Taking stock

Today I sit on the bus, looking around. There are things that need to be done, things that should be done and things that might be done. On the whole, progress has been good.

I looked at the barrel hangers I welded and was unsatisfied as they should in my changed opinion, be oriented differently. Thus I have cut another piece of steel ready to weld links to. Originally, I was going to replace the mounts I'd already installed. I've changed my mind about that now. I'll just add two extra chains attached to four extra mounts. I'll then see which, if any, fail. That will support each barrel from 5 chains, hence I bought some more chain. Rather than buying extra connecting links, I might just weld the right length of chain to half the mounts so if any links fail, the chain will fall safely away from the tyres.

The battery powering the fans needs in my opinion, to be mounted underneath the bus. Thus, I shall make a mount and bolt it to the underside of the bus at the rear. If the mount breaks loose and falls off, oh well. At least it won't fall under my wheels. I keep thinking about a battery to power 12v stuff but thus far can't really see any great advantage. Solar powered extraction fans seemed a good idea but in practice, they're not as practical as they could be. Having said that, they do work and I imagine in the heat of summer they will work far better.

Meanwhile, my smartphone pretty much died about a month ago having been in varying stages of demise since September. I bought a Tracfone SIM card and for text messages it has been great. For voice I made one call to another Tracfone and the call quality was terrible. It remains to see whether it's good or just cheap trash. I must admit I really like the idea of paying $20 every 3 months for my phone service, given that nobody ever calls me. That's much better than the $50 a month that I was paying for talk, text and data with Straight Talk. I really do not need data. 

Thinking about data any my bus lifestyle I have realized just why people are so broke these days. Back in the 40s when life was good, most people didn't have a car. They cycled, walked or took the bus to work. They had a radio and some had a TV but no cable. Some had telephones but not everybody. Nobody had cellphones, internet nor most of the electronic gadgets we see as normal but which are in fact luxuries.

My bus has solar powered ventilation, battery powered lighting, a small gas cooker and no fridge. How much electricity do I need? Sure, I have a plugin that I can use in order to use mains power when available but that, I feel, was me making a blunder. I have a feeling that though nice, mains power is a red herring.

Today I looked for Christmas cards. Looking proved to me just how much absolute garbage has crept into my possession. I'm going to have to take one box at a time and see what I really need to keep. I suspect not an awful lot to be honest.

I seem to be moving farther and farther away from the modern electronic lifestyle. My bus has no TV, no video player, no sound system. I have a pocket radio that runs off a PP3 battery that never gets used because I love silence too much. My smartphone died so the only camera currently used is on my elderly tablet. Interestingly, the charge controller on my solar setup will also charge USB devices. That gives me the option of charging my tablet or my phone.

But what about the Internet? Well, my old friend Eric, blogs profusely but does not have his own internet connection. Instead he uses connections along his travels. While I do have a MiFi pad, the data is so appallingly expensive, I never buy data nor use it. 

So, how much am I saving versus spending?

No smartphone so I save $50 a month though I do spend about $6.67 a month on the Tracfone.

No internet so I save between $15 and $50 a month.

No electricity so I save $28+ a month. Batteries cost about $5 a month.

I do use a $3.50 cylinder of butane each week.

Rent - if I paid for land rent in a mobile home park that would be $200 a month as opposed to $525 which was the last actual house rent I paid.

Expenditure now... $25.67 but $225.67 if I rented in a mobile home park

Expenditure at the max... $650+ per month.

Annual saving $7,491

Note... I haven't factored in heating nor cable TV. I'm really unimpressed by beating. When I lived in Britain, in cold weather we wore warmer clothes and went to bed earlier, using minimal heating. Small gas heaters are available though their cost and running cost have not been calculated. The alternative is an electric heater.

So, no wonder everybody is broke. They all have to have the latest gadgets etc. I can put a light on, grab a mug of tea and sit down with a book when there's no available internet connection. We make life too complicated and too expensive with all our toys.

A mystery solved

Today I went to start my bus but the battery was flat. I charged it and drove the bus forward and back in the yard noting that the gizmo attached to the drive shaft is not a supplementary speedometer. The red power cable is disconnected and the speedometer functions. This is all particularly curious!

Starting the bus was a challenge as the battery was flat. I charged it and it started up straight away. Turning the kill switch on the battery I went back inside to find the power still on. Returning to the kill switch I discovered what a marvelous piece of engineering the people that installed it had done. The switch is on the negative terminal and the terminals on the switch are both uninsulated and in contact with the bodywork. What a stunningly bad piece of engineering! Until I can resolve the short in the ABS circuit, the solution will have to be duct tape over the part the switch touches.

Looking underneath the bus I found the steel plates on my welded barrel hangers are a little overlong. I can trim them though extra width would be welcome. I have a feeling that the hillbilly steel just isn't going to be any good for anything bus related. No matter how much I tried to reuse most of the hillbilly parts, I never could get them to work. I might end up having to buy more appropriate steel.

Today I didn't actually do much. I was just so utterly exhausted from working. My day starts at 4am when my alarm sounds. Typically I drive a school bus, picking up children between 6am and 7am, delivering them to two elementary schools then between 7am and 8am I drive for a high school. Add in a few extra activities and I'll be driving for approximately 3 hours. Then I go home and if I can manage it, I have a nap. The last few days that nap just didn't happen. From 1:35am until 4:30pm I usually act as an aide on a bus while the other driver drives. I take over at 4:30 if there are still children to drop off, dropping the other driver at a prearranged point (which changes). I can then be driving until 5:05 or occasionally 5:45. That's around a 12 hour day! I do that every day and by the end of the day I am shattered. Driving takes a lot of concentration because I have to be aware of what my passengers are doing, what drivers around me are doing and obeying the rules only school bus drivers must obey. Yesterday, for example, on the morning run I had to stop midway through a left hand turn because a car driver thought he could get into a non existent gap. Had I not been checking my side mirrors, he would have been an insurance claim. Then as I was slowing to pick up a child, with my amber lights flashing, a very long flatbed semi pulled out of a turning just in front of me. I'd already seen him as a risk but hoped he wouldn't be that dumb. I was prepared to stop and did. Finally, driving along a narrow road I spotted some children up ahead. As I drew closer one pushed another into the road I had to swerve and brake. Had I not already checked my mirror to see if I was being overtaken my only recourse would have been harder braking which could have thrown my passengers on the floor with injury potential. So now you know... my job is absolutely exhausting.

If tomorrow is warmer, I might get underneath the bus since the wasps have gone and see if I can use my carefully welded barrel hangers.

Nothing much today. Too cold!

Yesterday I built a solar oven using materials to hand. As there has been no sunshine to mention, the temperature inside did not reach any great heights thus the paint I put on my barrel hangers did not get baked on as I'd have liked.

I'm trying at the moment to demolish an entry room in front of a spare mobile home that's being used for storage. It's proving somewhat of a challenge. The problem is the floor of the entry room is unsafe so the whole room has to be removed in order to access the storage. I need to access that storage to put my excess supplies in while I complete the things I'm working on with the bus.

Not getting very far with anything much, I git a little depressed. Being asked to dispose of some ancient tubs of Greek Yogurt, I set them up not far away and built a little backstop then lifted my mood by shooting them with my .357 magnum. That was fun!

Demolishing the room is probably going to be best achieved by pulling the walls down by force. I'll have to work on that!

Ready for liftoff - almost

Having not started the engine in several months, today I tried to start my bus. Needless to say there wasn't sufficient power in the battery so I set to and charged the battery. While I was doing that I noticed there was a strange red wire coming from the battery and going to a peculiar box coming from the prop shaft. As I fiddled, the wire disengaged itself from its attachment. It had clearly been installed by the hillbilly previous owners.

I have absolutely no idea what that wire is doing other than taking up space. There's a white wire that clearly used to go to the reversing horn. The horn still exists but the hillbilly wiring has long since fallen off.

After a while I started the engine and ran it for 10 minutes noting that the battery gauge and rev counter were not flickering as they used to. I'm now wondering whether the hillbilly owners had added the reversing horn and all the bad wiring. I intend to replace the reversing horn wires but I will wire the horn directly to a switch on the console. The less automation the better!

Hunting around, I didn't find a paintbrush suitable to put white paint onto my barrel hangers. I did however manage to spray them with grey paint. As it is very cold, that paint might take days to dry. 

Thus my cunning plan involves a piece of plywood I found rotting on the ground, a retread tyre that fell apart and the remaining piece of plexiglass from the bus. The plan involves making a solar oven. The plan if the oven works as described is to use it to bake my paint.

Needless to say, as the solar oven comes straight from the green conspirators cookbook, its dubious as to whether it'll work. So many of these kooky green brainwaves never work. I can give a pretty long list of kooky green ideas that don't work yet cost a ton of money.

• LED lightbulb replacements. I bought 5 and only one lasted more than six months. How is that green when they're unrecyclable and contain phosphorous? They hurt my wallet to five times the cost of a CFL bulb and ten times the cost of incandescent. The amount of power used by LED over incandescent is minuscule. 
• Solar power. I've tried so many of these solar things and end up throwing most away because they don't last long. How is that green? Solar panels contain cadmium and other toxic elements. How are they greener if they're introducing unrecyclable toxins to the environment?
• Fuel efficient things on cars. Electronic ignition came in in the 1990s. It saves no appreciable amount of fuel. It's a green conspiracy to make things more technology dependent and expensive. I wouldn't mind betting the green movement is a cunning plot by the Chinese government to make the world dependent upon Chinese electronics.
• LED lanterns and flashlights. I have never had an LED anything that has lasted longer than the first set of batteries. LED flashlights are so bad that Harbor Freight gives them away free. I have several LED lanterns and none are as bright as a lantern with an incandescent flashlight bulb. They're blinding to look at but the light they produce is terrible.
• The latest green scam is DEF - diesel emission fluid. It costs money, squirts toxins into diesel exhaust, adds electronics to the system and causes nothing but problems.

See where all these green things are going? They all add tons of extra electronics to everything. It has to be a plot by the Chinese to sell electronics. These greens are nothing but Chinese terrorists waging war on the western world. Forget Isis - the greens are far worse.

It is my goal to make my bus conversion as independent of electricity as possible. I tried a solar powered ventilation system. It kinda sorta works but worked far better before I added the battery, charge controller and even the solar panels.

I do use a cellphone and a tablet. That's it for me for electronics though. In fact I recently stopped using a smart phone and went back to a dumb phone. That was driven by Straight Talk pointing out that all I did with my smart phone was to play on the internet. I'm happier with a dumb phone and don't actually miss a smart phone.

Rain stops play

That's pretty much a standard thing for British cricket. People go to the cricket grounds expecting cricket and a few spots of rain hit the delicate little players so the umpire stops the game. Here, it's rather more of a torrential downpour that has stopped play.

Yesterday I finished putting undercoat on my brackets. The plan today was to give them a topcoat of white paint then while that was all drying, to weld some more brackets together. Unfortunately neither arc welding nor painting work well in wet conditions.

As many of you know, I'm not wealthy hence I'm turning a school bus into a home. Let me thus update you on the latest in the saga of my phone....

In 2013 I spent an inordinate amount of money on a flashy Nexus 4 smartphone. Google had dropped the price by $100 to get rid of the last 4s before the 5s were released. I spent about $300 on a phone that I hoped would last a few years. How wrong I was! In 2015 the charging port became so loose no cord would stay inserted. Thus I bought a cordless charger from China. That worked well until probably August so around about a year. It then started switching off after a few seconds.

Recently I ordered a new charging pad that was allegedly coming from California. That was supposed to arrive on the 30th. When it didn't arrive, I checked the tracking number and found it was fake. By then I'd been without a phone for a week. That's never good news.

The other day, I located the phone I took to Britain in October and put a Tracfone SIM card in it and bought the smartphone package at $15 for the month. Sadly it turned out that only the talk bit will work. Tracfone and Blu don't seem to be on the same page regarding connectivity. Thus, when the package ends in January I shall buy the $20 package giving solely talk and text for 3 months.

I'm looking at the costs of my phone service. I had a smartphone for $300 that barely lasted 3 years. That's $100 a year. I had a Blackberry prior to this that was $200 and which died after a year. Back then I was on a $35 a month plan with Virgin. Then I moved to a $45 a month plan with Family Mobile before eventually, $55 a month with Straight Talk.

Over the years I have questioned why I have a smart phone and then hunted around to justify  having one. Now I am by sheer happenstance using a dumb phone. Thus far I don't really notice any difference. Nobody much phoned me before and nobody much will continue to phone me. Nobody much texted me and I expect nobody much will continue to text me. As far as data is concerned, it was nice to be able to pull up email, websites etc, to take photos and play around.

I had an interesting email from Straight Talk, trying to get me to renew. That was a spectacular own goal! Let me show you the email...

How fatal is that? The phrase "playing on the internet" struck a chord. That was all I was doing. I was spending all this money on smartphones and data just to play aimlessly like a small baby. I don't know about you but I have better things to do with $760 a year than play quickly forgotten games online. My poverty stricken friends use Tracfone and spend $20 every 3 months. That's $80 a year and their phones had two huge advantages. The battery lasts a week between charges and the phones last for years and years.

Had I not been ripped off for the charging pad then I would never have realized that I wasn't missing much by dumping smartphones in favor of dumb phones. I was hung up on keeping GPS but since I already have a GPS unit, I'm covered. I have a neat little camera too. I don't need to be reliant upon my cellphone camera. As far as Facebook, Twitter and all that other online twaddle is concerned, I took those apps off my phones years ago. Straight Talk did me an immense favor by sending this email.

So my phone bill now drops to 10% of what it was. That's very good news!  More good news is the difference in size. My cellphone is now very small at about the size of a credit card and very light in weight.

I had been somewhat dismissive of the MiFi pads because the cheapest is $40 for 4gb that can roll over across just two months. Now that looks much more practical. In terms of cost, I used 2gb a month of wifi data and there's plenty free wifi around. I have to say that this change looks like it's going to be for the better!

My day job as a bus driver is a bit odd. We are not permitted to use electronics such as GPS navigation units. It's ok though to look at street names and a route description while driving. This has led to my making more use of ancient technology - maps and compasses. In order to better do my day job, I have ordered a street map of the area. I find it very interesting how low tech my life is becoming. I'm increasingly getting the feeling that all this expensive high technology, expensive stuff is why everybody is in so much debt. Indeed, people seem amazed that I have no full time power supply on the bus.

I grew up in Britain in the 70s and 80s at a time when CDs, DVDs, MP3s, cellphones, tablets and computers just didn't exist. It doesn't worry me not to have the latest electric or electronic toys.

Plans changing again

I had planned to put more barrel hangers together to hang barrels that as yet do not exist. Then I realized I'd be better just working with what I have. I can easily build more hangers. Well, that was part of the reason anyway. The other is I don't have sufficient hardware to hang more barrels. Thus, that can wait. Let me get these barrels hung better.

There are a couple of things I want to upgrade but I want to get the bus operational now rather than carrying out more upgrades. I've had my bus already two years and time is flitting past. One upgrade is to add a master breaker to my 120v plugin. That'll have to wait. I'm itching to get the bus operational.

Once it's operational, I have to sort through my stuff. I have several boxes with out of date papers, old tax returns and a whole load of other trash that needs to go the way of the dodo. Once all that is done, maybe I will take on some of the upgrades. The whole bus can be upgraded a bit at a time if need be.

My biggest failures so far are the woefully inadequate solar panels and my LED lighting. Combined
with a battery, they do actually work and power fans to ventilate the bus. His good that ventilation is, I'm not sure. As far as LED lighting goes, the supposedly bright LED lanterns are little short of abysmal.

Most of my lanterns have two or three settings aside from off:

• Setting 1 - There's a dim glow over there. Is that where that lantern is?
• Setting 2 - I can almost see the table the lantern is standing on!
• Setting 3 - There's a tabletop. There's a pool of light around the lantern but I still can't see to read or do anything.

Now, one of these lanterns is made by such a prestigious brand as GE. The others, the manufacturers were so proud of their work they didn't bother putting their name to it. 

Sadly, all the manufacturers seem to have gone to LED lanterns these days. If somebody made a lantern that took krypton bulbs then I'd be interested. I know I'd get less battery life out of an incandescent light but on the other hand I get just as much illumination out of putting an unopened pack of batteries in a drawer as I get from these LED things. Indeed, the battery life would be better.

In the house I have been forbidden from bringing back any LED light bulbs. I bought 4 on Black Friday last year of which only one is still functioning. Given they haven't had but 90 minutes use a day or around 2500 hours out of their alleged 25,000 hour lives, that's abysmal. More do since they cost far more than a CFL equivalent. Indeed, in Lowes yesterday (the day after Black Friday) I saw huge boxes of those CFL lights at 89 cents each. I noted they didn't seem able to shift them. As my partner said, they're not worth having even if they were free.

It just seems to me that the world has been hoodwinked by the technology people. It has become normal now to buy an electronic gizmo then throw it out a year later and buy another. Not only is that very environmentally unfriendly but it's wasteful of money. The argument to ban incandescent bulbs was the carbon dioxide emitted by power plants. Rather than force power plants to clean up their act, in came compact fluorescent bulbs. How are these greener? Every part of an incandescent bulb could be recycled - metals, glass and the plaster. Compact fluorescent not so much - plastics are harder to recycle. Phosphorous and mercury rather more challenging but the glass and metals can be recycled. Coincidentally, a broken compact fluorescent bulb poses a serious health risk. Mercury is absorbed by the body and cannot be excreted. The first time you know you have breathed or ingested too much mercury, you'll be suffering the unpleasant  side effects and there is no cure. In terms of life, compact fluorescents do last a bit longer than incandescent bulbs. Then there're these accursed LED bulbs. They claim 20,000 hours life yet theurctrack record is so poor the European Union had to specify that they must last a minimum of 6,000 hours. I've not had one reach 6,000 hours yet. In terms of recycling, it's 90% unrecyclable plastic. Not very green at all and at a replacement cycle of one every few months, terrible for the environment.

Now let's return to those LED lanterns. Like all this technology stuff they seem to have been designed by somebody with Aspergers. All these extra light level options. Who in tarnstion needs them? Throughout history too much light has never ever been a problem. Why then do we have this ridiculous dim, dimmer, where the heck is the darn lantern settings? I fully intend to do a comparison between my lanterns and a candle and I'm not going to be betting on the lantern being brighter than the candle!

Remaining to be done on the bus...

A mount for the battery for the solar powered fans

Retitling the bus as a motor home

Replacing the existing barrel hangers with my new hangers.

Other than that, it's all upgrades. I'm going to say construction is pretty much done. The upgrade phase follows. 

Tolerances

Todsy I set to and tested my welds for strength. That was actually easier than I had envisaged. My original plan had been to attach a chain to the loop I'd welded then suspend the plate with the chain dangling down then attach a step to the other end of the chain and simply stand on it.

Life presented me with a simpler option. I took some of the hillbilly channel and cut it so that I had a point on one end. I suspended the steel plates between wooden blocks, passed the end of the channel through the loop then simply jumped up and down on the channel. Given that the weight calculations work out as follows, I think I have a good safety margin.

The barrel when full of water will weigh 125lbs.
The turnbuckle is good for 130lbs.
The chain is good for 520lbs
The connectors are good for 600lbs

The weakest point is clearly the turnbuckle which is itself strong enough to support the barrel all on one turnbuckle.

There are three chains in use. I've designed the system with redundancy in mind. One chain can fail without disaster ensuing. Thus, the designed stresses are as follows.

Each barrel hanger will carry 1/4 of the weight, i.e. 32lbs. In a sudden jerk caused by hitting a pothole then I'm guessing 3 or 4 times the weight will be exerted on the mounts. That's 120lbs.  Now I'm not going to say how much I weigh but I jumped up and down on that bar and I weigh over 120lbs. I'd say that my system is going to be safe.