April 6th 2004
The past couple of days have been pretty relaxed.
Erika's birthday was yesterday. We got her some great gifts
that she got to open first thing in the morning and we delivered
cupcakes to her whole class. She got gifts in the mail from my
parents in the evening and seemed to have a great day. The weather
was still a little "iffy", so we decided to put off having a
party with her friends until later in the month - then Erika and Emily
will have their birthday parties together since they are only a couple
of weeks apart anyway.
The weather today is hot and sunny. We had been only generating
about 100 or so amp-hours over the course of the day, but yesterday and
today we're getting back to normal (around 300). We've generated
over 6KWH of power since we arrived here in Elfrida. That does not
count the power generated from the wind generator. I would guess
that we produce around 500 amp-hours a day with the wind that comes up
in the early morning and again in the afternoon.
I've been learning a lot about living in the bus full time.
There have been a few disappointments like the washing machine that will
not work on inverted power (even though we have more than enough battery
capacity) and new toilet that has already failed and constantly fills
the black water tank if anyone forgets to pull up on the flush
handle. Other than that, the work we did to get the bus ready has
paid off and it is very comfortable to spend time in.
There are a few things that I hadn't thought about that have turned
out to be a bit of a nuisance. The biggest problem we face here in
the desert is the dust. It's everywhere and gets into everything
no matter how hard you try to keep things clean. It settles on
everything, so we have to remember to close the laptop and take the
paper out of the printer tray. You can use a wet rag to wipe
everything down and remove the dust and later the same day everything
will be covered with it again. The other problem with the dust is
that when it rains, the ground outside turns into something like wet
cement. It clings to everything and gets tracked all over the
bus. Another nuisance is the flying bugs (mostly gnat sized) that
seem to like to hang out anywhere there is shade, including the interior
of the bus. The only effective way I have found to get rid of them
is to put up fly paper strips. That has helped to remove them in
the evenings so we can all sleep soundly.
We've found the best method of dealing with our garbage is to take it
back to the store when we go shopping. We put our non-burnable
garbage into the plastic shopping bags that the groceries came in and
when we get to the store to do our shopping we drop them into the
garbage cans outside the store. We usually only have 1 or 2 bags
to get rid of each trip, so it has worked out well for us so far.
I don't know what we would have done without water. We are
lucky to have a seemingly endless supply from our friend Robbyns
well. She has also provided us with an electrical cord to plug our
washing machine into so we don't have to run into town every few days to
do laundry. Becky is thinking about selling the one we have now
and getting one that does not have a computer controlled
interface. It appears that the computer in the washer we have now
can't handle the modified sine wave that our inverter puts out and will
not accept any programming correctly. It is not that we can't put
out enough power (we tested that theory already) it seems to have to do
with the quality of the power coming from the inverter. We ran
into the same problem with a mini coffee maker we had that no longer
works at all (on any power source) because we tried to run it through
the inverter. The rest of the appliances like the laptop, TV, DVD,
printers, microwave, etc. seem to work fine. Electric fans that
run off the inverter tend to be a bit noisy and buzz to some degree or
another. One of our florescent lights buzzes pretty bad
too... Eventually I'd like to switch over as many of our
appliances as I can to 12V. Our TV is a 12V LCD screen, and we
have a few rechargeable items that could easily be switched over, so I
just need to start building adaptor cords for things.
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We were having a problem staying cool on some of the sunniest days
until we tried out a evaporative cooling fan that Robbyn loaned
us. It made a HUGE difference. With the fan on the lowest
setting we easily drop the temperature in the bus 15 degrees. On
one day we brought the bus interrior from 90 degrees (85 degrees
outside) to a comfortable 76 degrees. It also has the side benefit
of removing a lot of dust from the air and because of the added moisture
the plants and fruit we have out do not tend to dry up as fast as they
were before we started using it. The evaporative cooling fan uses
60-130 Watts of power depending on the power setting. The unit
holds 5.5 gallons of water which lasts us for the whole day. We've
been able to run it all day long (when the sun is out) with the power
off of the solar panels and still charge up the house batteries.
Wal-Mart has the coolers for $235.00 (Home Depot is a bit cheaper at
$205). The unit has a "BONAIRE" label on the
front. We're checking around to see if we can find another unit
for less money, but will most likely end up buying one of these units. |
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That kind of brings things back up to date. I have some work to
do on the wind generator. The wire I ran from the unit is not a
large enough gauge for the length of the wire so we are only getting
about 30-40% of the power we should be getting out of it. I bought
some 6 gauge wire to replace the 10 gauge I used originally. I'd
like to get that done before the wind picks up again this evening.
I also need to seal the refrigerator vent. I ran out of sealant
and we've had to resort to using pans to catch the rain water that was
draining through the vent. |
