Getting Ready - Part 6

This blog got a comment from Will who questioned the wisdom of a solar panel array of 48 volts, "48 volts? I question your installer as to weather he knows what he is doing. These should be in parellel for 12 volts." Here is a quote from the Renewable Energy Design Guide & Catalog section on the OutBack MX60 MPPT Charge Controller: "The OutBack MX60 allows you to use a higher output voltage PV array with a lower voltage battery - such as charging a 12 or 24 VDC battery with a 48 VDC PV array. This reduces wire size and power loss from the PV array to the battery/inverter location and can maximise the performance of your PV system."

I received a partial estimate from Solar Wind Works for $9,011. This covers the cost of the hardware (except for cabling) and does not include shipping charges or installation costs. I sent them a check on Friday and depending upon when the hardware arrives, the installation should commence soon.

Last night I spent my first night in the motor home. I slept in the cab over bed and it proved to be pretty comfortable. I'm not sure that this will be how I will sleep when I finally get on the road. Since I have the two couches in the lounge area, I may decide to sleep there and then the cab over bed area could be used for additional storage space. George of the "The Adventures of Tioga and George" blog sleeps below and had his cab over bed area converted to storage cabinets when he was down in Mexico. One potential problem with this idea is that of the weight that the items in the additional storage space could impact on the total weight of the vehicle.

For those of you who are not RVers, one can only have so much weight in the vehicle so you are limited in the amount of stuff you can carry safely. I think that the total amount of items for this size rig is about 2,000 lbs. The solar panels, inverter/charger and additional batteries will add quite a lot of weight and decrease the amount of weight left for storage of items.

I am also thinking of getting a motor scooter and carrier to hang off of the rear as a dinghy. This would also impact the total weight of the vehicle on the road, specifically on the rear axle. Several of the posters in the Yahoo group "Life with Lazy Daze RV" suggested that I should seriously think about towing my Honda Accord instead. I rode a Lambretta motor scooter when I was attending college and enjoyed it, especially the mileage. I love my Honda too, it's paid for and gets pretty good mileage for a car but if I am going to have a toad, I might like to get something smaller like a VW convertible or a Jeep to be able to get off road. I wish the VW Thing was still in production but the ones still available are now getting more expensive since they are now collectible.

I hope to take this rig out in the sticks for camping. I seriously considered getting a Sportsmobile 4x4 van conversion before finally commiting to this Lazy Daze. I also thought about getting a Sprinter class B conversion. These two possibilities would have cost more than a brand new Lazy Daze. It would be nice to have another vehicle to scout for new places to camp and run to the store for groceries but I think for the time being, I'll try it out without a toad or dinghy. I just hope I don't end up on some road stuck out in the boonies with no place to turn around. Maybe I'll get a bicycle or moped. Who knows? Any comments?

Here’s hoping that I’ll see you On the Road with Gary.

Getting Ready - Part 5

A little progress happened yesterday. The guys from Solar Wind Works showed up yesterday for another look at the rig for planning the solar/electrical installation. They think that we may be able to fit 5 130 watt solar panels on the roof. With the 85 watt that I already have that will be 735 watts, which I hope will be adequate for my computing life style. The plan is to have 4 of the new panels in series for 48 volts to be connected to a Outback MX60 Charge Controller. Using 48 volts for the solar array allows for reduction in wire size and power loss from the array to the charge controller and can maximize performance. The other new panel and the existing panel will be at 12 volts and use a separate charge controller.

We plan to install the Outback sine wave inverter/charger (VFX2812M 2800 watt) on a MidNite Solar E-Panel. We will also install a Outback Mate system controller. One thing I learned new about this is the size and weight of this setup. The E-Panel is 20.5" by 9.4". I don't know it's weight. The inverter/charger is 16.25" by 8.25" and weighs 54 lbs. The most likely location for the mount will be vertically on the wall backing to the refrigerator. The MX60 charge controller will be mounted vertically beside it. It was determined that the inverter charger was too big to be mounted in the cabinet next to the door. So it will be exposed but this leaves the cabinet available for other storage. I have moved the Lazy Daze magazine rack to the rear lounge to make room for the mounting of the inverter/charger and new charge controller.

We plan to install 6 AGM batteries probably 6 volt. We will remove the 2 12 volt lead acid batteries currently installed because it is best to have a matched battery bank.

Solar Wind Works has not yet provided an estimate. I'm guessing that the solar system will cost about $15,000. Not cheap. I hope I'm making the right decision about this RV life style.

I have been spending time on line researching parks and potential camping sites and putting pushpins in the Microsoft Streets and Trips maps.

My realtor stopped by. It now looks like we will have to lower the asking price on the house. We will wait one week to see what feedback from the realtor open house is before we make the change in price.

The last 4 or 5 days I have been dealing with an affliction that pretty much crippled me. I didn't go to a doctor (typical male) but I now think that it was probably a spider bite. The first symptom was my left foot near the base of the big toe became painful and I could hardly walk. Then I noticed that my whole left foot was tender and swollen. It is better now. I think I'm about 80% recovered.

Getting Ready - Part 4

Not much progress in the last few days. Several people showed up yesterday for a Real Estate agents open house to introduce the availability of my house on the market. My agent thinks that we may have to reduce the asking price. The Real Estate market definitely seems to be cooling off up here. I'm not in a real big hurry to sell the house. My agent says that she can handle selling the house by herself and I don't need to be here so as soon as the rig is ready for the road I could be out of here. I'm not in a real big hurry to leave Tahoe either as long as the weather is good. I just hope that the house is sold before November and it starts snowing.

I am now spending most of the day in the motor home since I have internet, TV and my laptop there. I can still log on to my other wireless network in the house if I need to. The main reason for doing this is my laptop is now current and my desktop in the house doesn't have my current correspondence. Plus I need to become more familiar with the Vaio and some of the new software it has like Microsoft Trips & Streets. I learned that Microsoft Trips & Streets can import data so I have added all my friends and family contacts from Outlook 2003. I also found a web site that has a lot of GPS information that can be imported to create pushpin sets like Wal-Marts, Public dump locations, State Parks with campgrounds, Cosco stores and lots of other information. Here is the link:

http://www.discoveryowners.com/cginfolinks.htm

I had a phone call with Chris at Solar Wind Works who will be helping me with the installation of the new solar panels, inverter/charger, charging controller and batteries. They will come out once more before the actual installation to check some measurements and determine exactly where the inverter/charger will be mounted. Hopefully, the installation will take place next week.

One pleasant result from publishing this blog is that I heard from an old friend, Connie Kelley, which I hadn't heard from since I lived in San Francisco over 20 years ago.

Getting Ready - Part 3

Some more progress on getting ready for the road happened today. I got the LNB for DirecTV installed and DirecTV activated. I bought the TV Kit from Dustyfoot and it came with pretty clear instructions. If you contact Dustyfoot, Scott Whitney is very helpful and responsive to emails.

The only thing confusing was that the LNB has two cables attached and the provided 50 foot cable is also dual. The confusion comes in because the DirecTV satellite receiver only has one connection for satellite in. Maybe the LNB can be used for two different satellite receivers. Any way I got it installed and running pretty easily. I did have to re-peak the internet signal because the dish moved during the install of the LNB. Once the internet satellite signal was on target for SatMex5, the DirecTV LNB was on target for 101.

Here are a couple of photos of the dish with the LNB for DirecTV or BOW (Bird on a wire) installed.

Here's hoping that I see you On the Road with Gary.

Getting Ready - Part 2

Yesterday, late on Friday afternoon, the packages from Dustyfoot arrived. They contained the Mobility Kit for the HughesNet satellite internet dish which arrived about a week ago. The reason that I didn’t order the entire system from Dustyfoot is that when I wanted to order they couldn’t provide the satellite (SatMex5) that I wanted. Since that time, HughesNet is allowing their systems to be commissioned on SatMex5 again. I ordered my HughesNet System from a friend of John Calypso’s in Pueblo, Colorado.

The bottom line is that today I’m now online via satellite. Here is a shot of the dish and the rig.



Setting up the dish was not without some problems. The first was that I had assembled the dish right after it arrived. The Dustyfoot Mobility Kit includes the tripod, Align-A-Site, OPI (Outdoor Pointing Interface) and some parts which allow the dish to be adjusted without a wrench by hand tightening. So I had to disassemble the dish, replace some parts and then put it back together. I think if you buy the whole system from Dustyfoot, they will have already done this part of the assembly.

The Align-A-Site can be either used when you are trying to locate a suitable location to set up the dish or it can be slipped into a mount on the dish to aid in the aiming of the dish. So while you are installing the mount on the dish for the Align-A-Site the dish tripod must be level and plumbed. I didn’t catch this part of the instructions, so I went ahead and tried to find the satellite. Well, after awhile, I installed the mount correctly and started over.

Even though the Dustyfoot instructions warned of sharp pieces of metal on the dish, I still managed to slice a finger.

I’m sure the next time I set up the dish things will go much smoother. Some people state that they can set up a dish in 15 minutes.

The first realtor showed up with a client to look at the house yesterday. My realtor had suggested that I should get a haircut so I won’t scare away prospective buyers so I got my first haircut in over a year. Here is a shot taken by the camera in my Viao notebook computer while in the rig.



Here’s hoping that I’ll see you On the Road with Gary

Datastorm location

Getting Ready

In June 2006 I bought a 1993 Lazy Daze motor home. It is the 23.5 foot Twin/King model on a Ford chassis with a V8 460 engine. My plan is to get the rig ready for full timing and hit the road after selling my home in Truckee, California (high in the Sierras near Lake Tahoe).

- click to enlarge -

First a bit about me so you can get an idea about where I'm coming from. I'm a single retired guy of 68 years of age trying to live mostly on Social Security. I have worked at several different jobs when I was working but the last few years of my working life were spent working on computers as a programmer, tech, network manager and in technical support.

I was born in the state of Oregon and grew up in Central Oregon in the town of Redmond. After graduating high school in 1956, I joined the US Navy and spent the next three years in San Diego as a Hospital Corpsman at Balboa Naval Hospital.

After getting out of the Navy in 1959, I started attending San Diego State majoring in Zoology and minoring in Chemistry. My idea then was to become a medical doctor. Shortly after getting out of the Navy, I got married and about a year later my daughter Heidi was born. After graduating from San Diego State, we moved to Westwood in Los Angeles while I attended the UCLA School of Medicine. I continued to work odd jobs to provide for my growing family (my son, Marc was born at UCLA) while trying to be a husband and father and study with the full load of Medical School. To make a long story short, it all got to be too much and I dropped out of Medical School and went to work full time as a Research Technician at The Laboratory of Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Biology at UCLA. After about two years, I got a job in Medical Research at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla.

After about four years of research in biochemistry working on enzymes, my marriage started to fall apart. My wife and I separated and I got a small apartment in La Jolla. I started hanging out with beatniks and attending Acid Tests. Then three things happened within the space of a month that changed my life. My divorce became final, I lost my job and I lost my apartment so I packed a few things in my red TR3 sports car and went On the Road (thanks to Jack Kerouac).

I went past San Francisco to Portland, Oregon where I stayed a couple of months with hippies I met there. Then I left for Denver, Colorado and stayed about four months and made a few friends, some of whom, I am still in contact. Towards the end of 1966, several of us traveled in a caravan to San Francisco and the Haight Ashbury. It was a great carefree time and we spent the time staying with new friends and attending shows at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms.

I survived the next few years selling Berkeley Barb and Oracle newspapers on Haight Street and doing other odd things that hippies do. In 1969, I had another son named Demian. I did some art work, paintings and drawings and took photography classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. Then I started to drop back in working as a epidemiologist for the San Francisco Department of Public Health for about four years and then as a sound and audio/visual tech at San Francisco hotels for a couple of years. I then got my first computer a Commodore VIC-20 and got interested in programming computer games.

The property where my art loft was located in the Lower Pacific Heights was sold and I had to move. I got an apartment in downtown San Rafael across the Golden Gate bridge in Marin County. I lived there for about 12 years working as a computer programmer, computer tech and accountant for five years with The Marin Housing Authority.

circa 1975

I then was offered a job as an assistant network manager with the Truckee River Bank where I worked for a couple of years.

I rented my house out, left the Sierras and returned to Marin County where I lived several more years working in software technical support for several different software companies. Shortly after the 9/11 disaster, I was laid off from my job and after looking for work for a few months and finding nothing I decided I was retired since by that time I was eligible for Social Security.

Two years ago after several unpleasant experiences with tenants, I moved back into my Truckee house. I have had to share my home with roommates because I couldn't afford to pay my mortgage and utilities on the meager Social Security payment I get.

After quite some time of researching cheap living possibilities, I have decided to try full timing in a motor home. I haven't traveled a lot in my life so I hope to visit many of the beautiful places in our country that I have not seen before. I also want to check out some areas in Mexico and may decide to get a place down there. After my house sells and my rig is ready for the road, I hope to visit my friend, John Calypso at his place in the state of Vera Cruz, Mexico. Please check out John's blog "Viva Veracruz" at http://vivaveracruz.ranchocalypso.com/blog/ .

My house is now on the market. The realtor put the sign out front last Friday. I have made some changes to the motor home. I installed a new pantry cabinet and took out the microwave and Onan generator. Since I want to continue my computing lifestyle while on the road, I plan to put as many solar panels on the roof that will fit. The installation should begin next week. In addition to the 85 watt panel I already have, we will install four 130 watt Kyocera panels, an Outback sine wave inverter/charger (2500 watt), a new charge controller and four more batteries in the space where the Onan generator lived.

I just took delivery of a new HughesNet dish and satellite modem for internet access. I am expecting delivery of the Dustyfoot Mobility Kit (tripod, etc. for the HughesNet dish) and the TV kit (which will allow me to get DirecTV using the the HughesNet dish) this week.

Other things I plan to do in the near future to get ready for the road:

1. Get a cell phone for emergencies. I'm thinking on getting a Motorola E815 phone with Verizon service.
2. Move my web site, Gary's Mountain Inn http://zextek.dyndns.org/ to a web hosting company.
3. Change residency to state that is friendly to full timers and set up mail forwarding. I'm tending towards South Dakota at the present time.
4. Finish setting up all my bills for online payment.

Gary this week.

Well, I think this is enough for my first blog entry.

Here's hoping to see you On the Road with Gary.