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.