Lots done and I'm exhausted

There are only so many sunny days in the Willamette Valley, so when we heard that Saturday was going to be sunny we kicked everything into high gear. In order to put the panels on the trailer, we needed some mounting brackets. I went on a search for pre-manufactured brackets and quickly found that it was going to cost us a minimum of $80 for all the brackets that we needed to install the panels. With that amount in mind, we went on a hunt for materials to make our own. I bought 4' of aluminum z stock 3/4" wide by 1/8" thick. The piece of aluminum cost us approximately $11. And it took us about 20 minutes or so to cut 16 brackets.

Once we had the brackets cut, it took us quite a bit longer to drill all the holes needed to secure the brackets to the panels and roof. I eyeballed the smaller holes that would eventually become the attachment to the roof. The holes that we drilled to attach to the solar panels we manufactured a jig for. Becky used a file to clean up all the rough edges and make the brackets look more refined. I think it took us a little over 3 hours to drill all the holes, countersink, and clean up the rough edges. We did all that in the carport while it was raining.

After we had the brackets manufactured, Becky attached them to the solar panels so that they would be ready to go Saturday morning. The brackets were roughly 2" long and about 1" high. That will give us enough clearance to let the cables run underneath the panels to the junction box.

We had beautiful blue skies this morning. We did a bit of wiring on the panels to get them ready to go on the roof. We moved the cardboard boxes that the panels came in to the roof and test fitted them in place of the panels. The location that we picked was perfect. It turns out the the center of the panels lined up perfectly with a cabinet on the inside of the trailer that also happened to be our favorite position for the charge controller directly above the batteries. After a couple of minutes of positioning the junction box I decided on a location and held my breath while I drilled a hole straight through the roof and into the cabinet inside. I used a small but long bit so that we could see where it popped out inside the trailer before we drilled it out to full size. We were lucky and didn't hit any ceiling cross members, or electrical. Becky worked inside the trailer while I worked outside the trailer and fed me the wiring I needed for the junction box.

It took me a lot longer than I thought it was going to to wire the main lines from the trailer into the junction box. The 6 gauge cable gave me a lot of trouble, but eventually I managed to get it wired in. The junction box was attached to the roof with 3m adhesive tape. As you can see, we had to clean a circle for the 3m tape to adhere to. The plan was to drill as few holes as possible through the roof. I installed some water tight compression fittings so that when I had the panels on the roof I could run the wires straight into the junction box.

Once we had the junction box in place, we moved all the panels from the living room to the roof. Becky handed the panels one at a time up, and since they were pre-wired I could basically set them up where they needed to go. Everything lined up perfectly. It took me another 15-20 minutes to center them on the trailer to make sure they would look pretty. After that, there was a lot of work scrubbing the spots where the brackets attached to the roof, marking them, putting down adhesive, then screwing the panel brackets down with self drilling sheet metal screws.

It took about 2 hours to get all the brackets mounted to the roof. I think I climbed up and down the ladder at least 30 times, and moved it from one side to the other of the trailer at least 10 times. My legs are aching. The whole time that we were working on the panels, the girls were riding their bikes back and forth in our little loop. Half the time Emily was running instead of riding. Not sure why... Becky did a little jig once the panels were attached to the roof, I think that she was relieved to see the panels finally being put to use instead of taking up space in the living room. Considering that this is probably the only sunny day we will have in weeks, I could see why Becky would be so damn happy to see the panels completed.

I figured that since we were on a roll, I would tackle a few other projects that needed to happen outside the trailer while the sun was still shining.

The first project was to fix the fan in the bathroom. We weren't sure why the fan wasn't running so we had to take the thing apart, test it, and figure out what was wrong with it. It only took a few minutes to find out that whoever tried to "fix" it before didn't know a damn thing about electricity. They had butted two ends of a broken wire together with electrical tape hoping to solve the problem. I stripped the wires and joined them together appropriately, and VIOLA! everything worked fine again. Since we are all going to be living in a small space together, I figured it was really important to have a working fan above the toilet.

The next big project was to fix the TV antenna. Over the last 20 years the cable between the roof and the top of our power antenna have become so brittle that it was broken off and rusted through. I spent about an hour lubricating all the fittings, pulling all the coroded cable, and re-installing new cable. We hooked up our LCD TV to the power antenna and watched an hour or so of really nice clear TV on our newly recovered antenna.

The final project for the day while the sun was still shining was to lower the 5th wheel hitch on the trailer a notch. As it was, while the trailer was hooked up to the truck, the front of the trailer was sitting a bit low (2-3"). You can see by the picture the nice rust line where the trailer hitch used to sit. I dropped the hitch an additional inch so that when we are at an RV park we don't have to drop the trailer and jack it up to sleep level.