A real good blow job today!

People ask me why I don’t have a generator in my bus conversion. The simple answer is I just don’t need one. I’m unlikely to be dry camping when the temperature is low. I have a 30A plugin which is common enough that I could plug into just about any campground or mobile home site in North America should I need electricity.

What about now, now that winter has come? Well, I’m sitting in the bus right now, feeling quite cosy and warm. I turned my electric fan heater on after plugging the bus into a 20A supply. The temperature inside has risen from 54F to 57F in just a couple of minutes. I could turn the heat up even further but don’t really see much need.

I’ve had this fan for a number of years. Indeed, I bought this as soon as I moved into a rented hovel in the heart of Lexington. It was pretty well a slum property and it was $525 a month which was rather galling. I remember it well...

The front door had a split going all the way down the center where somebody had broken it in two breaking in some time or other. It had planks nailed across it to keep it together. The carpets all had nasty looking stains and nothing was particularly clean when I moved in. There were stains on the walls and ceilings. Indeed - that could well have been a hastily cleaned up crime scene and probably was for all I know. There were 2 inch gaps under the front and back doors through which roaches, lizards and spiders came and left at will.

The next door neighbors were pleasant enough as were all my neighbors though I felt the odd one out being the only white face in the area. Needless to say the place was very close to the jail and the first building on the road was a bail bonds office. At no time did I ever feel exceptionally unsafe but on the other hand I never felt exceptionally safe and slept every night with my 9mm pistol under my pillow.

Of course being a slum property I was a little surprised to be asked to pony up a month’s rent in advance as a deposit. I never figured I’d get it back. I just figured it was a greedy grab and typical of slum lords. Consequently it did not surprise me in the least when I cleaned the place and returned the keys that I didn’t get my deposit back. I calculated since I spent 30 months there that my actual rent instead of being $525 was actually $542.50. Not too bad actually. Having said that I’d spent $15K on renting a slum property.

My bus cost me $4200 and the jury is still out on how much the conversion will have cost. I have everything I need to complete the solar and battery setup. I do need to get stuff for the plumbing bit and I might still redo the toilet so that I can simply plumb it into a sewage disposal system at a campsite. I’m still undecided on that one. I gather that if I rented a space at a site then I’d be paying $250 a month. That doesn’t actually seem that bad to be honest. It’s a far cry from $525 a month for a place I didn’t even own!

When I lived in the slum, it was a two storey building. Alas I cannot find a photo of it though one surely exists somewhere. Just a two storey townhouse on a dirt track near a jail in the poor section of town. I believe it was around 500 square feet per floor. Needless to say what with the cockroach problem I didn’t actually use the downstairs for anything. There were three bedrooms upstairs, a huge one and two smaller ones. The two smaller ones I used - one to sleep and one to use as an office/den/day-room. In the cold of winter I ran my little fan heater and kept just that one room warm.  My monthly electricity bill was rarely above $25. In the heat of summer I just used a fan.

With the bus though I don’t have heat unless I plug in, I do have cooling provided by my solar powered fans. Not only do they circulate air but they extract the hot air and blow it out the back. I believe I have done a good job with the bus so far. I just need to have a warm day to complete the underbus operations. At the very least that is completing fastening the long cable that goes from front to back and putting the battery compartment into place together with its wiring. Preferably I’d like to add the bedroom wiring which I’m hoping to be able to pass under the bus though other solutions may have to be used due to the proximity of the wheel arch.

In an ideal world I’d then add an instant hot water heater plugged into the main breaker board, mounted under the sink. Then I’d put a dual hot water line with one piece going to the sink and one to the shower. Obviously the underbus piping would need to be lagged. I’d also need to put a faucet on the sink. That doesn’t sound much but is probably a few weekends worth of work and about $200 expenditure.

In my dream world I’d put a flush toilet. How I’m going to work that, I’m really not sure. I’m still in favor of a simple funnel with a trapdoor that adds some kind of splash guard. The flushing can be done with a hose with a pistol jet head like so many kitchen sinks have. For dry camping that could be a simple hand pump gallon water sprayer. The tank sounds like it needs to be specially constructed to fit the space available. I can weld steel with no problem!

Looking at the weather it looks like next weekend might be doable for going under the bus. It should be 66 which means if I’m lucky I can get at least the wiring done and possibly also the battery compartment. I don’t know about doing the bedroom wiring though.

There are pictures I’d have liked to have added but though I could find them on Google Photos using my phone, I could not locate them using my tablet and the web browser. Go figure! Seems to me that Google needs to do some work on linking things. But by the time I finished in the bus for the day, my little fan heater had raised the temperature to a somewhat balmy 63F. That’s bikini weather!

How not to do a blow job!

Last night I pondered my battery situation for the bus and realised I’m making life harder than it really needs to be. I’ve run though various permutations of battery hangers before deciding I need to read up some on the battery I actually have which is a 35AH AGM Deep Cycle battery. Looking online it seems that AGM batteries are acid impregnated fiberglass mat. They’re also pretty tough things that can be subjected to vibration with no ill effects. That puts a totally new perspective on mounting it! I’ve tried various mounting ideas in my mind from things welded to the subframe to things bolted to things welded to the subframe. Now I realise that as it’s a fiberglass mat, it is probably going to be OK to mount it behind the rear wheels. Of course having spent $70 on the AGM battery and probably about $50 on gel batteries I’ve come to the conclusion the best battery would probably have been a lithium battery at $200 but I’ll use what I have before I go lithium.

Thinking about going under the bus, I looked and as I suspected, it was knee deep in leaves and other detritus carried in by the winds. Thus rather than using the blower to blow the leaves and risk blowing yet more sand into the mechanisms, I decided to move the bus. Thus I pulled it forward 30 feet and went to the shed to find the blower. It wasn’t there. Enquiries revealed it had been lent to somebody so that’s probably the last we’ll ever hear of that blower. Further enquiries revealed there was a rake available.

As can be seen, there were a lot of leaves. Moving the bus revealed how many. Let’s just say that it took quite a while to change the scene from this.

To this.

The primary thing is it would have been done in seconds using a blower as opposed to minutes using a rake. It would have been even faster had the rake handle not snapped in two having been left lying flat on the ground in the wet for months. I ended up spending twice as long, using twice the energy stooping to use a rake with half a handle.

While I worked on it I noticed an ugly-looking spider crawling out of the leaves. It seemed to be brown with a red stripe up its back. Heaven knows what that was. I’m certainly glad I swept those leaves!

Having reconceived my idea for hanging the battery I’m not going to have to do any wending underneath (thank goodness). I can instead complete my hanger and simply bolt it to the subframe just behind the differential. That has several advantages. First there’s plenty space. Second it’s an easier way to fasten it and third if by some chance the people that denigrate my welding are right and it disintegrates (which I severely doubt) then it will just drop harmlessly into the road and not under my wheels.

Meanwhile, my last two relays ordered via Amazon arrived a couple of days ago. I’m not 100% sure how I will employ them but employ them I shall. They took a heck of a long time to arrive because Amazon didn’t notifying me they would come from China. I wish Amazon was more transparent about things like that!

I know I bought one in case the solid state relay didn’t work and the other in order to use my digital door unlocker keypad. That way I can run it from the solar battery rather than the AA batteries in the door lock. Now, of course I found my solid state relay works well but needs a heatsink. For that, enter the feet the hillbillies put on the beds they installed. For some weird reason known only unto them the feet are welded aluminum while the rest of the bed frame was steel.

Now that I can use as a heat sink. The base can be riveted to the bulkhead and the relay bolted to a horizontal on the aluminum angle. The vertical will dissipate heat quite nicely. This should work as well as any other heat sink with the bonus that this relay uses a fraction of the low power that an ordinary relay uses.

I would have liked to have achieved something today - more than just clearing some ground. The sad fact is that it never got above 57F today (13C) which was just a bit too chilly for me. Maybe another day though. It’s just not worth getting sick and missing work and hence missing money. That’s the sad thing about the USA - if you’re sick, you get no income but you get plenty outgoing trying to get healthy again which is why so many people end up on the street after being responsible workers and homeowners all their lives.

Some good news though - when I drove the bus (admittedly only 30 feet forward and 30 feet back), I found what that mysterious cable attached to the accelerator had been doing. It was simply pulling the accelerator down so that the bus would move forward at about 8mph all on its own. I have a suspicion that was done in order that drivers would have to keep their foot on the brake to control the speed in the bus yard.

I had ideas about maybe installing my solid state relay and new heatsink after I’d cleaned it up but by the time the heatsink had dried, the temperature inside the bus was 55F and outside was even lower. Add to that it was 5PM and beginning to get dark. Today just does not seem to have been a day for doing much of anything.

Ouch, dammit! That hurts!

Yesterday I’d got a bit fed up with things and decided to go out for a change. It gets a bit old going from work to home, home to work and working on the bus when I’m not ill or working or shopping. Thus I went out to a national park some 80 miles away. I had a great time tramping along trails, seeing sights etc. The problem was I haven’t done too much walking in years. Thus by the time I was at the end of my second trail, my little legs were tired. Today, of course, they’re sore as anything. Getting under the bus was a definite no.

Thus as my solid-state relay seems to need a heat-sink and I didn’t have one, I cut a piece of aluminum to fulfill the role. That took a while as it’s an inch thick. I drilled the holes for my mounting screws to mount the thing to the bulkhead. Then I drilled the first hole for the first screw to attach the relay to my heatsink. At least - I tried to. The drill bit kept skipping so I put my glasses on and looked at the tip - broken. I wonder when that happened. I pulled out another drill bit and drilled the hole. That worked just fine. Then I tried to insert a small self-tapping screw which broke off in the hole. Very useful!

You can probably see the broken screw in the small hole just below the big hole. No chance of getting that out so back to the drawing board!

I am limited by the supplies at hand. I could rush out and buy everything I need but at this stage in construction I’m using up odds and ends and what I have on hand as I’m definitely going to have a ton of surplus materials and of course all that cost money and money as they say doesn’t grow on trees.

Looking at the size of the mounting holes on the relay, they seemed to fit a #8 screw. I bought a whole box of #8 self-drilling screws. Heaven knows where they are. I’ve looked and can’t find them. I’m not going to rush out and buy more though.

Meanwhile I realized I have some thinner aluminum. Now if I can bend that into a U shape (no guarantees or even use some of the aluminum from the bed feet and cut that into size then I can put two #8 self tappers through that thinner aluminum, use the same self-drillers to secure the lot to the bulkhead and then use some of my leftover thermal cement - if it’s not gone bad - to make a thermal bond with the aluminum heat-sink. Of course, having already worked some and having so many aches I felt somewhat disinclined toward doing any extra work so that’s a task for next weekend.

Swings and roundabouts

Today I was able to file for a refund with eBay on the cordless webcam that failed to arrive. My review on the sellers account was fair and unbiased: “Product never arrived. Seller unresponsive. No tracking number. Suspect fraud”. Meanwhile I have two relays ordered from Amazon that bizarrely seem to be coming on the backs of tortoises from China. Good job I don’t need them immediately! I always thought Amazon was an American operation instead of China Inc.

Meanwhile, my solid state relay arrived. This was my last eBay purchase. I have no more eBay purchases in the system. In fact it’s only the relays to come from Amazon and that’ll be it for online purchases.

It’s a great big thing and the first thing I did was to test it. Putting 12v through the switch control made a red LED come on. Encouraged I connected a 12v battery and a CPU fan to the other side. It worked. The fan went on and off as I switched current on and off to the switch control side of the relay. I’m happy! It might need a geatsink but I have plenty aluminum I can use so no worries there!

Meanwhile I’ve been thinking about updating the toilet to a flush type toilet. I was always impressed by the toilets on Brutush trains that had a flap under the bowl. When the foot button was pushed, the flap dropped down and the toilet contents slid onto the track, flushed with a small amount of water. Talking with a young lady bus driver at work today I mentioned the British Rail toilet and she spoke of an RV toilet she’d seen that had two blades that opened and closed. Very interesting!

My current thought is to weld steel from fridges etc to make a black tank. I’d have to paint it thickly against rust but that’s not a problem! Some form of macerator would seem a good idea though I’d want something manual. I don’t have too much faith in electrical fancy goods. Similarly the toilet could be welded from steel. It is, after all, just a funnel. The flapper would need to mate precisely with the outlet from the toilet pan but I’m sure I can find some way of doing that. As for flapper operation, a rod would do. Flushing had me stumped until I saw hand pumped portable pressure washers. Talk about water saving! That sounds ideal! Actually I’m wondering if a mascerator could be avoided by using an enzyme digesters.

Building a flush toilet would save several hundred dollars over buying one. The same for the black tank. Somebody wrote that using a caddy to carry the waste from their RV to the disposal site eliminated the need for a sewage tube. That makes sense! In fact a sewage tube would only be needed for semi permanent locations such as a mobile home park. Having said that, it’s probably where a flush toilet would be most beneficial. Sewage disposal with my current setup is easy. After the bag in the bucket has had enough put in it, the bag can be placed in a plastic 5 gallon bucket - the type with a lid. Those are $5 from Walmart. That should take several toilet bags. Then simply toss the bucket into a skip.

It’s getting ever harder to get up!

Today I set my welding work on the ground and set to, welding. I only paused when my welder cut out due to it reaching the cooldown threshold when it cuts off to cool down. It has a limited duty cycle but It’s an economy model which means it has more limitations than the Fancy Nancy models out there. For my purposes though it’s slow, it does the job and I have no complaints. Well, maybe just one. After I retrieved it from where it was stored, I tried my Lincoln Electric 1/16th rods and just could not strike and maintain an arc. I switched to my Harbor Freight 3/32 rods and hey presto. I had an arc. Go figure!

It’s getting ever harder to get up from my knees after working on the ground. Today I had to find something to lean on in order to lift myself up. I think it’s called getting old and to be quite honest I don’t like it one little bit! It makes me wish I was one of the Shape-Shifters from Sci-Fi. I could transform myself into a busty, blue-eyed blonde and get any number of men to drool and do the work for me, for nothing. Sadly, that’s not possible so I have to get on with it myself or pay somebody money to do it for me.

After some procrastination during which I declared the angle steel I was going to use to be way too heavy for my intended purpose, I got on with the task. Cutting the steel angle was a breeze. I used my trusty Harbor Freight angle grinder and its 4.5” cutting disks. Heaven knows how many packs of cutting disks I’ve used! I’d decided overnight to cut and weld to hold just one battery. I don’t have much generating capacity and though I can now limit power usage by cutting the extraction fans on and off at set times, I can probably still use more power than I generate if I’m not careful.

I’d been puzzling over how to keep the work square before spotting in the yard my old main breaker housing that I’d painstakingly welded together. That was pretty flat on the back which proved idea. I simply placed everything on that while I tack welded it. Once it was cool from tack welding I tried the battery in place and as designed there’s about an inch or so on the sides spare space. That means that if the next Harbor Freight 35AH UL1 battery is oversized, it’ll fit. It’ll fit even if the current battery is undersized.

So, I spent a couple of hours today doing nothing but cutting steel and welding. The fun thing will be when I have to weld the brackets to the box section ribs. I’ll have to go over them quickly and lightly in order not to create too much heat. The rubber coating on the underside of the bus certainly burns well. It self-extinguishes but it’s certainly flammable. More than that, I don’t know if the hillbillies managed to drill through the box sections to insert their self-drilling screws and I’m also aware the floor above is rubber coated. Keeping heat down is therefore a priority. Fortunately I don’t have to weld directly to the floor. As heat rises, it’s worth keeping it to a minimum. This is why in this respect, arc welding is better even though it splatters badly.

In my box of Harbor Freight 3/32 rods I found a 1/16th rod that I’d partially used and tried that. Oh Boy did that rod work well on the 70A setting. That was very fast welding. Next time I’m in Harbor Freight I’ll have to see if I can pick up more of their 1/16th rods. Today has been almost exclusively 3/32 as with the amount of paint on my steel angle, I figured I’d be best using a penetrating 6011 rod rather than my usual 7014. Given the thickness of the steel I’ve been double-welding too. That’s welding from both sides.

I think my mount is nice and flat. I’ll probably go over some of my welds with an angle grinder to smooth them out but they don’t need to look professional so I’ll just do some of them. Anyway, after a couple of hours working in 56 degrees Fahrenheit (which was cool but not unpleasant) I’d had enough. I need to crawl under the bus next in order to measure properly for the struts that will fit under the bus and from which my battery holder will hang. I’ll have to build the top struts (same ladder design), clamp them in place and mark where I need to drill my mounting holes and where I need to mount my 4 hanging brackets. When that’s done, I’ll bolt my 4 hanging brackets onto my cross members, clamp the cross members into place using some G clamps. Then I’ll weld the brackets into place. Finally I’ll release the clamps to see where the cross members move to and then reclamp and drill my bolt holes in the C section members. When that’s done, I’ll take my top mount down and weld vertical support struts to hold my battery base into place. The final thing to be done (aside from sand blasting and painting) will be to put attachments that can be used to clamp the battery into place. I’m going to say that my mount when it’s complete will probably weigh more than the battery it’s designed to hold! On the other hand, I’m using steel that I already have and that I don’t have to buy.

I stopped work for today after finishing the base welding for several reasons. It wasn’t that I was getting particularly cold. It was more that I’d finished the task I’d planned to do and usually I find when I stretch onto the next task is when things begin to go awry. It was also threatening to rain and rain does not go well with arc welding or freshly welded steel. I’ve not put an “after” photo of my battery base because it looks very similar to the “before” photo. I could have put a photo of my 4 pieces of cut steel angle but didn’t really see the point. Though I like to do blow by blow photos at times, this wasn’t one of those times. That’s probably more because my phone is on charge and not in my pocket.

I had intended to head to North Carolina to take photos of the autumn colors this weekend but looking at the state park webcams the leaves were all still green. They say that there’s less chance of a red autum but more of a yellow autum due to the unseasonal weather we’ve had. Perhaps next weekend will be the weekend I’ll head up there. It surely can’t be any later than the weekend after that! So, failing a trip to North Carolina and having a dry day, I might be underneath the bus, putting the final attachments on my underbus conduit then extending the wires that didn’t stretch far enough while also measuring for the top part of my battery holder. If I have time then I might also cut my steel for the top and mark it ready for drilling and mounting.

Is there no end to it?

Yes - it’s the weekend and I’ve got another bug. I can’t blame the children I drive daily to and fro from school for poor hygiene. Most don’t know any better (and who would at that age) and schools are a hotbed of infectious viruses. The only thing I can do is to double down on spraying my work bus with disinfectant spray before every trip.

So, in the bus I removed the 20A fuse that had been working my fans for the past week or so and replaced it with an appropriate 5A fuse since my box of assorted ATO/ATC blade fuses arrived a few days ago. It lacks any 0.5A fuses which the specifications call for as being dark blue. Somebody, somewhere makes them but I’m having a dreadful time trying to find who and who stocks them. I’ve reached out to friends in the amateur radio world but none have come up with solutions.

Looking under the bus was fairly exhausting. It seemed at first glance that the distance between the outer edges of the two sets of channel under the bus is 30 inches. I’ll have to get under there to measure that properly and that is something that right now, I just don’t feel like doing. My plan such as it is to build a cage from leftover steel angle from the beds that were installed by the hillbillies. Why they used such heavy steel, I don’t know and how they managed to bend one of the steel angles, again I don’t know. I had a hard job bending that angle with a sledgehammer. In fact, I gave up trying!

The plan is a simple, open cage that will support one or two of the Harbor Freight 35AH deep cycle lead acid batteries. I’ll probably install them end to end rather than sideways. The steel ribs that can’t have bolts passed through will be a particular challenge. The two sets of C section are easy to drill and bolt. The others and I have two as shown in my simple diagram below will need brackets welded to them. That will be challenging as I have never before welded on the underside of anything. I just hope the molten steel does not drip. The idea is to bolt the cross members to those brackets. That way the whole thing is removable if I want to change my mounts in order to accommodate a different battery.

Obviously the diagram is not to scale but a rough sketch. That should take care of all my battery requirements. One thing I will do though is to attach a thin steel hood using steel purloined from an old microwave as a hood. That will stop any corrosive fumes from going straight up to attack the underside of the floor. Similarly if a battery catches fire, it will act as a heat barrier.

Meanwhile I just checked on eBay. It seems the security camera I ordered back on September 2nd still has a few days left before I can file it as a non-arrival and get my money back. Apparently it has until November 1st so come November 1st I shall be filing. I’m pretty sure that after what must be 55 days that the seller just pocketed my money and vanished. He certainly didn’t respond to my message of a few days ago as to whether he’d actually shipped the suspiciously cheap item. Actually I’m getting a lot of that at the moment. This must be the 3rd or 4th bad transaction recently. The last guy
was from India and for an Indian, it makes a load of sense. Given the Indian guy had 265 negative ratings for items costing about $3 each then that comes to around $750 which to him must be about a year’s wages. In fact that’s not a shabby amount even in the USA. I know of many people earning far less than $750 a month! This is of course why so many will rent a $400 a month ramshackle home from a slumlord and pile several people into it, all sharing rent. In fact there was a book about the struggles of the poor and dispossessed called “Nickel and Dimed”. In fact so many have come to expect to be nickel and dimed that they just don’t believe there’s another way.

Measuring my battery, it seems to be 8 inches long by 5 inches wide by about 8 inches high. It also weighs 20LBS. I’ll try building the cage to hold just one battery in order to cut down on weight. The steel of my cage is not inconsiderable heavy and while I could go out and buy lighter and more relevant steel, it just makes sense to use what I actually have. I’ll definitely have to practice my underneath welding techniques. I’ve never done that before. And of course, there I was, thinking I wasn’t going to need to do any more welding!

Looking at my solar panel output I’m thinking that the older panels with the more modern technology that total 20W just aren’t producing quite as much as my 15W Harbor Freight panel. I could be wrong, of course. Still, until I’m feeling more like getting under the bus to do something I’m not going to find out definitively.

Thinking about the problem of needing adequate blocking of incoming air through my extraction vents and the need to keep incoming bugs out, two solutions came to mind. Reading around somebody had used the equivalent of a cloth sock. The air keeps the “sock” open and when there’s no pressure, the sock closes. That’s actually a pretty neat idea though I’d imagine the “sock” would fray where it’s attached. As far as keeping bugs out, as my internal bug screen inside my ventilation ducting is probably more reducing airflow, I’d looked at various solutions but not been overly impressed. Looking in the cookware section of one of the online places I found they make 7 inch stainless steel sieves. Those sound ideal. I could simply attach tags and screw them over my mushroom domes. Indeed, I could probably replace the mushroom domes with fixed louvered vents and just have the sieves over that. I shall have to pay a visit to Williams-Sonoma as Walmart just seems to have plastic sieves which really aren’t going to like being outside.

 Those with longer memories will recall my purchase of a GPS speedometer. Those who are astute will remember that when I tested it after purchase it worked just fine. When I went to use it in earnest, it proved unreliable with the display being inaccurate, missing digit segments. It did give me a pretty good indication that the speedometer on the bus is actually correct despite having oddly sized tyres. Today though, it wouldn’t even pick up a satellite signal.

Where I work, as a school bus driver, no electronic devices are permitted that aren’t installed. GPS is not installed. Thus I work from route descriptions which are turn by turn descriptions. Turn left on Joe Bloggs Road. Turn right on Murhey’s Law Road, Turn right on Sprogget & Sylvester Lane etc. That’s fine until you miss a turn. Thus I bought a street atlas online. None of the local bookstores seemed to stock them nor have the slightest interest in tracking one down for me. It’s all very unlike when I worked in a bookstore where I’d search the catalogs for the book the customer needed and ring other bookstores if the bookstore I worked for didn’t have it. One by one all the decent and half decent bookstores closed, leaving just the ratty stores where you have to watch they don’t clone your debit card or pick your pocket while you’re in there. Anyway, that atlast has the tiniest print I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I would have said see but it’s so tiny it can’t be read with anything other than a bloody great big magnifying glass or an electron microscope! The point is that while useful, a GPS isn’t the solution to navigation. It’s useful but I feel maps are largely better. Indeed, if I go on a journey though I’ll take a GPS, I carry a map (when I can get maps) and write out a route description for the non interstate portions (or use Mapquest to do it for me).

Look at the size of the text in conjunction with the ball point of the pen. How tiny and unreadable is that? Sure - if you have phenomenal teenage vision then it’s probably great but most of us are well past that especially those old enough to be driving school busses!

I’ve been idly looking at replacements for my rather scratched and worn Busboy mirrors. So far I’ve seen a lot of mirrors with L brackets but precious few with tunnel mount. Having said that I did come across today a rectangular convex mirror that had a clamp mount that would apparently fit 0.75 to 1.5 inch tubing. I dashed out and measured the tubing on the mirror mount and found it was 0.75. The irksome thing was those mirrors were $40 each. That’s too expensive. It’s something I’m going to have to get but I’m not spending that much. I really don’t like the Busboy mirrors as they show only the ground in front of the vehicle. The circular mirrors (and presumably the rectangular mirrors too) also show the top of the bus - very handy for low bridges and clearance issues. Don’t forget my bus is 11 feet tall and bridges marked at 14 feet might after a few road resurfacing be a lot less than 14 feet.

Tomorrow is a day when I normally do other stuff as well as working on the bus. Oddly enough, Sundays seem to be the day these days that I get the most achieved. I can’t say I’ve achieved an awful lot today! I’ve cut no steel, done no welding. I’ve played with my ventilation a bit but I really need to wait until my relays arrive before I can do much more with that. Having said that, it’s always possible for me to run two wires from the battery if the relay doesn’t fix the problem. The relay I ordered for the solar controller is solid state and designed to switch 250V so whether it will switch 12V remains to be seen. It’s Chinese so I expect all kinds of funky and unforeseen issues. To be candid since all the Chinese charge controller does is to switch the supply on when there’s enough power in the battery and off when there’s too little and of course to stop charging when the battery is full, it could all be achieved with simpler but more reliable separate circuitry. I have no idea how much power the Chinese relay will guzzle but I’d imagine in the region of 25ma per hour since that’s what everybody else claims on their solid state relays. We know they all come from China. Nobody in the west seems capable of making anything any more!

Nothing arrived in the mail today. No checks, bills, final demands, court summonses, stuff from Amazon or stuff from eBay not even any letters containing suspicious white powder nor letter bombs. Quite disappointing really! I’m still waiting for 3 relays and of course the mythical security camera that seems destined never to arrive. Now that’s odd because it’s the second one I ordered off eBay that just hasn’t arrived and where the seller seems to have been a scammer.

Recently somebody expressed astonishment that I’ve not set my motorhome up with a huge battery nor a huge amount of solar panels nor a generator. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I don’t see the need for all this expensive gadgetry and the second is it’d cost too much. I’ve got a 12v system almost completed that cost probably somewhere in the region of $350 that will do everything I need and then some. I have a plug-in mains system that will power just about everything my heart
could desire - mini-fridge, microwave, fan heater. I’m a simple fellow and don’t need much. There is no water pump because I’d have to mount a water tank under the bus and that’s complicated and expensive while 6 gallon jerrycans are available from Walmart for $12. There’s no hot water supply because water can be heated in a kettle fairly quickly and mixed with cold to provide washing and shower water. It can even be stored in an insulated container ready for use. Similarly I have no need for a TV nor stereo nor a cassette deck nor a radio. I don’t even own one of those Sony Walkman things. There’s no built in cooking because countertop cooking gear is cheaper. My solar system will charge my $29 phone and my $50 tablet. What more would I want? My lighting is LED lanterns though I might add built in lighting at some point. I’m just not addicted to outsourced entertainment. In fact I make almost no phone calls either. If the world ends I shall be well placed to survive!

Every size except the one I want!

My fuse system has a requirement for 7A, 2A, 1A, 0.5A and 5A fuses plus a bigger overall fuse. It seems that 7A is not made but 7.5A is so that’ll have to do.

A few days ago, I ordered a box of multiple different fuses and it arrived today. It’s pretty good in that it has every size except 0.5A. Those size is proving the devil to locate. As you can see, they’re all pretty and color coded. They look more like candy or beads than fuses! In fact they remind me of displays in greengrocers stores and confectionery stores in Barnstable in the late 1960s.

The specifications I see say 0.5A ATO fuses exist and are dark blue. Several websites claim to sell them yet have no stock. It’s the old story of selling anything you want at the price you can afford but is never in stock.

The kit is pretty extensive but I have to find a better way of getting the low amperage fuses than paying $10 for a box of 120 when only a third are useful. The car parts stores don’t have low amperage fuses. Perhaps the motorbike stores will. Radio Shack would have been worth a look but they no longer exist.

It’s just totally amazing that nobody online even lists a 0.5a fuse!