Welcome 2022

Let me start by saying; I hope each and every one of you had a wonderful Christmas and that you were able to see in the New Year the way you wanted to.

Peter and I had a lovely Christmas with family, and mum hosted a New Year’s Eve party. I think it’s safe to say, everyone had a terrific time and, like every other person in the world, we enjoyed saying goodbye 2021 and are looking forward to a much better 2022.

Now, I would love to tell you all about our travels, but…we are still stationary at Port Macquarie. Mum had her cast removed on the six-week mark, and even though the break was healing well, she was given a moon boot to wear for an additional six weeks. Let me tell you, she was not happy about that. But at least she could walk around and do more for herself.

The silver lining to our prolonged stay is that we have been able to make some changes to the caravan. Mainly, upgrading our batteries, installing a couple of fans, fixing the arial we ripped off the roof some months ago, (don’t ask me where or when we did that) and insect proofing the van. I’ll hand you over to Peter tell you about the electrical stuff.

Hi, yes it’s me, Peter. So, about the electrical stuff (and other things). It’s been over 18 months since we took delivery and we’ve spent the majority of that time living in the van so we’re getting to know our way around the lifestyle. Generally, the van has proven to be very good but we’re pleased to be addressing these few things:

• The water tank level meters never worked anywhere near well enough. Projecta replaced the PM 200 for us but it still just didn’t work so now we’re getting it replaced with a separate meter, we’ll have to let you know how that works out.
• Night-flying insects love the inside more than the outside and the insect screening just isn’t effective. Talking to others and it seems that this is a very common situation. Jo spent some time looking for their secret entrance and we came up with what we hope will make it a bit more difficult for them.
• The big one is the batteries. Our 200 AHrs of AGM battery was just not enough and we killed them! So now we have 400 AHrs of Lithium Ion, I reckon this will be great.

THE BATTERIES

We had two, 100AH AGMs That seems like an ok spec but here’s the rub: We have a 12/240V fridge that has a rated power demand of 3 Ahrs, that assumes that it only needs to run 20 minutes in the hour… not so. I reckon these fridges probably run for more like 60% of the time if not more (and that’s in winter with the fridge set to 3 of 5) so if you do a bit of basic arithmetic you’ll find that they probably pull 120 plus AHrs in any 24 hour period. Add in a few overcast days and before you know it, your 200 AHrs of AGM are down to less than 50% even without switching on a light. Do that a few times and you have dead AGMs!

So we killed our AGMs! The lack of a current flow meter on the Projecta 200 series management system made it hard to monitor the battery charge/ current drain so we had to guess. To solve this, we had a Caravan Repair workshop install a Projecta BM320 which is a good unit as long as it’s installed properly; unfortunately, that didn’t happen, not everything went through the earth shunt, so a bit of a waste really.

You know there’s a lot in this so I’ll just jump to the take-aways:

THE TAKE-AWAYS

• Budget your compressor fridge to use 120 to 150 AHrs per day.
• AGMs do not like to be flattened, and flattened means being taken down below 50%. That means that 2 x 100 AHrs are at best (and I do mean best) only good for 100 AHrs in a day.
• Solar panels aren’t all the manufacturers say they are and if you relate 100 watts of solar to the current you can draw from your batteries per hour it comes to about 3.5 amps in summer and 2.5 amps in winter. So if you have 300 watts of solar multiply the above hourly usage by 3. Of course this is reduced with every cloud that passes and every layer of dust on your panels.

WHAT BUGS US AT NIGHT

You may recall from an old post (ref it) that we have a lot of problems bug-proofing the van. After a few tests Jo was able to find out exactly where they are getting in. Following the light they hit the fly screen, make their way up into the roller mechanism, then still following the light, into the window frame then into the van from the space between window frame and the wall.

• Getting the blind/screen assembly off the wall is easy but I found that using a lever to prise the assembly away gives more control than just ‘grabbing and reefing’ them off.
• Using a sponge sealing strip around the frame with the sponge a couple of millimetres proud of the frame will seal that gap nicely.
• The biggest gap is between the screen roller and the assembly frame so this needs to be filled with foam also, but you will need to be careful not to create too much pressure against the screen as this will impact on the operation of the screen as it moves up and down.
• Removing the screen roller to fix this sponge means managing the wound up spring inside the screen roller. If you lose control of this spring it will unwind quickly (and noisily) and could cause damage. You need to control the spring not only from unwinding but also from pushing out axially so expect the spring axle to push outwards and brace the end of the spring axle against the framework or you will lose it. In the last photo below you will see that the axle pushes out 50 mm (this is it fully unwound on one that I lost control of). If this happens you just have to guess on how tight to rewind the screen but I would suggest not to over-tighten it.
• I found that using vice-grips gave me better control and I kept hold of the screen while Jo applied the sealing sponge.
• Whether this is successful or not is for another day – but we’re hopeful.

Another little change we’ve made is that we have found some storage cupboards to benefit from extra shelves. I rather like the way this has worked out and it’s really quite simple, so in the photos below I’ll show you what I did.

• 7mm ply for the shelves. Allow 2-3mm clearance each side for easy fitting (and to allow for error). Our cupboards are 460 wide so I cut mine at 458 and that worked out well.
• 18mm ‘L’ moulding braces the front and back of the shelves to stop them bowing under weight and provides a lip to stop things sliding off. I just glued these on to the shelf. I cut these 450mm wide allowing 5mm either side for easy fitting.
• 18mm quad forms the shelf supports. I glued and screwed these. Cut them a little shorter to allow for the ‘L’ brackets. I cut mine . To get them level I used an appropriate height support that I knew was parallel and just sat the shelf support on top of that to get the height – worked out fine.

A COOL IMPROVEMENT

We bought a couple of Sirocco fans. They’re not cheap, over $200.00 each but they’re quiet operating and only draw three to four hundred milliamps at full speed. We had thought to mount these on the ceiling above the foot of the bed. But after looong consideration we bowed to reality – getting power to them would have been difficult and there really is not enough support in the ceiling.

So we mounted them on the sides, this is all pretty good. Power on one side came from the TV 12v power outlet and on the other side we took it down through the corner cabinet and into the battery compartment under the seat.

Just a hint on this. Rather than just connect to the battery I installed a 4-way 12V terminal strip, so in the future we just need to connect to this terminal strip rather than meddle with the battery connections. This is important given that the RedArk BMS would need to be reprogrammed if we were to disconnect the battery.

WHO NEEDS A RADIO ANYWAY?

Well, we do; so we have to replace the one we ripped off under a tree. I reckon it was when we were bush-camped on the Darling River, but who knows?

It’s probably a very simple task to replace the radio aerial but I don’t want to mess with the waterproofing on the roof of the van, so I’m getting it fixed by the professionals. Mind you, not all professionals are… so I’ve done a bit of prep work for them.

I checked with the manufacturer and got them to send me the extraction tool to get the radio out of its’ chassis and took the radio out in preparation. I also plan to ‘suggest’ to them that they use the existing radio aerial lead (after cutting off the broken aerial mount) as a draw wire to pull the new aerial cable through from the top. It really should be quite straight-forward – we’ll see.

Back to me, Jo. So our time in Port is coming to an end, and we are getting very excited about getting back on the road. We have a few more bits and pieces to fix up on Chunky Bum, but in the mean time we will continue to enjoy mum’s company and the beautiful scenery and wildlife of Port Macquarie, even though it has rained most of the time we have been here.

See you out there somewhere

On tow and on the go!