Four days left

It's hard to believe that it's so soon, but we only have 4 days left to finish up everything before we hit the road...

It's been a very hard week. Both physically and emotionally... I'd rather not get into the funk part of this journey for now. Rest assured that we're all healthy and relatively happy. It's just a lot of work fitting a business, 4 people and a dog into a space only 28 feet long... Today was no exception, so I'm going to focus on what got done today and not what was difficult about it.

I received my truck tool box locks today. I bought a cross bed tool box a couple of weeks ago for the truck. I want to take some of my tools with me in case we run into problems with the truck or trailer. I got an aluminum diamond plate box for pretty cheap. It was missing one of the locks and the guy didn't have the key for the other one either. It took me 3 days to find a number for the manufacturer and after some negotiation with them, they mailed me the latches (keyed the same on both sides). The latches appear to be stainless steel. I bought some stainless security bolts and lock nuts and installed the latches. Of course I had to buy the security bit too, so the entire project has cost me about $120.00. It was sleeting/hailing most of the time while I was working of course. Tomorrow I will sort through the tools and decide what items I can live without... Then we'll sell off/give away the rest.

The second big item done today was the purchase of larger propane tanks. As it is we're burning through propane at an alarming rate. It's the cold weather which makes the furnace in the trailer run quite a bit. We bought some larger tanks to extend our time a bit. We're shooting for 1 week disconnected from everything before we have to "dock" for power, water and propane. I think the new tanks will help us accomplish that...

Selling everything

So much has hapened in the last few days. We had a huge moving sale on Saturday. It's just about imposible for me to go back and recount it all. Bottom line is that we got rid of about 65-70% of all of the stuff that we still had to sell. Some of the leftovers will go to charity organizations that we like and the rest we'll put on-line again to try to thin them all out.

We're finally 100% connected to the solar panels. Up until this moring, the panels had been charging and maintaining the bank of Trojan batteries. Now both banks of batteries are connected and the solar panels are charging everything. We're still connected to the house because my new HP laptop has an odd voltage that I can't find an adaptor for... Unless I can find one, we'll have to get an inverter to power it. Inverters eat up power as do the power supplies that convert the inverted power back to DC. Not good when our power use is very tight with all of the cloud cover... We'll have to make a few hard decisions in the next few days.

Other than that, priorities have switched over to getting rid of everything that is left in the apaprtment. That's taking a lot of energy and keeping us busy...

We have POWER!

We received a package in the mail today. We didn't write anything about it before, but - the shipping company lost our original shipment of a charge controller and battery temperature sensor. So, the company we ordered it from overnighted one to us Friday - which showed up today. With the charge controller finally here, we were able to make use of those beautiful panels installed on our roof.

We had finished up all the exterior wiring the last sunny day. We still had a lot of interior wiring to finish. We made a run to Jerry's and picked up some 6 gauge wire to finish up the wiring inside between the charge controller and the battery bank. My goal with this project was to keep the wiring and related mess out of sight and have as little impact on the trailer as possible. That meant I had to do some creative wire routing to get from where the power came in to the trailer from the panels to the battery bank and then tied into the wiring of the trailer.

Once we had the wires run to and from where they needed to go, I took some time to put in some circuit breakers. I put a 30 amp breaker between the batteries and the charge controller. And I put a 50 amp breaker between the bank of trojans and the bank of RV batteries. We didn't actually wire the RV batteries to the trojans today because I'd like to install a bank selection switch between them so I don't have to put them all together in one bank.

The final step was connecting the batteries to the charge controller. And then, connecting the solar panels to the charge controller. As soon as the panels were connected, Becky climbed up on the roof and pulled the cardboard covers off the panels. We immediately started to see a charge despite the fact that it was overcast, raining, and after 5pm! Once the panels were exposed, I had Becky take a picture of the beautiful panels.

There is still a little work to do to secure the wiring. The new charge controller looks great, and all the wiring is hidden inside closets. It's really nice working with the trailer where everything is easy to access and already in place. It's a big change from the bus, where we had to construct everything from scratch. Picture to the right shows the new charge controller (little black box). Tomorrow if the weather is not too bad, we will work on connecting the two battery banks together and do an "official" off the grid day to see how it goes.

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.

Four batteries become one

Today was pretty productive. We managed to get our passport applications submitted and did some more work on the solar installation on the trailer.

At some point in the near future I plan to do a write up on the entire solar install... For now, a short description of what we are doing each day will have to suffice. We only have a few weeks left before we have to be on the road, so lots of time it spent selling off things that we're not planning to take with us in the trailer.

Becky and I worked on getting the new 6V batteries all wired together to make a single 12V battery bank. I picked up some 1/0 wire at the local welding shop. Then we picked up the cable ends at the local hardware store. It took about an hour or so to solder the ends on four 6 inch sections of wire. Most of the time was spent prepping the wire and setting up an area to do the work. It was pouring down rain, so we had to make a work area in the carport. Not the best place to work, but we managed to get the four cables soldered.

Once the cables were done, I hooked them all up to the batteries. I started off by wiring 2 pairs of batteries in series making 12V batteries out of them. Then I connected the two 12V pairs parallel to make a larger 12V battery.

We also did a bit of soldering on the smaller wires that will come down from the panels to the charge controller and then the batteries.

There was a lot of thought that had to go into how to hook up the existing electrical from the trailer to the new battery bank. This evening, we found a way to wire the battery banks together.

More tomorrow if the weather is a bit more cooperative...

Some work again today

We managed to get a few more things done today. This morning the trailer went in to have the axles serviced and brakes adjusted. I also wanted them to take a look at the way the axles were mounted because something didn't look right to me. The way the axles were mounted, the arch of the axle was up and the tires seemed to be riding a bit on the inside edges instead of flat. That concerned me because the trailer is unloaded and once everything is moved inside, the arch of the axle would only increase and the tires would wear even more on the inside edge.

It turns out that I was right. Someone had flipped the axles over in the process of doing a spring over axle conversion to raise the trailer off the ground. Probably to make it high enough to work with their lifted truck... The axles could not be flipped back over without lowering the trailer again or welding a cradle bracket on to the axle. After some thought, Becky and I decided to go ahead and have the bracket welded on so that the trailer could continue to be raised and give us extra clearance. The cost for the welding and axle flip was $180.00. That was in addition to the $150.00 we paid to have the bearings re-packed and the brakes adjusted. Good news is that as of tonight, it's all done. Brakes looked good and all of the bearings have been checked, greased and re-packed. The trailer is good to roll for another year at least.

While the trailer was being worked on we took the truck to a transmission specialist. He took the truck for a drive and couldn't find anything wrong with the transmission at all, so we're almost done with all of the truck repairs. Last item on the list is to replace the damaged muffler.

I also took the truck in this evening to get the final adjustments done on the alignment. They adjusted the steering wheel and double checked that everything was in spec from last week. All checked out OK and the steering wheel is now straight.

We need more power!

We went through our power needs today. It took us about 1/2 hour or so to write down the power needs for our electrical and convert the results to an amp hour number. We're going to have to make some sacrifices....

Our total power requirements for our family of 4 came out to roughly 120 amp hours per day. We want to have enough power coming in to cover all of our needs and have a bit of a buffer so that if we don't get power for a 2-3 days we don't run the batteries flat.

There are 2 parts to powering our new off the grid lifestyle. The first is getting the power and the second is storing it so we can use it whenever we need it instead of only when it's available.

Today we covered the storage part and bought 880 amp hours (at 6V) of battery storage to add to our roughly 300 amp hours (at 12V) that we already have installed. We'll only use the 300 AH bank in an emergency. We can use roughly 50% of the capacity of the batteries without damaging them, so our effective amp hour bank is about 220 amp hours (440 at 6V, but 220 at 12V). That gives us about 2 days power without any power coming in.

We also made a solar panel and charge controller purchase today. Nobody in our area had anything in stock worth looking at, so we settled on a company in New Mexico that had the best price on solar. After shipping costs, the price still comes out better than buying local and they had one of the panel types I was interested in - a 64 Watt Unisolar panel. While not as high powered as our previous panels, we're hoping to gain a bit longer charge time. Total Amps per panel came out to 3.88 at 16.5 Watts. We could only afford 4 panels, which is a bit shy of our power needs. 4 panels put out 15.52 Amps per hour... If we assume that we'll get roughly 6 hours of power out of the panels then we should expect roughly 93 amp hours out of our panels. It's hard to accurately guesstimate the number of amp hours we'll get during the day bacause the sun follows an arc over the sky and the panels don't, so the voltage out of the panels varies depending on how low in the sky the sun is. There's also some room for error, because if the batteries are fully charged and the sun is still out, we can time some of our usage during that time and get "free" electricity directly from the panels instead of discharging the batteries. Our amp hour usage is based on no sun at all, so some of our hours running the fan or laptop may not pull any power from the batteries depending on how the weather cooperates... At some point we'll need to expand the number of panels we have or find non-electric (or more efficient electrical device) alternatives.

Some work on the trailer

Yesterday while we were waiting for the hitch to be installed in the truck, we made some progress making our trailer a bit more ours...

The trailer originally came with a dark pink material that covered the curtain rods of the windows and some lighter pink fabric on some of the walls and furnishings.

Becky and I ripped out all of the pink material the same day we brought the trailer home. The curtains that remained were OK looking, but the material that covered the curtain rods did a good job of hiding the rods and hangers for the curtain. The picture to the left shows what the curtains looked like after we removed the pink boxes.

Our solution was to put some 6 inch wide strips of paneling up where the pink fabric used to be. We had no luck in finding the right shade of wood paneling, so we bought unfinished panel, stained it to match and sealed it with a few coats of semi-gloss clear coat. The result is pretty impressive. The curtain rods and hangers are now all neatly hidden from view and the wood matches the cabinets almost perfectly. I glued corner braces in the corners to strengthen the boxes. The picture shows a clamp in the corner that was holding the pieces together while the glue dried.

We did it!

The 5th wheel hitch was installed along with a brake controller and other goodies. We went straight home and hooked up the trailer. At first it looked as though the truck was going to be too low to keep the trailer level, but it turns out that once we were out of the driveway everything seemed to level out.

Up until today, we had been unable to move the trailer, so everyone was told not to use a lot of water or the toilet so we wouldn't have the problem of overflowing tanks and no way to dump. After a short trip around the neighborhood to fine tune the brake controller, we headed for the local RV dump station about 1 mile away to dump the roughly 1/2 full tanks.

Just before arriving at the dump station I noticed that the brakes on the trailer were out. The light on the brake controller was out too, so I assumed that the cord had come loose. Sure enough, when I checked it at the dump station, the cord was loose, so I plugged it in further and tried to lock it in place. We're going to add a strap to keep the plug from being able to come out again.

Freedom is almost here

I can't sleep this morning. I'm too excited. Today is the day that we finally become mobile again...

For a couple of months now we've had a trailer parked in our driveway and no way to move it. I had been pretty depressed about the situation and wondering if we would ever find a truck in our price range that would meet our needs.

A few days ago we finally found a truck that can handle moving around our future home. The past couple of days we've been focusing on getting the truck ready for the task of hauling our trailer wherever we may want to go. The truck received some new tires, an alignment, an oil change and fuel filter. The next big step (and final piece that needs to take place before we can take our trailer anywhere) is to install a 5th wheel hitch in the back of the truck bed. Yesterday I found a suitable hitch and this morning at 8:00 we deliver the truck & hitch to a shop to have it installed. The shop will be installing the hitch and a new trailer plug in the bed of the truck. They will also be installing a brake controller and some extra goodies to isolate and protect our truck's electrical system from the trailer's.

With any luck, we'll be able to get the last few things together and be able to take our new home for a tour around the neighborhood. I am finally beginning to feel free again.

There's a lot of work ahead getting ready to leave. We still have a whole home full of stuff that we will not have room for in our trailer