First test

 

Those are the stairs on my bus - yes, they are a mess - but they are illuminated by the light of a single two LED red marker light. 

Though it can't be seen, the marker light is temporarily held in place by a single neodymium magnet. It's centrally located above the stairwell. I had wondered whether I might need a second LED light but this seems to illuminate the stairs enough to see the stairs and not so much that it's dazzling or announces "Hey there's a light on in that bus". It preserves night vision and gives enough light to see while consuming just 0.2W. There's not much not to like about it!

In the dark with just the marker light for illumination, it does look rather like one of those movie explosions. Having said that, it's pretty darned good. I might add another of these inside the galley since there's no way of seeing one's way in there to hit the first light switch.

The lower battery bank - the AA batteries - are what used to power the door lock until I switched to the D cells above. None of the wiring is in its final configuration. Tomorrow I will probably work on the door lock circuit and tidy that up. Once that's done I'll turn my attention to the lighting.

That's the switch for the lighting circuit right now. That's a straightforward on-off switch. The future switch will be just an ordinary momentary pushbutton switch. That will fire a SPDT automotive relay and that will lock on, firing a DPDT timer relay from eBay and putting power to the light. The timer relay will wait a minute or so before firing at which point it will disconnect the power to the whole circuit, cutting the light out.

Once all that is done and wired tidily, the door lock circuit will be in its final (so far) evolution as will the new stairwell light. The only thing against me tomorrow will be the cold weather.

Half a job done.

It was cold this morning and it snowed last night. Overnight it dropped to 29F and was still only a degree above freezing by sundown today. It was warmer in the sun but only because there was no wind. Not a day to go under the bus!

Today I didn't complete the task I wanted to complete. I did get the new D cell battery holder into place. That is a huge step forward. I also installed a fuse box at the end of the battery holder. I had wanted to put crimp spade connectors to connect to the fuse box but I couldn't get the first one to grip even with my extra powerful crimper. In the end I simply soldered to the fuse box. The other side can be spade connectors. 

The messy bundle of wires will be tidied up later. I ordered a relay but it has not yet arrived. When that arrives, it will be screwed to the bulkhead on the right and wires of appropriate length installed. What's there now is just a jerry-rigged affair that had worked for the past 5 years. The bigger batteries and the fuses are a great step forward. 

The experimental set up with the time-delay relay probed the time delay was in the wrong direction. It would delay before it activated rather than delaying after activating. That made it a bit nonsensical. I had to get a second relay to put with it in order that I could have it latched on then the other relay could activate a minute later, breaking the connection. It's fiddly wiring but it'll work.

This is the relay. I bought this from Autozone on Thursday. What a nightmare that was. I walked in and browsed the entire store looking for relays and could not find any. Eventually I approached a disinterested sales clerk. He asked what I was looking for and I said "relays". He pointed to the electrical section so I told him I'd looked. He went and looked then to prove me wrong. Seeing that there were no relays, he asked the usual nonsensical question: "What car is it for", I told him I wanted their cheapest relay. He said he had to look it up by car. That was pure nonsense! Clearly the fellow did not know anything about what he was doing. Having said that, the staff in the store was totally different from the last time I was in there.

While the moron was playing with his computer searching through Ford Explorer parts - he'd decided to look up Ford Explorer relays for some unknown reason - I looked up the Autozone website. Up came relays and I sorted them, cheapest first. The fellow as on about a relay for that Ford Explorer that was $20. That was nuts! I showed him the one I had found on the website. Nope - didn't have it in stock. I showed him the next one which was about $6. Yes. That was listed so he trotted off to get it. Then having found it, I bought it. 

Where does Autozone get its staff? The bargain bin at the lunatic asylum?

So, the door lock works though I do need to replace the relay with one that has a base. That relay arrives likely on Monday. To get to South Carolina from New York it seems to have had to wander off into Georgia. That's not a straight line! Having been out in the cold for an hour or so working on installing and wiring the new battery pack, it was time to head back inside. I was frozen. Tomorrow I'll have a go at wiring the time delay relay pair for the stairwell light.
 

A long hunt

Today I decided to get on with replacing the battery holder for the door lock. Well, perhaps I should back it up a bit. In my spared box I found a 4 D cell holder and a pair of 2 D cell holders. Given that D cells are heavy it's going to be a better idea to mount my batteries flat. The AA cell holders grip the AA cells nicely so I never had to worry. 

That's the old setup. I can tidy those wires up a little though. Behind the aluminium plate is some spare AA cells and a relay. That relay controls the door lock via the keyswitch. The keyswitch is rather bizarre in that instead of being On 1, On 2, Off which would make sense it's On 1, On 1 & 2 and off. That meant I had to do some fancy wiring with a double-pole relay to make the lock open and close.

The old relay works just fine but isn't mounted in any meaningful way. It's just rattling around loose behind the aluminium plate. A new relay has been ordered that has a base. 

After having mounted the battery holders to a suitable piece of plywood and soldered the connections then hot glued the wires into place it was time to populate the holder with batteries and test the wiring. That's when I hit a huge snag - I knew I'd bought batteries at Harbor Freight some weeks ago but could not find them. I couldn't remember what else I'd bought in that shopping trip either so I didn't know what the batteries were likely to be sitting beside. I went to the bank website to try to find how much I'd spent there and when as a clue. The bank website did not cooperate and wouldn't let me in. That old trick it has of refusing a perfectly good password. It'll play that game for weeks on end then suddenly let me in using the password. If I change the password, it'll complain the new password is wrong. I learned long ago that these banking websites go through phases of silliness like that.

Having no idea where the batteries were in order to test the battery holders, that put rather an end to matters for the moment so I sat haranging politicians for their lack of morals via Twitter then suddenly realised I'd bought a big plastic ammunition box in which I should store all my socket tools and wrenches. Then I remembered I'd had the lady serving me at Harbor Freight put everything inside the ammunition box instead of in a plastic bag. Bingo - all I had to do was find the ammunition box. That was a matter of a very few seconds.

So, the battery holder was filled with batteries and tested. It worked fine. Then I realised I needed a relay that had a base that could be screwed down. I ordered one. While I was looking around the bus I even found a 4-fuse holder. The door lock has run without a fuse forever and a day. Time that had a fuse on it. Same for the LED marker lights. Those will run off AA batteries - that way if the LEDs are left on then the door lock won't be dead.

I can see another trip to Harbor Freight in the near future. I might need another 90 degree drill attachment in order to get everything screwed down correctly. I certainly need more angle brackets. I'll probably put up two LED marker lights initially to light the stairwell and cockpit. I'll have to see how it all works before I do much further.

I had hoped to go under the bus this weekend - since it's a 4-day weekend - but it's been too perishing cold. The brakelines get put off again.

I did relocate the old Harbor Freight LED light. That thing had never been up to much. It is one of the worst examples of LED lighting and the batteries are almost always dead in it so there has to be parasitic power drain.

With the current Covid strain named Omicron running wild in the USA, I might have more time to work on the bus. The big boss where I work said no closures but also that people should be prepared. Meanwhile other similar organisations in the area have split 50/50 with some closing and some not yet making that announcement. Thus my 4 day weekend might get longer or it might not. The longer it is, the more I can get done on the bus.

Fancies are expensive!

Going in and out of the bus at night I had fastened a Harbor Freight LED light that ran off a paid of AA batteries. Well, that light had a horrible attachment and kept falling down. The velcro never worked. The magnets fell off the light so it was more often than not on the ground. Thus, since I have several LED marker lights that are of no earthly use to me I decided to replace the flimsy Harbor Freight thing that seems to have fallen off yet again and this time vanished with LED marker lights. 

Cue a decision - whether to run them off the solar door lock circuit or from the AA door lock circuit. Running them off the latter would run the risk of flattening the door lock batteries so the idea was to upgrade from AA to D cells, particularly since the AA cells struggle in cold weather. That led to another question of how to stop the light from shining if I forgot and left it running. For that I looked on eBay and found something called a time delay relay. That sounded promising so I forked out $10 and bought one. 

The relay arrived with no instructions so I had to work it out. It seems that after placing it on its little pedestal that on one end there are 4 contacts. The set at the front were two pairs. One pair was to operate the relay and the timer. The other pair supplied power. On the back were 4 contacts - the bottom pair fed through from the relay when the relay was not activated. The other pair fed through when it was activated. A dial on the top set the time delay though the time delay seemed a bit off.

I connected the relay to a pushbutton switch that I had not realised was a latching pushbutton switch. That's actually useful to have! I connected an amber marker light to one pair of relay outputs and a red to the other.

In this picture, the button has been pushed but the relay has not yet tripped so the amer light is lit.

In this picture the relay has tripped so the amber went out and the red light came out. That all looks fine and dandy but brings me no closer to having my light turn out after a moment or so. While the relay does trip to switch the amber it, it leaves the relay powered and burning up electricity. What therefore would be needed is an extra relay to cut power. That's when it all begins to burn up yet more money and get far more complicated than just putting in an ordinary flippy switch and remembering to turn the light off!

The D cell battery holders I have will work just fine. The only issue with them is that the batteries need to be held in or vehicle motion might jog them free. This does not happen with the smaller lighter AA batteries. As I have AA batteries in situ I might as well add D cell holders and run the door lock of D cells and the LED lighting off AA cells. That, to me, would make far more sense. Due to limited real-estate behind the wall and due to the thinness of the OSB I might have to put a 3/4 plywood panel up that's attached to the OSB that just holds the batteries. This needs some thought. 

Meanwhile I angled my solar-collecting water heater and set it all going. I'll have to see if after a few hours the water is warmer. I suspect it won't be but who knows. There is a warming ray of sunshine out there. In the sun it's not bad. Out of the sun it's a little chilly. The temperature is 54F outside now. Maybe if I can find my infrared thermometer I can tell whether the water is warmer than ambient temperature or not.

In other news, I have been hunting in vain for another cheap CD-R unit. I bought the pair I have on eBay a few years ago and could not find another unit. Fortunately I still have the packet it came it. Sometimes it pays to be untidy and not to throw out packaging.

Looking up SKU S1169EU found ONE listing from somewhere called KKMoon that led to a non-existent Amazon webpage. That wasn't very helpful!

The back of the package shows how good this device is. Sure the video quality might be a little rough and ready but for recording traffic incidents it's absolutely perfect. I don't need to read number plates. Even if a car screams through a real school bus stop sign and the plate number is recorded and reported by the driver, nothing ever happens. In the event of an accident the police still don't give a hoot so there's still no point in recording number plates. They only take a mild interest if there's a fatality. However for shaming drivers by publishing their bad driving on YouTube, the quality is just fine.

There's the bar code. Again, the bar code got me precisely nowhere. All I can assume is somebody in a grass hut in the middle of Peking knocked a few of these out with their soldering iron, sold enough of them to be able to afford a supply of opium and then quit making them.

They are handy and they were cheap. All I needed was to add a video camera like this and the quality of the video was sufficient. 

So, I shall quaff more tea and maybe scarf some cake. Then I will head back outside and look again at installing a D cell battery holder screwed to some plywood that I can then fasten a gate to, to stop the batteries just falling out. That will allow me to put the D cells to power the door and the AAs to power the light. It is far more likely that I'll forget to turn my light off than for the door lock to wear the batteries out. Given the time a set of AAs lasts, a set of D cells should last a year.

 

Hydrogen experiment

Back at the beginning of August I set up an experiment to generate hydrogen gas using a 15W solar panel, two stainless steel electrodes, some old plastic bottles, wire and water. Over the months I was baffled as to why it was not producing hydrogen and why the water had turned orange. At one point I had added salt to the water in case 15W was not sufficient with well water to produce a reaction. That had the downside of also producing chlorine gas but I figured - it's outside about 20 feet from anybody and the chlorine would dissipate to meaningless quantities if indeed any quantity worth worrying about was produced.

Nothing happened so today I dismantled the hydrogen generator and retasked the solar panel to work with my solar water heater. In the case of the solar water heater, I suspect I need to do a redesign but that's what experimentation is all about. Experimentation is more fun than anything else.

The way I had it working was two dollar store stainless steel knives with ring connectors crimped onto the wires and the wires screwed to the knives using stainless steel self-drilling bolts. I had the anode inside a small water bottle with the cap on and holes in the bottom. That was inside the bottom of a 2-liter pop bottle with the top of another wedged on to to prevent evaporation of the water. The cathode was slipped outside the water bottle but inside the pop bottle. 

The rust colour had completely baffled me when it appeared. Having dismantled the setup, the bottles were thickly coated in rust and the stainless steel knives were covered in rust too.

The stainless knives look to be actual stainless steel. Where that huge quantity of rust came from is the wire ring connectors. As can be seen, the one from the anode is completely rusted away. The one to the cathode is barely hanging on.

So, the problem seems to have been an unforeseen electrochemical reaction that transformed some of the equipment from steel to iron oxide. That is an interesting situation as I'd been building the system cheaply and simply with my only expenditure being one dollar for the stainless steel knives. I dislike spending money on experiments, preferring to use what I have.

The solution would be a total redesign. The reason I have the anode and cathode separated is so that the hydrogen can be collected separately from the oxygen. I wanted the hydrogen for other experiments and other fun. For cooking I recall seeing somebody doing a similar thing using an old propane tank full of water. They were producing Brown's gas though which is quite hazardous. Brown's gas is oxygen and hydrogen gas together. It only becomes water when the hydrogen is burned in the presence of oxygen.

One of my thoughts had been that if hydrogen could be generated and collected in large enough quantities then aside from experiements, it could be used for cooking and water heating.

The solar water heater is another experiment that's more fun than practical. While they do work exceptionally well, done right, all I'm aiming for is proof of concept. To be "right" it would need black tubing, a black heat reflective backing and glass over the front to convert shortwave light to longwave light. In other words to make it hot inside the unit. The piping from the heating unit to the reservoir would need to be lagged. The reservoir needs also to be lagged. The alternative would be an immersion element and bigger solar panels. 

Going further, if the solar water heater was done well, the water heating would need no pump as the heating could be acieved by convective circulation. That is something well worth doing but which would really only be doable with a domestic installation.

  

Results...

I just looked up when I bought my 5ah battery. I pulled it out of the storage box and it was reading zero volts.  It seems to be around April 2016. Given that such batteries really don't last that long, I'm not surprised it's dead.

The other battery I've tried to charge and it did reach 13v earlier in the day but after dark and when there was no solar power coming in, it dropped to 12.4v. That battery I seem to have bought in around July of 2017. Again, no great surprise that it's almost dead.

At 0v for the one and 12.4v for the other. I can say the small one is definitely dead. The larger one suprisingly still has 80% capacity but 80% capacity of a 7ah battery really isn't worth very much. That would be 5.6AH or around the capacity of two sets of 18650 batteres.

I had the solar water heater running today. The pump was certainly pushing the water through at a good rate. It didn't heat the water but there are probably 4 reasons for this:

1. The sun was not out for long and it was a bitterly cold day anyway.
2. I had a lot of tubing just laid out on the ground where heat would be lost.
3. The lid of the cooler in which I kept the water reservoir was not tight enough around the tubes so heat was probably lost that way too.
4. The heat exchanger design is not very efficient.

I'm thinking that the biggest issue is probably the air gap around the tubing. I have two small coolers. I'm not really sure I want to sacrifice one to just an experiment - even though they were dirt cheap. This is an experiment I want to return to but I want to go at it full tilt. I want to put black painted copper tubing and a lot of it - as the heat collector inside probably a Rubbermaid low-profile tub that's lined with some kind of insulator on the sides and bottom.  The tubing needs to be lagged between the heat exchanger and the water reservoir and the water reservoir needs to be fully closed so no heat can be lost from the reservoir. Having got that working, I then want to see what the difference between using the heat exchanger and using a straight sheet of glass over an insulated bucket of water. 

Meanwhile, today I had hoped to go under the bus to work on brake lines but the high point was 41F so a bit too cold to lie on cold ground. Tomorrow will be 71 but as I have to work on Monday and usually get a day's worth of tummy bugs from going under the bus, it'll have to wait til my 4 day weekend. Pretty much the same for working on the brake calipers.

Aw no.... Wrong hose and connectors

Yesterday I went shopping! They say when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping so it must have got incredibly tough yesterday. I had said I would not go anywhere until the 3rd and I regret to say I was not true to my word.

So, one of the things I picked up was a selection of colour swatches. I'm trying to match the blue-green intereor paint of the bus. Misty Sea is almost the same as the Carpenter paint. It's shade darker and a shade too green. I will have to see what other swatches there are. 

The plastic nut holding on the switch at the bottom of the galley console broke which led to the switch flopping about. Yesterday I bought a new switch from Lowes (hiss, spit) and installed it. Now the 12v acessory socket works again. That's welcome as I use that particular socket quite a bit.

Also while I was out I bought some more plastic tubing and some plastic tubing connectors. They were supposed to connect to my existing tubing but it seems the tubing is the next size down and the connectors are too. Nevertheless, as the new tubing fits snugly inside the old tubing it might not be a loss. I put most of the solar water heater together. I just need to plug the pump in and connect that to solar to see how well I can heat water held in a cooler using just the sun and a solar pump to circulate the water. Needless to say as soon as I'd got that far, the sun went in and I ended up not being able to test it.

This little Radio Shack 5AH battery was what used to power the bus. I used it solely for extraction fans when I was using CPU fans for extraction fans and for lighting when I used 2w LED lights. I had another project that came up and I wanted to use the battery. After 3 days of solar charging off a 15w panel with a $10 PWM charge controller there was still no change in the voltage. I'm thinking that battery might be dead. I might be able to revive it by connecting it directly to about 100W of solar power in full sun but I doubt it. It's worth a shot anyway but that's a task for another day.

Underneath my cheap PWM controller is a 10AH battery. This read 12.2v when I connected it and after a short while it read 12.4v This battery might be salvable. I will leave it connected and keep checking the voltage. What annoys me is I bought the big one a year before Radio Shack went bust and paid silly money. The other one I got for a reasonable sum in their bankruptcy sale. Mind that's where I also got the plastic switches that broke! 

This is an old ammunition box. For the longest time it was a power box that held both of the gel batteries. I'm going to rebuild it and decided to change the colour from green to yellow. I didn't have any yellow paint and there was none in the store yesterday. Thus I had to choose between red, green, purple, black and white. I chose black because that paint is the colour I'm least likely to need for anything. The white I'll use later to put a nice skull and crossbones on the box for fun.

The plan now is to put a charging port into the box, a voltmeter if I have one spare, a charge controller and the 10AH battery. I'll also include a couple of 12v outputs. If I need USB power I can put that in or use a 12v car accessory socket adaptor. It'll be my equivalent of a "Jackary" and will be just fine for the things I want to do. Instead of costing out the wazoo, it'll cost me $0.00 as I already have the bits.

Oh yes... and the NAPA bucket - total trash. I bought that, put it in the bus with nothing in it. I came back to it 6 months later and the bottom has split. I don't recommend NAPA buckets.