Author: Bill

Just wandering around..
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Lost Wages to Salt Lake City

We drove from Vegas to Beaver, UT on Sunday.  It’s at about 6,000′ elevation.  Pretty cold for us San Diegans.  Was 33 when we got up that morning.  I haven’t seen temps below 44 in San Diego except once when it got down to 32 degrees and killed my Heliotrope plant in the front yard.  It was purple and red one day, the next morning it was brown and never revived.

Anyway, prior to leaving San Diego I had two of the three Air Dump valves replaced as they were getting stuck open occasionally and it was irritating to wait for the air bags to fill so we could drive.   I was just replacing the one that was leaking, but par for the course, as soon as that was replaced, another one could be heard purging air when it wasn’t supposed to.   I drove all around town to locate another valve and could only get one.  But I had the guy order one from LA so I could swing by some other day and have it on hand if needed.

All seemed well after the second one was installed till the morning we were leaving on the trip.   I hadn’t made time to pick the other one up, so as we were exiting San Diego I had to drive to El Cajon and get it.  (about 20 miles out of the way)

Monday morning in Beaver the rear bags were fairly slow to fill; so while I waited, I called Freightliner in Salt Lake City to find out about having the last one replaced.   They told me I would need to wait till the 30th., 10 days from now!

So I googled Diesel Mechanics around Beaver, UT.   There was one with almost five stars on Google’s Reviews.   I called them.  They said to bring it right over and explained to me they were 1,000 feet from me.   We drove over, showed the mechanic the part.  He crawled under the coach, said it would be a quick swap, and had me drop the air and raise the coach on the jacks.

He had it replaced in 35 minutes.   The last guy took 2 hours to do it.  Paid them $110 (1 hr minimum) and we were on our way in less than an hour.   That was utterly amazing to me.  I’ve got to make sure I write up a review of them!

So we headed across the mountains toward Salt Lake City and then the rains came.  Then they turned to sleet and hail to make it a bit of an edgy ride.   When it started to sleet, I slowed to 50 mph; but I was getting passed by lots of trucks still doing the 80 mph they allow there.   Seemed nuts to me as it was very steep downgrades and climbs thru long curves during all of it.   I never felt the coach slip, but I was waiting for it to occur.

Once out of the winter weather, it was smooth sailing into downtown Salt Lake City to a KOA we stayed at on our way to Yellowstone back in 2017.   It was one of Kathy’s favorite parks, lots of grass for Dusty! Thankfully it’s a lot cooler here than it was in June of that year and a lot less crowded.

Drove over to the big temple that’s in the middle of downtown and got pizza for dinner!   The next morning it was raining pretty good and continued all day.  So I spent a lot of the day redoing my playlists on my local pc in the front of the coach so we can have tunes in the great white north where an internet connection may be difficult to find.

We switched our cell phones to Cricket Wireless as it appears AT&T has more connectivity in Canada and we could get an unlimited plan that includes Canada and Mexico for $40 each.    Our current Verizon and AT&T hotspot plans don’t include any data outside the USA.   So we are good in Alaska, but Canada will probably find us looking for WiFi when camping.   I installed a new omni-directional WiFi antenna from Mikrotik Metal AC Router on my crank-up TV antenna.

I still have my NanoStation with us for longer range WiFi acquisition situations.

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Passing thru Sin City.

We were happy to leave the incredibly windy Barstow area and make the short trek to Lost Wages.   We dropped by the local Elks Club and they had open sites, so we are camping there for the next couple of nights.   We thought we would see a show while here,  Kathy’s choice was Celion Dion for tonight’s show, but neither of us want to sit in the audience and cough thru it all.   Unfortunately, both of us caught a cold just before leaving on the trip.

We took a drive down the strip this afternoon after checking out the local In-N-Out for lunch.   Had to pick up a Tee Shirt at the corporate store.   I had never seen one one of their stores before.  I didn’t realize In-N-Out sold so much swag.   

On the way back to the strip, we found a large sculpture made up of only boats.  Most looked like canoes, but there were a lot of them all wired together.

As we drove down the strip, I was amazed just how much more crowded it is. It’s like they just never stopped building in the 15+ years since I was last there.  It’s a zoo now.  But it’s all mainly down at the south end of the strip right around Cesar’s Palace.   Get much further north and it peters out till you get down to Fremont Street downtown.

On our way toward downtown, we passed the Pawn Stars shop and the little chapel a friend of ours got married in back in the early ’90s.  I sure missed that velvet Elvis above the alter.

We drove on down to Fremont Street so Kathy could get a gander at the spectacle that is “Las Vegas.”   It didn’t disappoint, even the rather plump almost naked gals posing for pictures wanted to pet our Dusty.  Unfortunatly I missed that picture..

 

 

 

A new to me thing on Fremont Street are the 4  ziplines overhead.   They travel the whole way under the FSE overhead structure.   Our hour parking space was just about up, so we headed back to the car and off to find a fill-up station for the car, Nevada gas is quite a bit less than home.   I filled the RV with 130 gallons at $3.15, probably 75 cents less a gallon than anywhere in California right now.   And the car gas was more at $3.34, still about 50 cents cheaper than the gas in CA.

Oh,  you San Diego folks will get a kick from this.  Last night I was able to stop at a local Roberto’s Taco Shop.   I never thought there were any outside of San Diego, but this one used the same TM Logo.    If you get here and need a fix, it’s at the corner of Pecos and Las Vegas Blvd N.

And yes while we were here I was able to fix the camera and GPS feeds.

 

 

 

 

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Alaska or Bust!

We set out for the great adventure Wednesday afternoon making it a ways north on I-15 about three hours to just past Barstow, CA.   To my delight right before the exit I saw the sign for Calico Ghost Town.   I had seen that on a map back in the 1980’s and wanted to go there since.   I guess I forgot about that till that sign reminded me I never made it there.

I had been planning on just an overnight, but I paid for two after the gal at the desk mentioned CGT was 3 miles away, and am glad we did.   The ghost town was way better than expected.   There is even a campground inside the park which turns out to be a county park.   From what I read, the guy who created Knotts Berry Farm restored that town back in the 1950’s then donated it to the county.   This is a must see if you have never been to a ghost town, but I would probably not go there in the summertime.  It’s in the middle of the Mojave Desert.  It was a beautiful 70 degrees and a bit windy while we were there.  I can only imagine what it would be like in July. (probably 120 in the shade)

That evening the winds were blowing so wildly I considered pulling in the slides to move in the center of gravity for stability.   Everything was howling that night,  not much of a restful sleep for either of us.

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Reducing the 24×7 power draw on the RV batteries

During our 8 days of boondocking in Tucson last month I was monitoring the constant power draws on the batteries.   One thing I noticed was the Inverter was drawing a constant 6 amps of power from the battery 24 hours a day.   The inverter is what creates 120v AC power from the 12 volts of power the house batteries produce.  It has a few amps of overhead and there is also a conversion loss there, not to mention the power conversion loss that also happens at low power devices we have plugged via wall warts.  (those little black transformers you plug into wall outlets)

My solution was to find DC-DC power converters that will use the 12v direct from the batteries to change it to the voltage a particular device needs.   Some examples are:  8 Port Gigabit Switch   It actually runs on 5v so removed the wall wart and used one of these 5.5mm Power Adapter barrel connector coupled with a 5v power supply and also tied in our HDhomerun to that same power supply via another 5.5mm barrel connector.

A note on that power supply, the width around the terminal screws was so small I had to grind down the crimp on connectors.  And they were the smallest (Red) connectors I have seen.

I also switched out my 120v POE supply with one of these 12v models:  Gig DC-DC POE power supply My WiFi device is passive POE (24v) and this device converts 12v to 24v and injects it into the Gig Ethernet cable to power my  Mikrotik Metal CPE   The Mikrotik is a CPE WiFi device with an Omni Directional antenna attached that I use to grab WiFi signals when near WiFi Access Points I can logon to.    That WiFi signal, once connected to the internet provides a connection to my internal  TP-Link AC750 WiFi Access Point via Ethernet cable thru the gig switch.  That access point also runs from 5v, but it uses a micro USB cable for power.   I power that from one of these 12v to 5v power micro usb output

My DVR (Sage-TV) runs on an Intel NUC  in the RV.  I found this 12v NUC power supply

I tied these all together with this Fuse Box. I also added one of these 3 port 12v power outlet switch box to allow for the Dash-cam and new NUC power supply to connect.    I have one left over to power the NVIDIA Shield Android TV device if I ever find a 12v adapter.   Is appears that no one makes one yet.  And no one makes a decent replacement remote for it either.

In its current form it appears I have reduced the current draw from 6amps to about 2.5amps.   A reduction of about 80 amp hours per day from the always on stuff.  That’s a lot of amps to replace when not connected to shore power!

Other things I want to change out will be the two TV’s.   Until then we will need to run the Inverter only when we use them.  Or maybe look into a couple low wattage individual inverters.   For now we can just turn on the main inverter to sit in front of the boob tube…

 

 

 

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Updating my Solar install to allow Web Portal Access

Having the Bluetooth (BT) connectivity to my solar controllers was to me a necessity so I went with the Victron line of controllers after looking at what was available.   The issue that came up was very short range for the Bluetooth connectivity.  This was due to mounting them inside the electronics bay, a metal compartment at the rear of the bus!  That all aluminum bay is acting as a Faraday cage which made the connection from a phone or tablet a very short range affair.   Basically I can only connect to it from the RV’s bedroom located right above that bay.  I found that I could also add a Victron Bluetooth Dongle to one of the charge controllers and mount that up inside a bedroom cabinet allowing my phone to access it from the front seat of the coach.  That was nice but now that we have two controllers and the Victron Connect App cannot view both controller screens at the same time.  The App allows only one connection at a time.  That’s very limiting in my opinion when you have two controllers charging one set of batteries.

I had read about the Victron VRM portal that allowed a couple of their accessory devices, the Venus GX or the Victron Color Control GX to upload the solar data from multiple devices like controllers, battery monitors and many other devices Victron Energy produces to a website that you can access from anywhere with an internet connection.

I looked at buying one of those devices but they are pretty costly and didn’t feel the need to spend that kind of money just for the convenience.  So I starting looking around to see if there was another way to do the same thing.

Turns out there is.  Those devices firmware (actually their OS) is in the public domain. (GNU) so I looked around and found to find a device someone has ported it to.  I found it ported to Raspberry Pi (RPI).   Currently they are $38 so I pulled the trigger and ordered one to see if I could make this work for me.

I had a few old 2 GB microSD card (had a bunch of them from over the years laying around)  So I downloaded the Venus OS from a repository on the web.  I then burned it to a microSD card and once the RPI arrived I pushed it into the slot on the underside of the little board (RPI) and then plugged in a micro USB adapters power cord into the power port and an Ethernet cable into its port and powered it up.

Bamm, it booted up and finished with the Victron Logo on the screen and stopped at the command prompt.  I typed in ifconfig hit enter and it showed me the IP address it had received from my home networks router.   I walked back to my desk and put that address into my web browser and connected to the device.   (It was a bit more complicated for me because at first I downloaded a version of the OS that didn’t support that new RPI device.  v2.30 or above is needed)

That is the required version to run on the B+ device (newest device available when I did this, early 2019) is here in the development folder:   https://updates.victronenergy.com/feeds/venus/develop/images/raspberrypi2/   Those files change often so by the time you read this the working version may have been release to production and be here: https://updates.victronenergy.com/feeds/venus/release/images/raspberrypi2/ in the Released area.

I also had to get a couple USB to VE Direct cables that connect from the RPI’s USB ports directly to the Victron Controllers.   I used a phone power supply i had laying around to power it until I could get a power supply to hard wire into the bay.     Hard wired 12v to 5v power supply

In order to burn the image I downloaded I needed a minimum of a 2 GB microSD card.  If you don’t have any lying around this link will give you two cards for very little money.  SanDisk 32GB MicroSD HC Ultra Uhs-1 Memory Card, Class 10   2 GB cards might be found on EBAY.  But these new 32 GB ones are extremely cheap.

First thing I had to do to the card is format it, I used SD Card Formatter, the  newest one from there. I always scan new downloads with all my virus and malware scanners prior to running and unzipping them to my laptop.  After a  successful card format I used this free tool to burn the downloaded VenusOS image to that card.  Win 32 Disk Imager.   In all, I have $109 into the install now that its done.  1/3rd the cost of a Venus GX and 1/5th the cost of a Color Control GX device.   There may be a way to use Bluetooth to connect to the controllers negating the need for the special USB cables but I am not sure how to do that yet.  Maybe someone else can try and let me know.   We were leaving for the 59th Escapade the following week so I took the easy way and bought the two inexpensive cables from Bay Marine here in San Diego.

I was able to look at my charging information while attending seminars at the Escapade in Tucson.   I had setup my device to upload info every 5 minutes, you can lower that to every 1 minute but I only did that while testing it, then I moved it back to every 5 minutes.    Now I want to get my battery monitor talking to it before we head for Alaska this summer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Boondocking in Quartzsite Solar Notes

It’s the middle of January 2019, the sun is low on the horizon and we are dry camping about 10 miles north of Quartzsite, AZ on BLM land off Plumosa Rd.  We camped with quite a few others, hooking up with David Botts’ group.   Tuesday, the afternoon we arrived, was pouring down rain and the dips on Highway 95 were running rivers of muddy water.  When we saw that, I  knew we would be in for some fun pulling out into the muddy desert, and suspected the two washes we had to cross would be flowing pretty good.  You always have to wonder how deep they will be when they are full of water.   They weren’t too bad, but the next day I must admit, I had never seen the coach so dirty.   The skies cleared within a couple hours of us getting there and deploying the slides, carpet and chairs. 

The following morning turned out to be a gorgeous day, and amazingly each day afterward was very nice too.   Warm and sunny till we headed back to San Diego. 

On our first full day here, the panels put out a respectable 160 amp hours of power,  2.15KW.  Pretty phenomenal for 640W of panels lying flat on the roof of our RV in mid-January.   But as it turns out, only about 80 amp hours made it back into the batteries, and the other 80 or so amp hours produced were consumed real-time by the loads running in the coach during those 9+ hours of daylight.   We did get the batteries juiced back up to 87% SOC, so that was pretty decent, although not what I was looking for.    So It was time to set up the solar suitcase I built last spring to provide those extra 8 amps every hour the coach consumed during those 9+ hours.  Hopefully that will allow all the power being generated by the roof panels to go into the batteries. 

After building that solar suitcase last spring, I returned the small 15 amp controller and purchased a larger 50 amp model that would handle the load from 640 watts of panels.  Fast forward to now and I did not have a controller to use with those 200 watts of panels.   They run at a different voltage from the roof panels, precluding me from hooking them into that controller, meaning I had to go out and buy one before I could hook them up.   So that afternoon,  Friday, I drove around Quartzsite looking for a 15 amp controller that could handle the 44 volts my suitcase was wired to produce.   Discount Solar had nothing to work with that voltage, and Bill’s Solar had something they said would work for about $300.  I decided to wait till the show that was to start the next morning to search for a solution there. 

We hit the big show tent early Saturday morning, trying to get in and out prior to the crowds.   Parking there can be a real pain, but someone was pulling out of a spot as we were about to pass them, and we pulled right into that spot!  We wandered all around the tent and spotted a booth from http://www.offthegridrvs.com which had a  Victron SmartSolar 75/15 controller on their table, and the cost was within a buck of what they cost on Amazon.   I bought that one.  And while I was paying for it, Chris’s girlfriend’s parents greeted us and we snapped this picture!!

Afterward we headed back to the coach to install it.  Turns out I didn’t have enough wire with me to complete the install, so I had to head back in to Quartzsite to a hardware store I had noticed on the way back to the coach that afternoon,  picked up a couple lengths of 10 gauge red-and-black wire.   

That allowed me to complete a temporary setup at around 4pm Saturday afternoon, a couple hours prior to sunset.   I could see that it would really help the situation tomorrow, our last full day prior to heading back to San Diego.   

Saturday night was the potluck dinner, and the band showed up before 7pm and started a few-hour gig.  They were fabulous as they had been last year.  The band is Notes from Neptune,.  They play the clubs in Phoenix. 

Sunday, our last day in the desert, was hazy with high clouds most of the day, lowering the amount of solar irradiation.  Thankfully the suitcase helped by adding another 5-8 amps of power all day long.   One note about using a suitcase is you need to remember to reposition them about every couple hours to point toward the sun as it moves across the sky.  It makes a fairly large difference in watt output each time you move it.  

Now we will need to wait till our dry camping adventure in Tucson during March to test again.  Should be a lot more solar power available by then. 

We saw this little fireplace while we were there.  It’s a wood burner and had a small adjustable blower fan in the orange box on the side to adjust the amount of heat being produced.   It was kind of clever.    This other device was hooked to David’s Komodo Joe cooker.   It was a temperature and WiFi enabled air blower that will keep the temperature you program for cooking in your KJ.  David was using it to smoke some ribs at right around 200 degrees.   Now that’s some slow cooking  🙂  

It’s now the middle of February and I finished the permanent controller installation for the suitcase this week.  

 

 

 

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The General Patton Museum

We took a bus about an hour east from the Indio CA rally facility to the Patton Museum. I was surprised it was right off the 10 freeway. Turns out it is on the original spot of Camp Young, one of many camps spread out over thousands of square miles of California, Arizona and Nevada desert. The first thing you saw as you walked in was a huge terrain map of all the camps. Kind of helped give you a perspective of just how large an area they used for training. Turns out the the furthest east encampment was about 20 miles east of where we would be camping next week. And we would be camping over 2 hours drive from here at 75 MPH freeway speeds. That must have been one hell of a drive back then on dirt roads.

Anyway,  the museum was much nicer than I expected.  The really put in a lot of work to make it a nice place.   Lots of tanks to look at and some with cutaways, others with turrets removed and stairs allowing easy from the top.   They even had a Sherman tank and it had a lot of 50 cal holes in it.  No wonder why they were called Ronson’s by the Gerrys.   

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The Indio FMCA Rally

We signed up for the FMCA rally at the Riverside County Fairgrounds for early January 2019. We loaded the coach and set out for Indio, CA. After checking in, we were lead to a large lot of dried grass and parked next to many other coaches already there. Kind of surprising they parked motor homes on that grass as newer diesels have an exhaust system that can get extremely hot during regen process and catch that dried grass on fire. Luckily we didn’t see any smoke. 🙂

After deploying the slides, I got out the carpet and started screwing it down where I found my first goats head sticker in my knee. Those things are nasty, very hard burr like things. Turns out they were everywhere.  Poor Dusty, he found lots of them over the course of our stay. The first morning after getting there I was scheduled to take a bus trip to the Patton Museum which is about an hour east of the Rally. I’ll put that into another post.

After getting back from the excursion that afternoon, I poked my head into one of the new coaches lined up for sale near the drop-off spot. I walked thru a new Allegro Bus. It was really beautiful inside; and as I walked into the back bathroom and stepped into the shower to see how much room was in there, I realized I hadn’t hit my head when stepping into the bathroom, which I did on all the prior coaches with rear bathrooms. The floor was level from front to back. How novel. But I was curious how they did that, so I asked the salesperson who was sitting up front. To my surprise, Tiffin had raised the height of the coach to around 13’4″ from 12’7″. And it also appeared to me they lowered the engine a bit. That change allowed them to make the floor level front to back and also added about 5″ to the height of the basement. Impressive. Except when I was thinking back to a couple encounters with very low branches on our travels back east the prior summer, driving this coach would have given me nightmares of poking holes in the roof or tearing off an air conditioner or two.

The next day the seminars started. They were very similar to what I experienced in Coos Bay last summer. Most of the seminars were just sales pitches for something the person was selling in a booth inside the vendor tents. I am seeing a pattern with FMCA rally’s, which I will need to think about prior to setting up another one in the future.

There were two seminars that didn’t follow that pattern. One was on our coach’s 120v electrical systems and the other on Onan Generators. Both of them were excellent and I learned things I hadn’t known previously in each. Well worth coming over to the desert. In one of the prior seminars I had learned that (according to the speaker) if you set your local TV Satellite channels to Los Angeles, they will follow you all over the country without paying extra for their Distant Network Services I tried that in Quartzsite and it worked, but that wasn’t the best test of it as we were only about 250 miles east of downtown LA. The real test will be when we are in Tucson this March. It’s closer to 500 miles from LA. If they work there, then the speaker was probably correct.

While at the rally we met up with Scott and Tami for a few of the seminars and went out for Mexican one evening to the El Mexicali Restaurant. The restaurant was next to the RR tracks, and when the trains went by, it felt like they were inside with you. The food was excellent (my opinion), the place was packed, and about 1/2 way thru dinner a musician with a harp, of all things, came in and played for the crowd. I think the last time I was around someone playing a harp was at the Cat in the Hat show at the Lowes Resort on the Silver Strand when Chris was very young. Personally, a harp is much nicer than the strolling Mariachi’s at other Mexican places. Especially when they stand right next to you and play.

When the rally was over, we drove only about a mile to Indian Waters RV resort for a couple nights prior to driving the couple hours to Quartzsite on Tuesday. We were able to dump the tanks and fill up the fresh water tank before our next week of dry camping off Plumosa Road’s BLM dispersed camp sites.

On a rainy Monday afternoon we got together with Kathy’s cousin Kay and her family for a wonderful lunch in Palm Desert!

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First Boondocking experiences after installing Solar on the RV

Let the testing begin!    Our first camping trip after I installed 640 watts of flexible Renogy solar panels and a Victron 100/50 charge controller was at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta campground October 3rd till the 14th.     We had signed up for an Escapee’s HOP (Head Out Program)  late last year when I couldn’t find more than a couple days in a row of available reservations.  Turns out they open the Balloon Fiesta Camping reservations up about a week after the last one ends so I was a couple months late to the party.  Luckily I found the ad for the HOP and they had a few openings.  I reserved a spot right then.

Fast forward ten months and we were camping there with our barely tested new solar panels charging our house batteries.    First thing I noticed was around noon the first full day there, they stopped charging the battery.  I checked the side compartment with the charge controller and I saw that one of the breakers on the battery side of the controller had tripped.  The devices I bought were supposed to be 50 amp breakers,  but from what I could tell, it tripped around 30 amps.  Not a good sign.  I clicked it back on and we started charging again.  

I started researching breakers and determined that I probably should have bought 60 amp breakers for that part of the circuit and better quality ones.   So I started calling local distributors, but none had them in stock, so I gave up for a bit.  

Next day it happened again, the same breaker tripped.  I could see this was going to be a chronic problem unless I replaced it.  Again I started looking online for a replacement and at the same time wondered where I could have it delivered.   After all, I was in a sea of RV’s.  No way for UPS to find us. 

A few  days went by while I called just about every electronic and electrical supply house within 90 miles of Albuquerque.    I also kept googling.  And then unexpectedly about 30 pages of results later, I found an ad for a 60amp breaker at an unlikely place called Sportsman’s Warehouse.   I called their local store, and to my surprise, they had a bunch in stock!   That afternoon I drove over and bought one immediately.   Turns out they were in the fishing section of the store for trolling motors, MinnKota MKR-19 Circuit Breaker 60A.   I replaced the faulty breaker that afternoon.  

Of course, once that was in place, the next day the breaker I had previously installed on the negative side of the circuit tripped.  I had only put that breaker on there as a switch so I could turn off both the negative and positive sides of the circuit.  Humbug!  So I went back to the store and bought a second one and installed that on the negative side of the circuit.   The issue with these particular breakers for me was no button to trip them manually, which is one of the main reasons I bought the problematic ones.  They had a button to press to trip them, so in effect they were also a switch.   I had seen other solar install pictures online where those same cheap breakers were used for solar hookups, so I figured they would work.   Geez,  was that a wrong assumption.

By now we are just a couple days from the end of the fiesta, so I decided to shop for one online that had the manual trip lever to install prior to us leaving for our next trip.   I eventually pulled the trigger on the Bussmann CB185-60 breaker and had it shipped to the house once we arrived back home.   I will be leaving the MinnKota on the other side of the circuit till I can find a suitable surface mount switch.

Now that I was no longer tripping breakers, I could really see what the panels were capable of.   One of the days I happened to look at the console and see over 540 watts of power being generated and almost 40 amps going to the batteries.  That was pretty amazing because the panels are flat mounted on the RV roof and the sun was getting low in the sky as it’s the middle of October.    Solar panels should be angled toward the sun for optimum production, but I decided early on in my research that I wasn’t climbing up on the roof to tilt them up and put them down each time we moved.   Once I committed to flexible panels that was fairly moot anyway.

While we were there, I experimented using the generator in the morning to charge the batteries up to around 80% SOC (state of charge), which is around the point the onboard charger drops out of bulk charging mode.  At that point I shut the generator down to let the solar panels attempt to top the batteries off during the rest of the sunny day.  Only using the generator while the charger is in bulk mode should be the most efficient use of the diesel generator.   Once the charging switches from bulk into the absorb charging mode, the charge amperage drops fairly quickly.  Even when the charger is only pushing 10 amps into the batteries, the generator seems to be under the same load as when it’s charging them at 125 amps in bulk.

I am now starting to more fully understand the difficulty of fully charging our batteries via solar . Adding more panels will help, but in reality I probably can’t fit enough panels on the roof of my RV to get it done in the middle of winter. 

The chemistry of batteries prevent them accepting the full amperage of the panels once they get above 80% charged state where the controller shifts into absorption mode.   More panels will get you to 80% quicker, but then the battery chemistry kicks in and effectively starts pushing back and the controller starts dropping the amperage going to them.  So if you calculated you could push 40 amps for 4-6 hours of the day (240 AH) and less AH before and after those hours, then in theory I figured we can push all those AH into the batteries during those six hours,  but that’s not reality.  As soon as those batteries hit around 80% SOC, the amount of charge accepted quickly drops.  So if your batteries are depleted below 80% SOC,  say at 60% SOC, you can really push in those amps for a while; but when they hit that 80% threshold, the amps  drop, and they drop in an almost linear line down to just a few amps and then hit float charging.

My experiment running the generator in the morning was my charge controller switched from bulk charging to float charging way too quickly, almost no time was spent in the absorb phase of charging from the panels, which should be the bread and butter of solar.   I started to search for an answer to that, and what I found out so far was the amount of time the charge controller stays in absorb is determined by the voltage the charge controller sees when it wakes up due to first sunlight in the morning.  The higher the voltage it sees when it wakes up, the shorter the time it stays in the absorb phase; and the generator made the controller see much higher voltage when it woke up, so the absorption time was cut to almost nothing.  

But that was learned a bit too late in the game, so this will continue when we dry camp in Quartzsite the middle of January.

 

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Petroglyph National Monument

During our stay we ventured out to find the Petroglyph’s which were almost in Albuquerque itself.   Its spread out over a large area so we hit the visitor center first and checked out the map.  After looking at all the sites in the area we chose the one they allowed dogs on the trails which was quite a few miles north of the visitor center.  We drove  thru lots of neighborhoods getting there.    When we finally got there we were kind of surprised to see the trailhead was in a housing development and right behind a small store.   We parked and headed out on the trail.  Luckily for us it was nice and cool for the uphill hike.   There was no shade anywhere in sight,  I bet its blazing here in the summer months.   I was amazed how many drawings were on the rocks, there were hundreds,  probably thousands of them.   It made me wonder if the parents of the people doing this to the rocks were unhappy akin to the parents of today’s taggers?

This was a nice walk thru the desert just west of downtown Albuquerque.   We finished the loop and then headed back to the car.