More "Tossing and turning, I couldn’t sleep all last night," but mostly tossing

Forced myself to open cupboards and refrigerator today, on Barth that is. Barth’s unloading, cleaning, and reloading must be done this weekend.

Matters are worse than I thought. I found out what had happened to all my cupboard space… it is full of useless things I have pack rat-ed during previous trips. Absolutely ridiculous. I used to think that my dear old deceased Mom was a pack rat. Well, I was right, so I came by the practice honestly, as they say.

It is going to be a challenging weekend indeed! Fortunately the ‘basement’ was easy.

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Housecleaning – what is all this stuff?

I have discovered that many of the issues associated with a stick house intrude on motorhomes also. For example, acquisition of ‘stuff’. Unfortunately in a motorhome stuff hits a critical mass much quicker. If stuff isn’t dealt with occasionally one will find himself hitchhiking.

I embarked on the task of major interior Barth-cleaning a few days ago. But I was completely derailed by the necessity of creating guidelines of what to keep on board, what to move to the stick house and what to toss. Today I finally started.

There was more tossing going on than during a night of sleep on a feather bed that has lost most of its feathers. The unfortunate part is that considerable time has been wasted trying to come up with guidelines clear enough allow me to proceed. It has taken days to discern this stuff from that stuff, or was this simple precrastination?

So today some progress was made in the living quarters. I haven’t even given Barth’s ‘basement’ any thought yet. But I got bored with the cleaning after half a day, embarking on the more fun task of adding another 12 volt outlet.

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Solar system completion

This entry will close out the solar panel system installation topic as the project is considered completed. However, a post to report system performance or problems may be added after I am on the road. Pictures of the installed components appear below.

Notice that it was possible to allow a small crawl space around all panels for installation and maintenance. These panels were just the right size to accomplish this. The sky light bubble that is mostly under the rearmost (nearest) panel is not visible. One additional panel could have been mounted if the manual TV antenna visible left of the frontmost panel were moved, or covered so as to make it unusable. Since I wanted to do neither, a fifth panel was not included.

This image shows the two Blue Sky controllers sitting in the equipment cabinet. It will not be known until actual use on the road if the second controller is needed. If not one controller may appear on Ebay.

Mounted in the bedroom is the control center consisting of a Blue Sky ProRemote to program and monitor the solar controllers. It replaces the Trimetric 2020 battery monitor that I have used for years. On the right is the traditional Xantrex programmer/monitor to manage the Xantrex Freedom 20 Inverter/Charger.

And last but certainly not least is the battery bank, which consists of eight AGM six volt 200 amp-hour batteries. It is my goal that the solar system will prevent the battery bank charge level from falling below 75% most of the time, with only occasional operation of a generator. This will greatly extend the life of the batteries.

In order to complete the views of major electronic systems, the next image shows the satellite communication equipment. It includes a Datastorm D3 dish controller, Linksys WRT54G wireless router, HughesNet DW7000 modem and a Hawking Hi-Gain 15dBi corner antenna. The Hawking antenna boosts my wifi signal so that I can receive it within an adjacent or nearby house.

And finally the Datastorm F1 satellite dish as it appears deployed on the roof:

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First light!

At 1:30 p.m. today the cardboard I had placed on the solar panels to disable them while installation was in progress, was removed. At startup the controller went into ‘acceptance’ mode at 30 amps being supplied to the batteries.

An image of the roof will be posted here when I have the time to get one.

There may be some adjustments necessary of acceptance voltage and float voltage at the controllers to match my batteries. A few more Dicor applications need to be added to the roof at the final cable pass-through. The auxillary connection to the start battery needs to be attached (cable is already in place). All wiring needs to be evaluatied to determine that it is ‘neat and clean’, i.e. check if tie points are secure and adequate, insulation protection is adequate at all pass-throughs, etc.