Smaller advances than desired

The running water demonstration of a few weeks ago used a battery pack under the sink. Right now my mission is to power the shower pump directly from my house batteries. Saturday being my day of doing little, I've not achieved as much as I would have liked. In my defence, it has been rather warm. The temperature inside the bus with the ventillation fans off rose to 41C or around 104F. Outside the temperature according to the online weather service was 98F though they said on the radio that it was actually 1 degree cooler than the maximum recorded of 101F.

The first thing I did was to complete installing the turn signal switch. That, I'd started the day it had arrived, which was a few days ago. I couldn't complete it then because I had to lie on the floor and that day I was wearing my work clothes.

This last few days my schedule has been way less hectic. Normally I'm out of the house at 5AM after a 4AM alarm. Then I drive a school bus from 5:30AM (or sometimes a shade earlier) until 8:15AM. Then I am out again on the first middle-day run which starts at 10:20AM and ends at 12:00PM then I'm out again on my second middle-day run which starts at 12:00PM and ends at 1:15PM. Then it's a hasty lunch before I'm out again from 1:45PM til 5PM. Every other day I have to drive after the morning run to another depot in order to get fuel. The fuel truck only comes every 3 days so I have to refuel in between since the fuel tank holds but 60 gallons and my daily run is 200+ miles.

Anyway, since term is now coming to an end, the elementary children don't ride. That reduces my midday runs to one and reduces the load significantly on my other journeys. That led to one very light day when I came home and managed to get some work done on the bus. It was for another reason though that I came home that day.

My car refused to start in the morning so I borrowed a pickup truck. I came home after the morning run to return the pickup and to fix my car. Well, the car fix was easy enough - the battery clip was loose on one terminal - clearly it had worked loose since Walmart had installed the battery in December 2015. Then I had to fix the pickup because it didn't want to start! With a few minutes remaining I started installing the turn signal switch.

Switching turn signal switches was pretty easy. I just had two screws to undo. The old switch had no rubber boot around the paddle. The new one does but it moves readily, and that allowed me to access the screws to fasten it in place readily enough. Then it was the connectors. They had a locking flap that could easily be lifted and the old connectors pulled out of the bus connectors and the new connectors pushed in. It was all unidirectional. Very easy and straightforward save for having to lie on the floor in the heat to do it. I dare say a mechanic would have charged a hundred dollars to do what took me probably an hour (because I had to work out how it all worked). Testing came next and it tested perfectly.

The horn button when pressed made a satisfying sound from a relay somewhere. The hillbilly horn that had been wired without a fuse, blew the new fuse I'd installed. I'm not sure what's happening there. I have it in mind to find out what is wrong with the original horn circuit that the hillbillies tapped into. My betting is that it was the old turn signal setup because some of those connections were quite loose.

I went under the bus to complete running the cable for the handbasin pump. That went well enough though I did break a drill bit making the hole in the floor for the cable to enter underneath the hand basin. By the time I finished for the day I hadn't quite connected everything but what needs to be done can be done inside the bus.

The photograph of the waste barrel is because one of my regular readers wanted to know how I'd secured my waste barrels. What can be seen here is chains that will hold 560lbs per length, chain couplers that will hold 400lbs and turnbuckles that will hold 130lbs. The barrel is 15 gallon and will weigh 128lbs when chock full. As can be seen, the barrel can never be fully emptied nor probably fully filled. I'll regard it as a 12 gallon barrel to be on the safe side. The bolts holding the chain terminals are 5/16th inch and capable of suspending 1,200lbs. I'm pretty confident that my barrels are secure!

The downpipe in the background is from the sink to the barrel. The pipe in the foreground is a water inlet and at the bottom is a pressure reducer. Though my plumbing should be fine for standard pressures I wanted to be very sure and use low pressure.

During the week I thought about my solar-powered extraction fan idea. I'll keep on with that but what I will also do is to install wiring to the battery compartment so that if needed I can put a 3rd battery or a bigger battery in the battery compartment. I bought the cabling the other day but as I need another 10A breaker and a battery connector, I have to wait as I had to order both. I have a feeling that might be a more profitable route.

I still have yet to install the cables into the battery compartment for the solar charger in order to keep the driving batteries topped up. I might change out the charge controller that's located at the front of the bus in order to do that. I just have little faith in the cheapest of the PWM controllers. All solar controllers are made in China. I did briefly consider MPPT controllers but couldn't see any real advantage over PWM other than something largely theoretical.

The roof vent still awaits installing. I still have to put my fuse box in the control console and connect all my switches to that. That'll be a job for another day. The new USB power supply works but isn't currently switched. I have a switch. Again, I have to get inside the console to work on that. There are a lot of little jobs remaining to be done though running the battery cables will be the biggest task. I looked at the flat mirrors on the sides and see that in order to get them pointing straight back it's just a case of adjusting the top connector a bit. Right now they point down a little.

The temperature inside was warmer than it was last year. The insulating properties of the elastometric paint I put on the roof last year must have faded a little. It was definitely hot inside. Maybe not as hot as before though. With adequate ventilation I would imagine that the inside will be the same as outside if not cooler. I'm not going to install AC though.

I'm still chasing real RV style insurance. At the moment that's not looking too promising. I keep coming across insurers who won't insure because it's not converted by a big-name company. That tells me that all the people that buy RV conversions from non big-name companies are going to run into the same issues. Mind, to be honest I've seen so many horrendous home-made and redneck chop shop bus conversions that I see why the insurers are like this.

This is an RV conversion I saw not long ago. It looks as though it's way over the legal height limit. It looks terribly unstable and I would be scared to turn corners in it.  It just looks totally unsafe.