How surprising was that?

Today started with little enthusiasm. It is, after all, Sunday and I went out yesterday. It’s also an overcast day which is never good for my mood. I do suffer from seasonal depression which is exactly why I prefer life in the USA to life in the UK, however accidental my arrival in the USA might have been. In fact, had I not been to the USA, I’d probably have ended up in Russia but that’s another story entirely.

Although I have plenty work to do underneath the bus, I worked more on the solar power and fans etc. Although it doesn’t look much and to be honest I haven’t worked very hard all weekend. I’ve spent more time chatting to long time friends online than actually doing anything than I really should have in order to achieve anything.

The sum total of today’s work is that both of my extraction fans work and work well via my timer which I worked on to give the fans 10 minutes on the hour every hour between 10am and 5pm. My next thing with the fans will be to put a mosquito mesh ball on the inside of each fan unit and to replace the external mesh and mushroom dome with a louvered vent. That will allow far more air to exit which should also have the effect of reducing fan noise and power consumption.

As can be seen from the two photos, progress has been pretty good. I left the solar controller where it is for the moment and mounted stuff around the access hatch I’d made some months or a year ago into the rear bulkhead. Both fans now work from the timer and the timer cuts off before the battery runs low. The charge controller is set to stop the power before the battery goes critical.

The tape visible is up there solely while the silicone sealant used to secure the wires to the bodywork sets. When that’s done, I’ll simply remove the tape, applying more seal as required. I could have used glue but that would have made it harder to change the wiring and if anything, I’ve discovered I do change things a lot. This is the 4th iteration of my ventilation system. If you remember...

• V1 used solar panels powering CPU fans directly to blow air out of the bus.
• V2 used a 5AH battery and solar panels plus a charge controller and two CPU fans.
• V3 used a 10AH battery and solar panels plus a charge controller and a single bilge fan.
• V4 uses a 10AH battery and solar panels plus a charge controller and two bilge fans.

The next edit to the system will be when I complete the underbus wiring for the front to back wiring. That will put the power of three solar panels and almost double the generating capacity. Indeed when I put the edit after that into the system, I’ll be able to put an external 50W solar panel that I can just place where needed and carry with me. That and I’ll be installing a 35AH battery with greater amperage output than my single 10AH battery is capable of. That battery will have a 30A resetting breaker that should ensure I won’t overload it or my underbus cabling.

While working on the system, I was greatly surprised. The negative of the supply to the battery is already connected to the bus body. I discovered that putting the positive to the fuse box and the positive of the charge controller, my fans sprang into life. What was more surprising was that I had not completed the negative connection from the charge controller to the devices being powered. OK. That sounds confusing so let me show you a photo.

As can be seen, I have a positive and a negative going to the solar panel. Then a positive and a negative to the battery (where the negative is the bus body). Then I have a positive going to the device power supply but no negative. I was greatly surprised to see power reaching my devices with just the positive wire. I’d grounded all my fans to the body more in hope than anticipation but it seems to have worked.

A further surprise awaited me when I did connect a cable from the negative to the body from the device outlet on the charge controller - the light on my fan timer dimmed. Clearly that wasn’t welcome so I left the extra negative out of the system for the moment. I’ll have to see what happens now. I had been going to use some fairly hefty twin cable to run from the battery to my charge controller. Having seen that I now need solely a positive cable, I’ll get myself a hefty single cable and keep the double for something else. This makes life a little easier.

While I was by the back door, I saw my door alarm - the one I paid next to nothing for in a dollar store. The tape had fallen off the bus but not off the unit. I simply glued it to the bus. That’ll be challenging to remove later but at least I now have a functioning rear door alarm - it’ll just remind me when I have the door open so I won’t drive off with it open as has happened in the past.

Not feeling as though I’d yet done a good day’s work, I set to on my idea for domed air inlets. These, being domed, will allow more air in than a flat inlet, once mosquito mesh is applied. I’d say the mesh blocks 50% of the incoming air so increasing the amount of mesh by more than double will render the reducing effect of the mesh to zero. As usual, my pipe glue had dried up. I really don’t see why they don’t supply that stuff in smaller quantities and preferably in tubes. The standard size just dries up before it gets used.

Meanwhile, I happened to be in my bus when the fans came on. Thus I whipped out my Harbor Freight infrared thermometer and raced around measuring temperatures. Everything was a nice standard temperature with a difference of maybe 2 degrees Fahrenheit which could well be the inaccuracy of the equipment. None of my wiring was getting warm. It didn’t feel warm when I checked earlier and the thermometer confirmed this. Even the fans stayed at a reasonably cool temperature. The duty cycle of those bilge fans according to the manufacturer is 8 hours. 10 minutes an hour is hardly going to exceed that!

Making my domed inlets was pretty straightforward. I just recycled some of the stuff I’d used for the previous iteration of my ventilation system. Yes, the cutting is rough and I did burn the plastic a bit when I softened it with my blowtorch but it has worked and will work better when I get some non-dried glue. I’ll probably spray paint it white to cover up the ugly burn marks before I glue mosquito mesh over it. I’d say I’ll have several times the surface area of a simple 3 inch diameter tube even allowing for the 50% reduction caused by mosquito mesh. Given that these are rather reminiscent of the onion domes of Russian Orthodox catherdrals, I could give them a Russianesque name but honestly I can’t be bothered. I’ll just call them intake caps.

Although I have not done everything I wanted to, this weekend has been productive. If I’d done everything I’d wanted to then I’d have been beyond a Superman and I’d have completed my bus conversion by my initial projected date of January 2015. Were it not for having to gut the interior of somebody else’s conversion and fix their disasters then I’d probably have done it far sooner.

Next weekend I’ll be busy doing various non bus related things. It looks like the fall colors are coming and Ceasers Head might be at its peak so I might just take my car and camera and spend a day at Ceasers Head or I might just go to Table Rock which is closer. My next planned bus project will be to complete the underbus wiring for the front to back wires and if there’s time, install the middle to back wiring in its entirety. I rather suspect I’ll need to pay another visit to Harbor Freight for more cable clamps though.

One of my big things on this bus project is that the bus should be usable and livable whether or not I’m hooked up at a campsite. This and the fact that one day I might need to sell my bus is why I’m doing all the work myself and designing so much myself. I’ve seen too many people sink too much money into busses that are literally not worth the money sunk in them. This is a $4,200 bus. I’m not going to put fancy air conditioners nor hugely expensive solar arrays nor huge battery packs etc, I’m not even going to waste the money on buying a generator. If somebody bought it as a completed motorhome conversion then the best I could hope to get would be maybe a thousand on top of what I paid for the bare bus. It’s well known for people to get back pennies on the dollar. In fact an old workmate had an MCI that hadn’t been driven in 8 years. Somebody had stolen the air conditioner coil which would cost $8,000 to replace. Doubtless the tyres also needed replacing at a cost of $2000 approx so there’s $10,000 for a bus that probably could be replaced for $5,000 if one was prepared to do as I have and do all the work themselves.

I’ve looked into plumbed-in toilets. They just seem terribly costly. Sure - I can weld together a black tank out of free sheet steel and paint the heck out of it and hope it’ll last a couple of years. That’s not an issue. The problem is the actual throne itself. Those are extremely costly. Thus, for the moment my solution of a throne containing a bucket and cast lit which cost me the princely sum of $50 to build seems pretty good.

Just as I was about to pack up, I discovered a snag with my electrical system. It seems that the switching for the solar controller is done on the negative side so my system remains powered whether the charge controller should cut it off or not. That’s unwelcome but not unexpected to be honest. As normal, I have a solution. Now, of course, you see the wisdom of fastening my power cables with removable silicone sealant? A few days ago, forseeing this potential issue, I ordered some relays. One is a solid-state relay which should use considerably less power than a mechanical relay. I can simply connect the control side to my charge controller and just switch power straight from the battery to the fuse box. Needless to say I do need to put a master fuse before the relay close to the battery In addition to my 30A self-resetting breaker.

So, not only did I order some relays a few days ago but I also ordered some lower amperage ATO fuses. My current lowest is 5A which is way too big for many of my circuits. One of those relays is destined for use with my digital door lock. I decided to keep the main door lock powered by my AA NiMh batteries. Let’s face it - I charged them so long ago that I really can’t remember charging them. I want to say I charged them in March (8 months ago). I know I was using them all summer for my door lock as I still am. So, anyway, I’ll have three ways of effecting entry. The standard way with my key and electric door lock. An emergency key and the back door or side door. Then if all else fails - for example if I locked my keys in the bus, with the pushbutton lock powered from my solar battery. As that’s an important lock, I might just bypass the charge controller, power it directly from the battery (with a fuse) and hope for the best. Alternatively, I could run it through everything else as normal and hope all the ducks line up when needed.

Meanwhile, more news on my rogue car mechanic. It seems that the dire warnings about my tyres were as nonsensical as I’d thought. I measured the tread at a good 1/8th inch on both front tyres. The backs I didn’t bother but there’s plenty tread. Buying a digital tyre pressure gauge the other day I found today that my front tyres are 35.5PSI which is 0.5PSI high. The backs are 29.5PSI and 26.5PSI. Both of those are low. I thought one looked a little squishy! I wouldn’t mind betting they didn’t put the valve cores in properly. I’ll have to find my valve core tool. Anyway the moral of the story is mechanics are on the money making side and that’s not always your side.

Should I hoist the plague flag!

Today was my first free day in a few weeks. I’ve been busy all week driving schoolbusses for work. Some days have been more exciting than others. I’m not really talking about the bad driving of other road users - that’s pretty much standard. I’ve come to expect drivers to pass my bus, cut in front and then take an exit lane, braking sharply while not actually using their turn signals. No - more exciting than that. This week there was a punch-up on the bus and my aide got punched as he tried to separate the parties. As a fairly stoic, older Afrikaner, he was pretty cool about it all. I took five minutes to get my mind back to what I’m supposed to be doing after the run completed by completing paperwork.

So today I’ve been battling a bad stomach, probably caused by breathing the germs of the children on my bus. It’s a hazard of the job and it always seems to catch me on weekends. Maybe I should just hoist a plague flag over the bus when I drive it?

I started by admiring my handiwork from the other day then got on with installing my new fuse box and the timer purchased some weeks ago. That involved a trip to Lowes where I was smart enough to buy #6 bolts as well as #8 bolts as it turned out that both needed different sized bolts to attach them to the wall. The fuse box took #8 and the timer took #6.

When I ordered the fuse box, I counted the fuses I was likely to need, carefully. I could double up on some if later I need to add extra things or perhaps simply add a second box. Maybe even change the box for a bigger one. So I have 8 fuse positions. They are for:

• Bedroom fan (0.5A)
• Bedroom Light (1A) - not going to be installed but could be.
• Bedroom USB charger (7A) - not going to be installed but could be
• Bathroom Light (1A) - not going to be installed but could be
• Galley USB charger (7A) 
• Galley fan (0.5A)
• Galley Light (1A) - not going to be installed but could be
• Electronic door lock controller - This is just an idea at present.

There is a possibility that if I add a flush toilet that I might also need a macerator pump. That’s something that I’ll face if and when the time comes. I’d thought also about how to put a waste tank together for that and came to the conclusion that rather than buying a pre-made tank, I could simply weld one together from mild steel, paint it fairly thickly inside and out with rust preventative paint and see how long it lasts. It would be more likely to develop pinhole leaks rather than suddenly depositing the entire contents on the ground. Those pinhole leaks would be ample warning that I needed to build another or scrounge a plastic tank.

I wanted to test my switch to see if it does turn things on and off as it should. Thus I hunted out my voltmeter. Uh Oh. I already have one dead voltmeter. That’s an analog meter I’ve had for years. I replaced it with a digital voltmeter that just goes bananas. I turned it on and it gave me all kinds of wild readings - readings that were constantly changing despite nothing being plugged in. I remembered that had been discarded for that reason. I pulled out my newer Harbor Freight clamp meter and that too gave me bogus readings. So I hunted and found a Walmart analog meter that I haven’t used because I’ve not been impressed with its accuracy. It would be very easy for the less intelligent individual to come out with carte blanche statements decrying the meters on price, origin or condemning the user’s skills. In fact that’s the kind of retarded statements I’ve come to expect from those addicted to forums and the internet in general. The sad fact is it really doesn’t matter how much one pays for many of these things. The components used to manufacture them all come from the cheapest possible source. A few years ago, the Pentagon discovered many of the chips used to make control circuits for missiles etc were made in China. That raised somewhat of a stink until they found out just how hard it was to source things not made in China.

Let me tell you of a little trick manufacturers like to play. They will buy the ready assembled circuits for their electronics and the casings for them from China. They will then put the electronics in the casings in a Free Trade Zone warehouse and sell them to the unsuspecting public with a “Made in the USA” sticker legitimately applied.

Going back to forums, I quit contributing to one a while ago because it was getting too stupid for words. The fantasy that was being paraded as reality was so reminiscent of the bad driving I see daily that it makes me wonder about the intelligence of the general population. I had stated quite clearly that I did not consider it worth returning. My last ever post on the board was quite specific...

Now normally I would not bother returning. Out of sheer curiosity to see whether they were in fact stupid enough to respond, I checked without wasting my time by logging in and indeed there was quite a torrent of nonsense. It wasn’t worth reading so I quietly closed the page, reassured that I had not erred in my summation of the forum users’ intellectual deficiencies. Maybe forums should all have a plague flag in the forum header?

Returning to the matter in hand, my problem is going to be locating fuses of the right values. I rather suspect I’m going to have to regard a 1A fuse as being acceptable for my 0.5A fan even though it allows double the current. It will blow at a short circuit but not if the fan starts running hot and using too much current. The common values seem pretty high so I’ll have to hunt online for the specific values I need. That’s not a huge issue - it’ll just mean I’ll have to have spares just in case as the motoring shops carry only regular car value fuses. I made sure when I bought the fuse box that it would take the same size fuses as the regular fuses on my bus. I’m not keen on using multiple different kinds of fuse. In fact several of the fuses in the console that I installed are in fact round glass fuses. Those will be replaced with blade fuses eventually. When I tried inserting a blade fuse into my new fuse holder, it went in sweetly. The holder bought via eBay that took weeks to arrive and cost about what my new holder cost, I’ve never managed to get a fuse to slip into it despite it being the right size!

Eventually, I’d connected all the wires up and put a 12v test battery on the system. The first thing that happened was one of my red LEDs lit up to show me that the fuse I was trying to use had blown. Now that’s a very handy feature of my fuse box! So, having connected everything, I was rather disappointed that I could get no response from the unit.

Hunting for the instructions to my rather non intuitive timer control unit took quite a while but they were illuminating when discovered. It seems that I should have pressed the c/r button 4 times in quick succession to unlock the unit. Why in Heaven’s name the manufacturers considered that worthwhile I have no idea. Just one of those bizarre things the Chinese think up I guess and probably this is why their nickname is the Yellow Peril.

Eventually my bilge fan sprung into life. Now I have to connect the other bilge fan to the controller and I shall be able to have both running simultaneously for programmed periods. I believe I programmed the controller to be active for 10 minutes every 60 minutes. Given that the fans use 5A combined and displace 130CFM of air apiece, that should, given that they only blow half that through my mosquito mesh, be around 1300CFM of air displaced or the entire of the air inside the bus and then some. The only way to discover whether that’s true is to get a flatulent individual to emit their noxious vapors in the cockpit then stand behind the bus and wait for the stench to arrive! Seriously though, some kind of theatrical fog might help. At the moment the rear panels that charge the small battery responsible for my unit produce just 20W or to be realistic, about 10W. In one hour they will produce 0.83AH of power. In 10 minutes the fans will burn up 0.83AH of power. That pretty much equals out.

I didn’t get done as much as I’d have liked but I got done pretty much what I set out to achieve. I’m pretty sure when I get the underneath wiring tied up properly and the connections underneath finalized that Eric will be well impressed. Tomorrow I’d like to work more on the underside. I’ll admit to being concerned about the strange, unidentified and broken cable attached to (or not as the case is) the acellerator. I’m thus hesitant about driving my bus more than just around the yard. Perhaps I should spend tomorrow tidying up my wiring and putting some form of connector in so that I can connect the underbody wires straight into the system. Great care will have to be taken with the solar panel connections. In fact I might just put some fuses as well as my diodes into those circuits.

Double the power!

Most of today was spent hunting for a fuse holder. A while back I bought a fuse holder online. It took forever to arrive! Without Radio Shack around the corner, it’s quite a challenge to get hold of electrical and electronic components. Everything has to be done online and you know just how much I adore dealing with eBay and so on.

Speaking of eBay, I made a purchase of a security camera back in July/August. It never arrived though the seller pocketed the money. I went for a refund and immediately reordered from a seller in a different country. That was on September 8th. Apparently I have to wait until November 4th for the last quoted delivery date in order to file for a refund. I seem destined not to get my camera. Needless to say this is not the only seller giving trouble. I’ve been very lucky with eBay until now. I ordered something from a seller in India and that seems destined not to arrive. Look at this!

That’s such a bad score! I’ve never ever seen anybody with so many failures to deliver. 200+ failures to provide the goods and yet when I ordered, his score was almost perfect. I note eBay has not calculated his feedback percentage correctly. 200+ failures and 65 good sales does not equal 50%+ feedback. It is something like 20% feedback.

So currently I have two bad eBay sellers and both delivery periods end in about 2 weeks. Needless to say I’ve had six bad experiences over the last couple of months and can’t say that bodes well for my continuing to make purchases via eBay. Let’s see - I had one item just not arrive and two more about to be filed as not arriving. I don’t think there’s much chance of two items arriving after 5 weeks. A further two items were clothing. They weren’t of the size nor condition described. Then there was the infamous solar panel. I think the world is trying to tell me to stay off eBay.

Today I had, as I said, to hunt for my fuse box. That’s going to be used with my 12v electrics. It took a long time to find it but find it I did. Now I have a problem in that I need to connect all the spades on one side to a common rail. I recall having some female spade connectors that had no plastic on them whatsoever. Can I find them? The answer is no. Now what I could do is to hunt for a different kind of fuse box that has a common live wire. I’m not averse to that given that the current fuse box appears to have been put together by a monkey armed with nothing more than a mallet. Needless to say, it’s Chinese! My friend in the dark barbaric land they call France, did tell me there was a car in Britain that had the perfect fuse box. I’m not sure if it was a Vauxhall Corsa or not. Anyway, Chevy makes the same car under license here. If I can recall the model then I’ll look in Autozone next time I’m there.

It would be somewhat of a challenge to make the one end of that fuse holder into a common positive rail. In fact, it would invite a lot of soldering or a ton of crimping. That just seems like so much hard work to be honest when I can just find a better fuse holder. In fact the fuses don’t slip into this one particularly easily anyway.

It was harder to disassemble the old ventilation system than to construct the rest of the new one. I’ll have to put some kind of mesh filter over the intake. What that’ll involve is making a ball or cone that has mosquito mesh over it. That way the mesh should not provide too much air resistance.

Out of interest I tried running the vents in reverse and that worked quite well. I’ll have to see whether I want to run them in reverse on dry days and forward on wet days. I have a feeling they might suck more efficiently than they blow.

The plan is to install the fuse box and a timer so that the vents can be operated on a schedule rather than operated until the charge controller cuts the battery off as now. The timer will be a problem because the screw holes are smaller than my preferred self-drilling screws. That might necessitate a smaller size if such exists. I can say I’m not happy with my fuse holder. It’s not right. I can use it if I must but I’d prefer to use something suitable.

While I’m ordering or buying my new fuse holder (which I hope will take the same fuses that my bus takes), I’ll see about a couple of relays. One to operate my door lock together with my fancy keypad and one to work with my charge controller should the controller go bananas if I combine the negative of the battery with the negative of the powered circuit. These Chinese things can do wacky things and since the output voltage is uncontrolled, it really doesn’t make much odds whether I run stuff straight off the battery connection anyway. Thinking further, a simple switch that will allow me to reverse the direction of my two blowers also sounds a very good idea. That’d have to be double pole with three positions - on, off, on.

In case you’re wondering, the temperature in my bus today is 84F and 69% humidity. Outside it’s cooler. As soon as I get the ventilation working properly I shall be cool. This coming weekend looks like being cool enough to go underneath to complete my wiring too.

I think you’ll agree the back looks a lot better without flexible air ducting drooping about the place. It was fine in its place but wasn’t a great idea. I think reversible ventilation using two bilge blowers sounds a far better idea.

While I worked on my vents, I noticed my injected foam has expanded brilliantly and now holds the ducts perfectly in place. I’m not sure about how good it is for insulation but it’s bound to be better than an air gap even with a heat bridge.

Where now? Well, I suppose I need to buy my fuse holder and a pair of relays as well as a double pole two way switch. A small tube of silicone sealant would probably be helpful too. I’ll probably run the cables through the rear bulkhead so they’re out of the way.

Is the anal probe coming soon? Read on to find out!

This morning broke like just about every other morning. The blackbird didn’t speak though because the hillbilly living next door had already shot, plucked, cooked and eaten him together with the four and twenty others. So, rising, I headed to the bus. 

It was a slow day that started with my black spray can putting more paint on my hands than on the object to be painted. Anyway, that having been completed as far as possible before the spray can coughed it’s last drop, my attention turned to the digital door lock. Thus far I’m really not liking any of the potential locations. So, after a morning studying possible sites, that idea was shelved.

As I really didn’t feel like going under the bus, I idly read one of those forums I had returned to in what I can only assume was a fit of insanity. Sure as eggs were eggs I was being lambasted and my code compliant electrical installations were being declared dangerous, illegal and so on. Given that I’d held my tongue on the sheer bad driving that caused one fellow to write his bus off and kill another motorist while claiming it was the other motorist’s fault and proving it by posting a video of it on YouTube, I thought it a but rich to be lambasted so. It’s not as though the other posters were professional drivers either. To be quite frank, the descriptions of how they fix their busses and get them home makes me shudder. It’s not just amateurish but rank amateur. I’m hardly surprised when I read about engines blowing, brakes failing etc when they do no daily checks, no running checks, skip on necessary expenses etc.

Let’s just say that by the end of today’s reading I’d had my fill. In fact my advice to them was that they needed to pull their heads out of their rectums and that I wasn’t going to hang around while they did so. I don’t know how they achieved such a seemingly anatomical impossibility but they did and more stunning still, they’re proud of it and proud of their ignorance!

Owning busses is expensive. Tires are $250-$500 each and most busses take 6. Because of the cost, many school districts run exclusively from remolds or part worn tires. The engines take 17 gallons of coolant, 15 gallons of oil, 12 gallons of transmission fluid, a gallon of brake fluid (on hydraulic busses). Air hoses and all other rubberwear needs frequent replacement. That all costs money. Only fools think they can get away with no maintainence because of lower mileage.

So, not feeling too much like going under the bus and being acutely aware of the mess that constitutes my ventilation system, I set about redesigning it. That did entail a trip to the hardware store where I got what I needed. It wasn’t much - just a plastic elbow and some steel brackets. That allowed me fairly swiftly to rebuild one side of my ventilation system.

As can be seen, my new plan is to have my exhaust fans blowing straight out. I’ll build some kind of filter to fit onto the other end that’ll stop trash flying into the duct and remaining there forevermore. Doing it this way affords me more space to install my fan control unit and my fuse box. Heaven knows, I might even install a few switches if everything pans out right. For some reason, I have a feeling that a switch that allows me to switch the battery out as well as the solar panels could be very important. Being electrically silent could be very important in the future. The only immediate benefit would be being able to operate the bus after an EMP.

Tomorrow’s work might well involve doing the other vent like this. After that, it might be time to get underneath to complete my wiring. I have a feeling though that completing the ventilation could take all day, particularly if having done that, I dive in and install my fuse bar and my control unit.

A mission from ISIS!

As many of my regular readers know, I’m a real school bus driver, driving real children to real schools in real life. Can’t get more real than that - actually you can. I drive special needs children to school. These are the children with various issues that mean that an ordinary bus is not suitable. Don’t take that the wrong way - many of them are particularly gifted children whose problem may be emotional and behavioral rather than anything else. That, however, is beside the point.

Driving around my routes I see driving behavior that causes me to wonder whether there are drivers out there on a mission for ISIS to cause chaos, to cause injury and to cause death. Alternatively there could be some McDonalds out there that I don’t know about, issuing free driving licenses with every Happy Meal. If a day goes by when I don’t see some road user doing something suicidal, I’m relieved. Today there was somebody in a pickup truck weaving through the traffic, causing cars to brake and swerve as he cut in front of them. No use of turn signals, of course. Then there was the guy following me, 6 inches behind my rear bumper who didn’t understand that’s why I kept slowing down and so kept blowing his horn. Sorry, mate, I’m not speeding up til you speed your happy arse away from my back bumper. I can do without being rear-ended.

Being a bus driver means I also know more about vehicles than most. Two weeks ago the local dealership gave me a horrendous price on replacing what boiled down to a $1.50 part wrapped in plastic. By the time I had done a deal with the Devil it had cost me $330. Now my car is showing me a check engine light. Reading the error using the tried and true method of turning the car on, waiting 3 seconds then pumping the acellerator 5 times in 5 seconds then waiting 7 seconds before pressing the acellerator for 10 seconds then releasing, I read the code. The code flashes out in 4 blocks and came up as 443 which is something to do with the vacuum pump switch.

Having had to do business with the Devil and being determined not to do it again, I bought my car manual for a massive $25 and will henceforth attempt my own repairs. The part needed is $65 online but I’ll get the car spares shop to check my diagnosis with their reader while getting the needed part from them. Fortunately my bus has no built-in electronics. It’s pretty much pre-electronics which means diagnosis is simpler and there’s a load less to go wrong. Honestly the things that go wrong in my car are all to do with the onboard diagnostics rather than actual problems.

The manual for my bus or rather for the DT466 engine is somewhat daunting at about $150. Carpenter went out of business years ago but left a handy circuit diagram on the cockpit wall. Unhelpfully they ran their wires underneath the roof panels. As for the transmission, it’s a standard Alison 542 or similar. I don’t expect to have to work on that or the engine.

Today is a day off from work but I’m not doing anything today. I’m still exhausted from work over the last 4 days. One of the major problems with school bus driving is South Carolina’s reluctance to put air conditioning on their busses. On the special needs bus I drive, the children have air conditioning. It doesn’t reach the front though. That means that I have a choice. I can either chug water while I drive and hence chug kiddie germs or I can avoid the kiddie germs and dry out which has the unfortunate side effect of inducing a constipation that can last the whole work week. As my own bus does not have air conditioning but does not have children aboard, I’m luckier in that I don’t have to make a choice between missing days from being sick from preventable airborne germ ingestion or spending the weekend trying to get things working normally again.

Tomorrow the plan is to continue work under the bus on securing the wiring to the underside of the bus and continue on to pass the wires through the floor at the back of the bus. Once that’s done, I can work on the electrics at the back. Alternatively I can start to install my electronic door unlocker keypad. It depends what I feel like doing, to be brutally honest. I need to extend the wires under the bus as some are a shade too short. That’s probably going to be spade connectors. Soldering would be nice but spade is more practical if I’m doing this on my favorite piece of roadway.

And now the obligatory photo down the aisle of my bus.

It’s not too bad. Still a bit cluttered with construction debris in places but it’s getting there. If I feel so inclined, I might even forgo getting under to install my wiring and just concentrate on building a battery holder for my Harbor Freight 35AH battery. Although I don’t really want to weld to the bus body, I think I might have to weld a couple of brackets in order to hold my battery more securely.

Joining the legions of the undead

Though I’m pretty sure a good number of my dear readers would probably love nothing better than for me to join the legions of the dead, I’m not quite that far gone yet. I shall be sticking around in order to be a constant irritant to those that dislike me. In fact, should my current miserable virus be bad enough to cause me to get near deaths door, I’ve arranged to remain undead. That should bring fear to the hearts of my enemies, whose livers I shall savour with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Yes, I’ve fallen victim to one of the viruses my passengers has brought aboard on my work bus. As those of you in the know, know, I drive a special needs schoolbus. So, I drive from 5:40am til 8:45am then again from 1:30pm to 4:50pm and while the children have the benefit of air conditioning, I sweat it out at the driving seat in 90F. By the time I’ve done for the day I’m usually a little unsteady on my feet.

This weekend is an almost lost weekend as far as I’m concerned. I can’t go far or do much. Thank heavens it’s the weekend though and I’m not missing work. I did make it to the bus for ten minutes and though it’s 73F, those ten minutes almost did me in!

This is a spare bilge blower and I wanted to see how much difference my mosquito mesh filters would make to airflow. I have a feeling my existing exhaust vents and mesh filters could be causing a problem with throughput. Thus, using my anemometer and a spare 12v battery, I experimented and recorded the results below.

First I tried measuring outflow then I measured inflow both with and without meshes. Now I don’t regard my eBay anemometer as being the best tool out there. It was cheap and can be used as a rough estimation of airflow. My fan is rated at 130 cubic feet per minute. The anemometer is rated at feet per second. There’s a disparity of measurement that I can’t be bothered to calculate.

Needless to say, with no filters I got about 2200 feet per second. With two meshes I got just over half at 1400 feet per second. Then things get interesting. It seems the fan is more efficient when blowing than when sucking. The blow rate was 1600/1400 feet per second versus the suck rate of 1400/1200 feet per second. That goes against all the online mumbo jumbo that I’ve ever read. I can’t argue with my figures - they’re there in black and white.

Now, assuming I use a more appropriately sized large mesh for the inlet and no mesh for the outlet, I should get a throughput of 2200fps. Using two 130CFM fans I should be able to evacuate all the air from the bus in just over 4 minutes. That sounds promising.

I currently have mushroom vents over my vent pipes. If I were to replace them with flapper vents, that would increase airflow though I’d still need some kind of hood to prevent the wind from opening the flappers enough to allow critters inside. I’ve already noticed that with my mushroom vents, I get air blowing in when the fan is turned off.  I shall have to investigate flapper vents further.

Bugger! No negative ground?

Today I tested my charge controller to see if I could put a negative ground for the battery. I've got the bus body as the negative ground for all my solar powered devices so far. Intreaguingly, as soon as I connected the negative of the battery to the negative of the lines to powered devices, the devices sprang into life, despite the charge controller having left the devices turned off. Clearly the charge controller flies in the face of conventional logic and switches only on the negative side. Now that's truly and utterly bizarre. That means that unusually I will have to employ other methods.

Given that the charge controller does not regulate voltage output at all, I imagine a relay will be very useful there. It'll be a constant drain on power though. That would allow me to use the bus body as the negative for the battery and for the circuits. Indeed, lighter wiring could be used to power that relay. The downside is that I'm going to have to rethink some of my circuitry. The alternative would be to use a negative and a positive cable from the battery and just isolate the battery from the bodywork. That flies in the face of conventional vehicle wiring but if it's what must be done then it must be done.

I can hear it now. All those morons saying "shouldn't have bought Chinese crap". I ask the question - how do you know what's Chinese or not? How do you know whether something Chinese is good or bad? It's just not possible. If a company buys the electronics from China and assembles in the USA, is it American or is it Chinese? The Chinese can produce some darned good stuff. They can also produce some bloody awful stuff. In fact the vast majority of what they throw out on eBay tends to be the rejects and low quality stuff but a lot of it is still good enough to use. The exception being clothing - a Chinese XXXL will be Medium to the rest of us.

One of the easier things to do was to fix my batwing doors. Well, they're not actually saloon style batwing doors though this is what I'd have loved to have but they're in essence batwing doors. One of the doors was out of synch and needed a stabilizing screw and another screw tightened. Now though they no longer swing to the center and close automatically because the plastic bits have worn down in the past two years, they still look pretty darned good.

Looking at my pushbutton door controller, I found that it was possible to change the on period for the relay. I changed it from 5 seconds to 10 seconds so now when I open the door using the pushbutton, it will take just one operation. Similarly the wrong key entry alarm sounds for one minute after a wrong key entry. I was going to put a piezo buzzer under the hood but decided in the end that I might just as well connect to the vehicle horn.

I decided to run the door controller off the driving battery because if I run it off the door battery, it burns up door battery power at the rate of 30ma. In a day that would be 720ma. In 3.4 days that would drain my door batteries flat and that really wouldn't be helpful. At least I can disconnect the driving battery when I park. Now in an emergency such as my leaving my keys somewhere, I can just connect the bus battery and boom - I have power to the door lock. Of course, if I then go on to put a lock on my battery compartment then that gives rise to a new problem!

Thinking of locks, I'm thinking of putting locking latches on the fuel cap and the battery compartment on the basis that some people just are too dishonest. That being the case, it begins to look as though I will have to provide a totally different power source for my door lock controller. Perhaps just run it off the door battery as before but with a pushbutton switch to power it up while in use? That being the case, putting a wrong key alarm seems a bit pointless. Far better then to keep the wiring simple.

As can be seen here, it's just a few pairs of wires in use. That plus a power pushbutton should all work really well off my simple 8AA battery power supply. Having no permanent power drain, my emergency entry lock should work as required. Clearly a pushbutton door close switch will be needed inside. Then another thought is that if a 12V lithium battery were used to power just the unit itself and a relay then the 12v lithium battery could be just installed and forgotten about for a few years as with a momentary on button there would be no current drain and lithium batteries have a shelf life of about a decade. That could happily be installed inside the vehicle.

Thinking along the lines of specialty batteries, I realized eventually that my current setup using 8AA batteries is best. If I put - as I said - the momentary on switch to power the keypad when required, I can run the emergency unlocker from the ordinary lock batteries. Indeed, if I'm not likely to be accessing the lock for a long period, I could even replace the standard alkaline batteries with lithium AA or even go up to C or D cells. The current rechargeable AAs have been in use now for several months without having been recharge between whenever it was I last charged them and now. Sometimes just sitting, thinking about all the funky and complicated ways of doing things, it turns out the way I am doing them is still the simplest.

Having spent most of the day looking at and considering options, I'm not really convinced that putting the button control in the engine compartment is the right place. Similarly I'm convinced that underneath and inside any of the existing hatches is probably also the wrong place. I've been looking at other latches thinking that it might be possible to install a whole new door. I could simply label it DEF so that anybody looking would think that's for Diesel Emission Fluid instead of having a keypad concealed. Thinking further along the lines of the existing door lock, I'd probably be best keeping the existing arrangement but purely to prevent an accident that will never happen, I'll put a relay in that cuts power from the key lock side while the codepad lock is operating. I might as well run that straight off the solar battery.

I'm hoping that next weekend I will be less exhausted. The problem is I take my work very seriously and put 110% into what I'm doing. I do this with every job I do. That means that I tend to use the weekends recuperating.

For the moment I shall put the keypad controller on the back burner while I complete the final wiring. That involves getting under the bus on tarmac again to fit more cable attachments and also to extend any wires that are too short.

Finally, today I saw a video online of a driver who drove straight into a bus and had a head on collision. It is not known whether the driver fell asleep or whether he was on his cellphone. That driver is now dead. The driver of the bus had a hard job keeping the bus upright and ended up way off in the fields and the front of the bus is a mess but the occupants survived. I feel happier to have an old schoolbus because I feel they're better built. So, let that be your lesson for today - that text message, phonecall, facebook message - it could just put you into the next world.