suggestions!