86 to 97

Despite the best efforts of my extraction fan, the temperature inside the bus crept from 86 when I went in at midday to 97 by 2pm. The night had apparently been a cooler 72.

Thinking more about extra power for the battery pack, it seems I could put two charge controllers onto the battery with each being powered by different solar panels. As long as the controllers are set up with the same cut off voltage, all should be fine. That would eliminate for the moment, my need to put more cables under the bus. This little project is on hold for one important reason.

Today I'm trying to clear the cockpit. It has been pretty much of a pigsty for the last two years. When I finish a job at the end of the day, I dump everything in the cockpit and close the door. I don't put things neatly away. Thus I'm having quite a time. I'm putting stuff to be sorted later behind the drivers seat, putting trash in the black bag on the drivers seat, tools in the tool box and screws etc in a jar.

As a little break, I swept the aisle of the bus and had a huge pile of sand. There were also cardboard boxes and other litter to move. One would think that I'd not cleaned the bus ever before but it's not so!

Remaining on the bus after I've done with the construction will be just maintainence supplies. Nothing too spectacular. Just screwdrivers, wrenches etc. I have no need for the welder, angle grinder etc. As I've said before, the welder was not one of my brightest purchases. Sure - it gave me a lot of fun and taught me to weld but it's not something that has been as beneficial as it could have been.

One of the ideas that struck me today was to install a pair of fans. One in the galley and one in the bedroom, tied into the extraction fan circuit, blowing air toward the back of the bus. That might help circulation quite a bit. I'm not quite sure what's happening to the airflow as air is definitely being blown out. The heat seems to be remaining though. I do, after all, have several unemployed 12v CPU fans.

Cleaning the bus cockpit took several hours. It had been knee deep in junk and that, sadly, is not an exaggeration. Some of the tools went to the shed as did some supplies. A 120v lamp stand complete with its 40W bulb went to an old trailer, where I had to duck to avoid a dangling light fixture weighted down by a birds nest.

Eventually, though the cockpit needs a really good wipe down, one huge bag of trash made it successfully to a huge pile of trash bags dumped in a corner of the yard. Those might one day make it to the dump. Sadly, some of the stuff from the cockpit made it to the galley. Clearing the galley or at least one side is a job for another day.

Now that's an almost clean cockpit. Everything needs a very good wipe down, to be honest. A lot of the brown dust I swept away was from when I sanded the OSB during the construction phase of 2015.   There's definitely some black paint touchup needed and I'll have to get some purple cleaner onto the floor. Otherwise, it's not looking too bad.

A few days ago, if you recall, my two charge controllers arrived. One has obviously had a sharp impact on the protective screen. I didn't catch it when I opened the box so I can't claim it as shipping damage. Not to matter though. It's ugly but it'll work.

During my tidying I found one of the things I'd been seeking - the cable converter I built that will allow me to use standard 20A cords with my non standard electrical inlet. The reason for the non standard inlet is cost - standard inlets were $75 whereas mine was $7. Even accounting for the non standard connector I used, it still works out at about $15 or a fifth of the price for something with equal electrical capacity. The TT30 crowd are really getting ripped off.

Just now the extraction fan cut in and out with a four minute cycle. That's probably why it's not really cooling the place. I adjusted the settings slightly so that the solar cell cuts off at 14.4v, the fan starts at 13.4v and cuts off at 12.2v. I'll have to see how that affects cooling. It could well be that I need to rethink my battery setup. I'd been running the CPU fans off a 5AH battery. I'm on a 10AH battery right now. If I moved to my twin 7AH batteries then I'd have 14AH. It could well be that instead of using small batteries - remember I didn't want electrical or solar stuff - I'd be better with a bigger battery though how big, I'm not sure. Running for an hour, just my extraction fan will use 2.5AH as its 2.5 amps. It therefore puzzles me as to why my 10AH battery voltage drops so quickly given that it was new. More to think about...

I almost put my welder in the shed. The only reason I did not was just in case I want to make something for my little generator. I've been thinking of turning it into a vertical axis wind turbine very idly. That might involve welding some steel for the arm.

Well, despite I didn't achieve a whole lot, at least the bus cockpit is clean enough to wipe down. I'll have to get on with that and get on with screwing the top of the console down properly too.

A journey of a thousand leagues

As the Chinese proverb says, a journey of a thousand leagues starts with the first step. I feel like I have a journey of a thousand leagues in front of me. It's time to start moving construction detritus out of the bus - tools I'm not likely to use again in the bus, leftover parts etc.

There are still things I'd like to do. One of those is a plumbing system for freshwater from a standpipe. I wasn't going to bother initially but I can see it is an idea with merit. The next step to that is putting an instant hot water heater that can supply hot water to both handbasin and to shower.

The toilet is probably going to remain as it is. I cannot imagine anything more foul than having to transport a used sewer hose! Bags of human waste can be stored in a sealed container then quietly disposed of where possible - either in landfill or some other way.

I have had thoughts about a built in gas hob. Those are demonically expensive however. Installing would be a straightforward case of passing tubing through the floor, sealing and plopping a 20lb gas cylinder on the ground outside.

Extra green power could be readily provided by turning my mini generator (the one I derided) into a small wind turbine that can be set up outside. Even solar panels could be placed outside then packed away for transport.

Today I went onto the bus and it was 104F. Putting the thermometer outside got me a reading of 97F. It felt cooler because of the moving air. I'd already started work, cutting slots into a piece of sewer pipe then gluing an end cap on it and mosquito mesh around it. I started mounting brackets to hang it from, on the ceiling when thunder began to boom. Fortunately by the time it began to pour with rain, I'd pretty much completed putting my ventilation filter in place. That meant I could throw the power cable out of the back door to close the door and keep the rain out.

That's what the ventilation looks like as of now. It is complete but with the same caveat as everything else of until I come across a better idea. At the moment, there's not too much power but if I pool my front and back panels, the power available should double. Throw external panels into the mix and we are talking tons of power.

Underbody cabling is in the plans but it's a future upgrade. In the winter I might go underneath and put some more cables but only when I'm sure spiders, ants and other nasty insects have gone away for the season. I even saw some of South Carolina's scorpions yesterday!

Yesterday I mentioned my mirrors. I'd replaced two eroded mirrors with new. It is possible to replace the mirror glass. The bizarre thing is it's cheaper just to replace the entire mirror than the mirror glass. The manufacturer wanted $45 per mirror for two mirror glasses. I bought a pair of mirrors for $35 or less than half the cost of fixing what's there.

I do not like those long West Coast mirrors. They take up a lot of space for very little gain. The bottom mirror is the one I just added (there's one the other side). Because I had to lower the drivers seat in order to make accessing the pedals more comfortable, the bottom mirror needs to come up as much as possible. I'd like to replace the 16 inch west coast mirrors with an 8x8 scquare flat mirror then up the top, put another rectangular convex mirror aimed downward. The busboy mirrors really need to be replaced with Hawkeye mirrors. The trick is finding it all at sensible prices.

As I sit writing my blog, the interior temperature following the rainstorm is 91F. My desk fan is keeping me cool and the extraction fan is currently roaring away. A tissue held up to the induction filter did not remain in place until the tissue was wrapped 2/3 round the filter. That tells me that my filter is big enough that it's not reducing airflow. That's important!

The next stage of motorhome construction will be to remove all the leftover construction components. Fortunately I don't think I have a lot too much. I barked up the wrong tree more often than I'd have liked though. I could have totally avoided buying a welder by just riveting a panel on the side of the bus where the hillbilly hole had been located. Still, I fancied welding and did learn a new skill even though with all the welding projects undertaken and not used, I could have been done 6 months ahead of now.

My biggest regret is the materials unused or used on projects that were later abandoned as they represent money not spent wisely. My other regret is wasting my time on some of the Internet groups. Whenever I sought an answer, nobody knew and whenever I showed off my handiwork, it either had no comment or something negative. That, I can honestly say, hurt.

Another thing needing to be done is to sort out the retitling. The previous owners never retitled the bus as a motorhome, which they should have because that's how it had been constructed. That's now my task!

Definitely not feeling too good

I seem to have picked up a stomach thing. After a hard day at work, I returned home to find not one but two parcels waiting for me. The first turned out to be replacement convex mirrors. My existing convex mirrors had become abraded over the years, being plexiglass rather than glass. The second turned out to be a pair of charge controllers.

My existing mirrors had become somewhat hard to use due to their lack of clarity.

The lack of clarity isn't all that easy to photograph to be honest. If you look at the top of the mirror you'll see a fuzziness. That was much more pronounced while driving. The other mirror was just as bad.

Again, the bad portion is at the top. As the mirrors had offset ball mounts, it wasn't possible to simply rotate the mirror. eBay is, however, useful at times like this.

The new mirrors are heated. As I don't have mirror heating set up, I have simply wrapped the wires around the mirror mounts. If I go further and change my big west coast mirrors then I will probably go for a smaller flat mirror and possibly a second convex but oriented vertically. As can be seen, it's pretty good.

It took me longer to remove one mirror because the bolt was seized solid. In the end I had to use my angle grinder. The other mirror came free much more easily. I'd have liked to have got them off in a non destructive way but it is what it is.

My charge controllers were not installed today. That's a job for another day. They're slightly different from my main charge controller in that they don't seem to have a thermometer built in though I have not read the manual.

The plan is to use them for charging batteries designated for charging cellphones etc. This is a plan I have vaguely in mind. It's not something I'm going to leap on immediately so I might just use one to replace the not very good charge controller I have in the cockpit of the bus.

Today I ran my extraction fan briefly from the 10AH battery with the good charge controller at the back of the bus. I have a feeling the bad charge controller might have damaged the battery judging from the odd readings I was getting. I'll have to see how it all goes though. My next task will be to complete the intake for my ventilation system. That's a task for another day when I feel better.

9 degrees!

the highest temperature ever measured in my motorhome was 140F. That was before I painted the roof white and installed my CPU fan powered vents. The highest temperature ever recorded since then has probably been around 106F.

Currently the interior temperature is 100F as opposed to an outside temperature of just 91F. It actually feels cooler outside as the air is moving. The goal today was to increase the ventilation. That plan involved a trip to Lowes (hiss, spit). Incidentally, somebody wrote a blog comment asking me why I shop at Lowes when I don't like them. The answer is simple - my desire not to shop at Lowes is weaker than my desire not to drive an extra 14 miles to go to Tractor Supply or Home Depot. My withholding my money from Lowes is not going to make them increase their honesty level one little bit, it would, however mean a longer drive which would hit my pocketbook harder. Though I detest and deplore Lowes, I'm not prepared to suffer in order to avoid them.

I must admit I laugh at people that won't go to Walmart because everything is made in China. They go somewhere else and buy exactly the same product - still made in China but they pay more (and often peel the label off to prove it wasn't made in China). Long ago I learned not to hold others up to my standard of honesty as I was always disappointed. Today as I was checking out in Lowes, the checkout operator - a sweet young thing - totally missed scanning one item, putting it straight into my bag. Now, if I'd been dishonest, I'd have capitalized on that by paying and leaving the store. I'd not have been been able to shop there without blushing ever again and I'd have been as disreputable as Lowes. I pointed it out, much to her surprise and after she'd scanned it, paid my bill and walked away with a clean conscience. The item was only a couple of dollars but my conscience is worth far more!

The goal with my ventilation is to get the interior temperature of the bus to be the same as the exterior. It can never be lower without air conditioning which is something I won't be installing.

As Lowes didn't have any 3 inch sewer pipe, I scrounged around in the detritus in the back yard and found an 8 foot length. Various people have dumped stuff on the land from old card to dead microwaves. A good hunt usually turns up with usable materials.

Having returned with the booty from Lowes (hiss, spit), I set to work. In short order I'd cut and washed several sections of sewer pipe. The plan was to do as much with solid sewer pipe as possible but to use sections of my bilge hose to connect them to the pump. One piece I glued to the pump in the hope that it'll hold. The pump will be screwed to the ceiling. The back closet is after all just a closet with a useful emergency exit entry capability. It's not somewhere I'll be using on a regular basis now that my front door lock is operational.

The one fly in my ointment is that my plumbing cement had dried in the can. That wasn't helpful! If it were not for the heat and my wanting to get on with things, I'd have done what I usually do with useless junk. I'd have taken it out the back and shot it. Remember the DOA solar panel and the dead microwave plus numerous paint spray cans that refused to disgorge their content. I gather people do the same thing with useless politicians though I have yet to hear of anybody successfully ventilating the current pro Brexit British Prime Minister. One can only hope!

After cutting the sewer pipe in 90F and gluing various bits together, I ended up with a fairly solid looking system. I didn't actually finish what I was doing, however. Time escaped on me. The problem with working in heat is it slows me right down. Indeed, the thermometer on my charge controller read 41C when I was installing things. By the time I knocked off for the day, the ventilation system looked like this.

Needless to say, it's not complete. The filter stage is missing. That will entail a piece of plastic pipe with slots cut in the sides and mosquito mesh being glued all around it. That should let in way more air than my fan can suck. I'd been a bit puzzled how to attach the pipe to the ceiling when I found some black cable ties lying on the ground outside. They'd come from the battery compartment and had been left by the hillbilly owners. Goodness knows how many times I'd peed on them in the past! Anyway to cut a long story short, the plan is to fasten two steel strips to the ceiling with cable ties attached and hang the tube from two cable ties. The tube will be attached to the unit by another section of flexible hose.

Given that I'm blowing air out of two mosquito mesh covered vents, it should be much more efficient than before. My sole concern is whether two self drilling screws is sufficient to hang my fan or whether aluminum rivets might be a better option.

Tomorrow I have to go back to work. The weekend is coming though! Two days and I can complete my ventilation system. This should be the last word in ventilation!

It's a mystery!

After a few hours experimenting with the new bilge fan, I'm presented with somewhat of a mystery. I am no further forward in having an answer as to whether the fan does anything or does nothing. Part of the answer is probably due to the weather which changed (somewhat unhelpfully) from sunny to cloudy.

The chronology went something like this...

• 1:13 started the ventilation system with the end of the unit including the filter standing on the bottom step in the entrance, with the door open enough to accommodate it. It was 95 in the bedroom area. The tube was extended half way through the galley and I could feel a breeze.
• 1:25 I took the filter off to see what difference that made. There was an appreciable increase in the amount of air flowing through. It was still 95 in the bedroom.
• 1:32 still 95F in the bedroom. Taking the thermometer and leaving it in the air from the ventilation tube dropped the thermometer to 91. Then I took the thermometer outside and it rose to 93 and stayed at 93.

I concluded extra induction seemed to make little difference to overall temperatures. This was good and bad news. The good news was I didn't have to scrabble around under the bus installing ventilation. The bad news was I'd not achieved much. Having said that, the next thing was to see what the fan does when blowing air through my exhaust vents.

• 2:05 With the interior temperature at 97, the fan was connected to an exhaust vent. By 2:12 by my calculation all the air should have been expelled from the bus. I gave it til 2:20 for good measure
• 2:12 Well, I went outside and when I returned found the duct tape attaching my ventilation duct to the exhaust vent had fallen off so at 2:15 I started again. The internal temperature was still 97F.
• 2:40 I stopped the experiment. The thermometers hadn't changed any but the bus felt cooler.

One thing I haven't mentioned is that the humidity dropped while my fans were going. Then afterwards the humidity climbed. I believe at one point it was 50% but at the point of writing, the thermometer read 93F and 58% humidity.

• 3:27 I restarted my bilge extraction fan. The thermometer read 93F and 58% humidity.
• 3:42 I stopped the fan. The thermometer read 93F and 59% humidity.

The biggest challenge thus far has been the useless nature of duct tape. I know I'm only holding things temporarily in place while I experiment but even so, it could be better!

A few years ago, I lived in a townhouse and never once used the air conditioning. Sure, it got warm in summer but I couldn't afford to blow money on air conditioning. My income was solely what I had from my job and it didn't pay much. Roll on a couple of years and I was stuck in a job that paid even less - so little that I could not afford to pay rent and had to move out of my disagreeable little hovel.

Back in my hovel, I found that a cheap little fan though not as icy cold as an air conditioner made a huge difference as did the fact that it naturally gets cooler at night. For a long time I've maintained that it's better to have moving air than icy cold air. Indeed, standing outside, it seemed cooler than inside the bus but wasn't really. It was due to lower outside humidity and the fact the air was moving.

As I wrote this blog entry, though initially I sweated profusely, when I remembered my $6 battery powered desk fan, I felt cooler having switched it on. My existing extraction fans are CPU fans. They remove a decent amount of air. I did have some 3V fans there before that probably didn't remove quite as much air but which worked. It seems to be a case of diminishing returns. It's something I shall have to think more on. Perhaps the answer lies not in more powerful fans but in more low powered fans just to keep the air moving toward the back of the bus.

Over a hundred!

Today the temperature inside the bus reached 100. As I sat putting connectors together the sweat was trickling down my back. Needless to say, after a while in the bus I was pretty hot and sweaty. This is exactly the weather I need forced air ventilation. My mind turned the problem over while I worked on today's project.

What I had planned was pretty straightforward. I was going to attach two single cables together in order to have just have two duals going to each battery in my battery box. I also had to extend the two single cables in order to have a dual of sufficient length. That was fairly easy soldering and I slipped some shrink sleeving onto the cables. 

The floor could stand some tidying as could the whole bus. Here you can see my cables in place and if you look carefully at the top of the ammunition box, you can see I've written 10AH on one side. The other side has 5AH. The rear fans which are CPU fans run off a 5AH battery. The induction fan will run off a 10AH battery.

I did more thinking about my ventilation system and decided to try everything out before diving in to make something that I might later decide not to use. That's several times I've spent time and money welding together things that for one reason and another I ended up not using.

I looked at my fan and decided I needed a hose to carry the air. I've already decided not to have an all in one unit but to have a separate inlet manifold, filter unit and fan unit. Looking around, the usual suspects didn't have much so I looked at the marine supply stores. Bingo! I found a hose for my ventilation fan. Without further ado, I jumped in my car and headed off to West Marine. Yes- I'm over a hundred miles inland and there's a ships chandlers not far from me! Weird but this is the USA where odd things abound.

It transpired that the hose is not really that robust. It's certainly not something I can leave permanently attached. It was $15 which isn't that horrible when I have to experiment anyway. Combined with a sandwich box and my Honda lawnmower engine filter, I knocked up a ventilation unit. 

I expect the filter to have to go fairly quickly. I think it's way undersized. I'm leaning more toward the  filters I was looking at the other day. Both the vacuum cleaner and the air cleaner filters have better throughput than the car engine filters. 

The goal is to put the filter end of the unit outside the bus and to pull the hose into the bus. It reaches 15 feet or so. With the door partly closed I should see fairly quickly how well outside air injection lowers the internal temperature. As I've said, I expect the filter to be the bottleneck which is why I expect to have to replace it with mosquito mash fairly quickly.

If the tests are a success then I'll get on with finding the right filter. I like the volume of air that will pass through a shop vac filter but it's hard to design a case to hold it. I feel an air cleaner filter may well be the solution. As far as tubing is concerned, it'll probably have to be plastic drainpipes.  For the moment though, my temporary ventilation system will have to suffice. There are too many critters under the bus for the moment. 

Having a cooler bus will allow me to get on with the next stage which is to go through the stuff inside, getting rid of the unnecessary junk. Junk builds up very quickly!

143 minutes

Regular blog readers will know that I'm known for being stingy. In fact, the joke is that I'm tighter than a Jewish Scotsman who's trying to save money. Anyway, you all know I dumped smartphones when mine started playing the fool back in October. Yesterday I had to pay my flip phone for the month. That came to $17.23 which I consider a real rip off. Over the last month they reckon I used 143 minutes/texts. As if it's not bad enough having to fork out $15 for 300 minutes (that I barely use), I had to pay an extra $2.23 or 15% extra in junk taxes! I'd be happy to go over to smoke signals.

So, today I soldered plug connectors to my wires for my small battery pack. That worked well. I have more soldering to do but it's all looking a load better. The next thing was to work on the under counter wiring. Well, I was not keen on going under the counter so I took the countertop off. That wasn't too hard. It was only ten screws.

Looking at my wiring I'd given myself somewhat of a problem. I'd used 30A cabling instead of 20A which made working with it rather challenging. I struggled valiantly or at least as valiantly as one can in 95F. After releasing one of my two cables from both ends, I couldn't budge it. There was nothing obvious holding it in place either. Taking an executive decision, I removed the other cable. With both cables cut loose I saw the problem. I'd connected the earths to a bolt that was obscured.

After junking my (probably expensive) 30A cables I pulled out some 20A cable. Then I went to cool down. Sweat was running off my forehead into my eyes and my tee shirt was soaked with sweat. I worked off and on for most of the day on the wiring with pauses in an air conditioned house as the internal temperature soared to 97F.

While I worked, I regretted that I didn't have my ventilation up and running. While I might get underbus odors from running with an intake directly under the bus, that might be my best way forward for the moment. If I put together a box that takes the Shop Vac filter with a PVC end into which my 3 inch fan is fastened then I can just build an all in one unit that should be relatively simple to attach. If the box is open on one face only or is set so that I can attach a 3 or 4 inch inlet hose, I can just install it and wait until I feel like doing extra work.

Eventually, dripping with sweat, my 120V system was completed. Last time I lay on my back under the counter doing it all and I think it took days. Today I just took the countertop up and did the whole thing in a day.

You can see the cramped space. I cannot imagine why I was lazy enough to work under the counter the first time around. I'd also way overdone it with the heavier cables. This time around it was nowhere near the fight I must have had last time.

My ventilation fan shifts a goodly amount of air. As I've already said, it can replace all the air in the bus in just seven minutes. That has to be my task for Monday.

The plan was to complete my extraction fan soldering and to complete putting heat shrink sleeving onto the wiring for my battery pack. I'd already done some soldering. I looked at the clock and something didn't feel right so I quit for the day. Better to stop rather than to plug on and make a hash of something and I'd already cut one cable a bit shorter than I'd like.

There you can see the plugs I soldered this morning and my yet to be deployed bilge fan.