One of the missing tools was my Harbor Freight magnetic angle measurer. I put this on the back door of the bus to measure the angle I'll have to put on the bottom inch and a half to two inches of the sheet of steel that goes over the back window. As the vertical measured 90 degrees and the angled area measures 82 degrees it seems the bend is just 8 degrees. A bend like that isn't too difficult. A few blows with a hammer should see a good approximation of that bend!
The temperature inside the bus, according to the thermometer built into my charge controller is about 34C so pretty warm. Looking at the charge controller, it informed me that the battery was on 28% charge. That seems way below the point at which it should have cut off so I'm assuming that it means 28% of the usable 50% portion of the battery charge so in other words, 78%.
I put out the old 15W panel and plugged it in then found an SAE splitter I'd made a few years ago then I pulled out some 10W panels. One needed a new connector so I put that on and then I needed another SAE splitter so I put another SAE splitter together. There were a further two panels that I could have used but they both lacked connectors. Of course, I looked at putting connectors on the two panels as they were both 20W panels. That was when I found the cable strain relief clamp was designed for a ludicrously big cable. Those things are for 2A cables at the most. They don't need massively thick cables! I'll have to wrap the cables in electrical tape or something.
Meanwhile I have some more SAE connectors on the way from China. I really doubt that I'm ever going to receive them though as the tracking data looks very fake....
Buylogic tracking #BLGEU1100617267YQ
If that shipment made its way from somewhere in China to the USA in 3 days, I'm related to a monkey! It is now July 8th and still no sign of that shipment. I will be able only to declare it fraud on September 8th by which time the scoundrels will have absconded with the money. I have absolutely no doubt this is fraud.
The vast majority of the stuff I order via eBay arrives with no problem. I can say the same for Aliexpress and Alibaba. I also have another thing allegedly coming from China via eBay that I don't believe will ever arrive.
YANWEN tracking #S00000139074970
Unless I'm proven otherwise, I'm going to say anything shipped "BuyLogic" or "YanWen" is going to be fraud. If I knew it wasn't coming UPS, DHL, FedEx or USPS then I wouldn't have ordered it!
So, as I said, a day of doing little things. I finally put the panel back on the back door that had been on the inside forever. It's a little floppy being fridge steel so I'll likely have to add some more rivets. I closed the access panel at the front of the bus into the cable bay. I'll have to go in there again at some point to adjust some wiring. I also located and disposed of another piece of fridge steel.
Outside the bus it was wet and dreary but the panels at the last check had raised the battery to 41%. That was more respectable but nowhere near the 100% that it should be. By the time I'd disconnected the extra panels and stowed them away, the battery had dropped to 39% and 11.9v. Not very encouraging!
Looking at the documentation for my junky charge controller I noticed that I can change the values. On the one hand they say it will only handle 12.8v LIFEP04 batteries but on the other they say but you can change the voltages. That sounds more promising as my 18650 cells are 3.7v each for a total of 14.8v when fully charged. I'm not very impressed with what Renogy has been telling me on their website and on their documentation. It all seems so uninformative and wrong that Renogy has to be a Chinese company if not based in Beijing, at least run by the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China.
It was quite interesting seeing the solar panels all laid out generating power today. I had 65w of panels sitting in the drizzle generating power plus another 20 mounted on the bus and 60W standing in the windshield. That's a total of 145W and then there're the 55W of panels that I haven't been using.
It's getting to the point where I'm thinking of putting the 10W panels to use elsewhere. The flexible one would probably work on the roof. I'll look into that after I've put the top panel on the back door, while I work on replacing the faulty upper and lower reversing cameras.
Today I noticed green mold growing on the outside of the bus. I'm going to have to give the thing a good anti-fungal wash - probably about the same time that I wash the roof prior to putting more elastometric paint on and put the new flexible solar panel up there.
The final thing I did today was to mark the steel for the back door. Instead of a three quarter inch gape from the edges I had to leave an inch because of the way the door is built. It won't make too much difference given the rivet diameter. The only tricky thing will be bending the steel in the right place. I'll drill the holes before putting it in place to mark where the bend should be. 8 degrees of bend really isn't that much and I could just put extra caulk under the gap if need be. As it would be a 1/4 gap, it's probably better to try bending though. The bend does not have to be perfect - just close enough though I'll try to get it right.
As the connectors are unlikely to come I did order some 12v pin connectors a while back. They're good but not perfect. They're in use right now. I ordered some SAE sockets on the basis that I can always add extra SAE sockets in various places. While I was at it, I ordered a couple of spare voltmeters since one of mine has died. My fault as I left it connected to the USB charger that I used for my temporary security camera. I'll have to rewire that box. Maybe replace the button for the solar power voltage with a different kind of switch. I liked the button but perhaps a toggle switch would work better.
The next job is the panel for the upper back door. In no particular order, the jobs that are probably going to get done are...
1. Back door upper panel
2. Back door inner upper panel - this will probably be insulation plastic foamboard.
3. The roof vent
4. Wash the green slime off the bus as it's likely harmful
5. Repaint the roof where needed with elastomatric paint.
6. Replace upper and lower rear cameras.
7. Wire the solar connector for charging the driving batteries
8. Redo the windscreen wiper pivot mount so the wiper is actually level.
9. internal wiring adjustments
10. Put an 18650 battery pack together to try. My twenty 18650s will probably give me somewhere in the region of (at a claimed 3400mah per cell) 10-17AH. That would be acceptable if it was true capacity.
11. Install my flexible 10W solar panel on the roof, connected via a port built into the upper camera mount.
No comments:
Post a Comment