So, these blogs are usually written over a several day stretch, sometimes a week or more period because it seems sometimes like there isn’t that much happening. Then days like today, things happen that make me want to sit down and write a bunch. More on that later.
We’ve finally made it to a decent boondocking spot. We spent much of the last few months moving among Thousand Trails and related parks in Washington and Oregon. When we left (driven out by smoke), we spent a few days at Iron Springs, near Cedar City, UT. It was a fairly new, standard design park – with pretty good WiFi – which is unusual, and some real cool iron sculptures. They are worth driving out and seeing them. Before that, we spent one night at a place on the other side of town that, in our rush, we didn’t get around to researching cell signals, and thus we had to bail. There was none. Well, not none – with my directional antenna I got a full 6 bars, but less than 1kbit per second of data. That’s not even good enough for email. At least the smoke that is here, is a couple of levels better than Cedar City and way better than the Bend area in Oregon. The day we left, ended up being a really long day. On top of being a 7+ hour trip, we had to deal with one of the towed cars not charging. Stopping and running it and letting it charge for 10-15 minutes would get us a couple of hours of tow time, maybe. In the end, we just unhooked and drove it.
We did manage to change the oil in both generators before we left Iron Springs. We are using them out here – along with our Solar. But the smoke out here is still quite noticeable and we don’t get full power from our panels. They DO however help with power and we are glad to have them. On a good day, solar provides the equivalent of two hours of generator time. Other, cloudy days, more like one. Our solar install details are here, here and here.
Oh, where are we? We are parked outside Capital Reef, on a hill, on BLM land and have already made several safari trips into and through this amazing park.
It is dusty here. No grass. We don’t need A/C most of the time – just a couple of hours in the afternoon on sunny days. Most people out here (this is a busy place) are considerate, but just tonight, some guy parked his Class C ACROSS a road. There is an alternate access to that road just past where he is parked, but sometimes I just have to wonder how totally unconscious people manage to drive across this country and stay alive. At least he didn’t park across railroad tracks.
Repairs continue. Today it was a little wooden stable for a granddaughter that had fallen apart. And a cover for my daughter’s diffuser. Before we left the last park, it was a connection in a fresh-water tank overflow. And here it was running a new power line for the towed connector on their RV. The car charged fine while towing for 6 months – then started to fail, then quit. We traced the pin to a wire, to the bundle of splices where it connected into the Ford wiring loom. No power there at all. The wire it was spliced into had an RV manufacturer-installed label: wait for it – “Interior Lights”. It looked like an 18-gauge wire. Black wire with a blue stripe. We checked EVERY fuse we could find in the RV. We looked everywhere we could for a black wire with a blue stripe – nope, none to be found. In the end, we grabbed an inline fuse, a spool of wire, and ran a new connection from the house battery compartment to the tow connector pigtail. The towed car uses an RVI battery to battery charger, so it’s a safe connection. Because the house is Lithium, and the care, of course, lead acid, you shouldn’t really just plug one into the other. The manufacturer, of course, Nexus, was completely useless as a resource.
Then there was installing an electric fireplace in the daughter’s RV – a straightforward job as one can be when you have to work with the tools and supplies that happen to be on the RV.
Next, we need to do some more work on the Kayak tie-downs. What we have is working, just a bit more hassle hooking up than necessary. My daughter had bought “j-hook”s for carrying their kayak. It never really fit well. In the end, we created a couple of carpet-covered boards that the kayak can be slid on from the rear of the car and tied down. Some tweaking of our kayak continues but in general, we really like the roller supports.
Yesterday some of us took a hike (Deb wasn’t feeling well) down the east side of Grand Wash at
Capital reef. It’s cool walking down the narrow canyon with the walls a couple of hundred feet above.
So today? Well for some time I’ve been feeling like the power numbers were a little off. Sometimes the battery monitor didn’t show fully charged with the generator was topping off the batteries – and it was taking a little too long to charge. Things weren’t adding up, but it wasn’t broken so I didn’t pay enough attention to it.
So today, we are fixing lunch. We have the Ninja Grill running and the microwave. Should be ok, with the generator running, right? But the inverter/charger was also charging the batteries. The generator has two 30-amp circuits. The air conditioners were off, but the TV, Apple TV, maybe water
heater, a computer and misc were also on. A circuit breaker on the generator popped off. And the Inverter tried and failed to pick up the load.
Ok, so I had made a mistake, or two. One – our Inverter is a 3k Victron – not the 2K that came with the rig. It has the ability if you limit its power input – to use battery power to make up the difference. But for that to work right, you have to set a limit on how much AC power it can draw. I had left mine to 50 amps because we were hooked up to 50 for so long. The generator breakers are 30-amp.
The two cooking appliances were pulling close to 30 amps by themselves, plus other things when the breaker popped. Yes, we should have been managing our usage better. But when I reset – nothing. I checked the inverter – no lights. I checked power at the infamous DC power panel next to the batteries – and the Inverter power switch was open/failed. As I was taking it apart (which necessitates removing the power in the buss bar from the fuse – I noticed the fuse bolt was NOT TIGHT! I replaced the switch (I had a spare because I still plan on replacing that entire panel). But when the Inverter switch was off – I’d get voltage through the fuse to the switch. When the switch was on – I’d get nothing. Then I realized the buss bar from the fuse to the inverter switch had been hot. Again. Same problem we encountered on the beach at S. Padre island that caused me to scrounge parts at a West Marine to bypass the fuse.
The inverter switch showed the same melted plastic around the input bolt and the buss bar show signs of having been hot. While the switch specs say – up to 300 amps continuous and up to 500 intermittent – should be ok for 3000 watts for our normal use, it has turned out to be insufficient for a 3k inverter. The specs for the inverter say to use a 400 amp fuse. The specs also say that continuous output is 3k – but can burst up to 6000. That would be 460 amps – which is still under the switch’s specification. The buss bar however showed signs of being hot – insulation was bubbled. The nut holding the bar to the fuse was barely hand tight, so it seems to me that again, the fuse had again gotten too hot. I couldn’t remove the fuse – it seemed glued (melted) to the underlying buss bar. The way this is constructed – a bolt has a plastic washer that insulates it from the underlying buss bar. The fuse is slipped over the bolt. Then the top buss bar that passes current to the switch goes on, then a nut that holds it all together. Power passes bar to fuse to bar via flat surfaces held together only with a 7/16 nut and tiny bolt. Steel bolt. Aluminum bars. Who knows what the fuse it made out of internally – externally, structurely, it’s a form of plastic, with probably copper parts. I suspect over time thermal changes work it loose. The higher currents associated with Lithium batteries and 3k instead of 2k inverter exacerbate problems built into inferior quality equipment.
When we were at Red Bay and had them replace the entire panel – I had them leave the cable and fuse we had created as a bypass. They just heavily insulated the end of the cable and left it. So, I again, bypassed the failing fuse and used the makeshift cable+fuse to provide power to the new inverter switch.
It’s scary when things break in the middle of the desert, an hour or more from any decent hardware store. Even scarier when these parts are simply not available in most hardware or even RV parts stores.
We did get some rain today – just enough to raise the humidity a tiny bit and cool things off, but ten minutes later, there was no evidence of rain at all, except the dark clouds receding to the east.
And a few days later….. It started to get pretty cold up there on top of Capital Reef. So we headed south again – to northern Arizona. We had reservations at a Thousand Trails campground outside of Cottonwood, AZ. They had nice large 50 amp sites up on top of the hill and not so nice cramped, 30 amp sites down the hill. Cell service was only marginal down the hill. We had planned to spend lots of time in this park, but despite a number of the 50-amp sites being empty, none were available to us. Generally, we’ve had good experiences with Thousand Trails, but this is the second time we’ve left a TT park early because of our experience there.
We found a nice, new park just a mile away with an attractive monthly rate and plan to be here for a month or two. Cell is great and we hear good WiFi is on its way. A Thousand Trails membership is a significant investment – and we need to be able to use them a lot to make it pay. But here at least, we are better off paying a monthly rate than staying in a substandard TT park.
More repairs: The driver’s side mirror was loose at its base. What a nightmare. It is held in by four bolts (actually three bolts with nuts inside and one sheet metal screw). One bolt/nut was buried under 6 inches of spray foam in the engine compartment. Another is hidden somewhere in the dash, also in the engine compartment. A third is inside, under the dash – all of those have a loose NUT on the inside. A fourth self-drilling screw also was used – I never found just where it entered the coach on the inside. Did I mention – that spray foam was full of wiring, so it had to be removed very carefully. Hours later, the mirror was fully tightened down and resealed. I’m sure the design engineers at Tiffin didn’t say “Just bury that entire corner in the engine compartment with spray foam”. Nor did they think about how hard it would actually be to ever replace or even just tighten the mirror. Just an inch or so different position and a little more care running wires and foaming would have made the job so much easier.
Kayak’s again – we’ve had several more outings and we are all getting better and launching and paddling We’ve taken the dogs with us. Murphy is still a bit anxious but getting better We also realized that putting our kayak on the truck with just four mounting points was starting to push the bottom of the kayak in – so we created two carpet covered rails to hold the kayak just like we made for the k
And forest fires seem to follow us. This one at least was about 50 miles away from us. In this photo – it’s still 0% contained.
We plan to head to Texas at the end of this month (Oct-2020).
Mike