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RE: Purchasing a Jackery or something similar....need help....
For his reviews of solar and battery technology and products, Will Prowse runs electrical tests for capacity, etc. then tears batteries apart to inspect details such as internal lead size, solder/weld quality, BMS and sensor capability, etc. He has panned a number of such as junk, and found a number of gems among the crowded field of companies making this gear. If you search for his youtube channel, you can quickly find both links to good gear at good prices as well as his reviews. He also has detailed plans for making your own systems, and changes recommended gear from time to time as he finds better options. I can recommend both his youtube channel and his book.
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naturist
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09/03/22 02:09pm |
Tech Issues
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RE: Chirping alarms
Propane/carbon monoxide alarm does have a useful life of about 7 years and must be replaced. New batteries cannot make up for a depleted sensor.
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naturist
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09/01/22 07:26pm |
Tech Issues
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RE: Capitalism at it's finest
There is a specific product that Wegman's sells for 99 cents a pack of 24, which I have seen multiple places on Amazon for up to $20 per pack of 24. The moral of this story is that not everything on either Amazon or anyplace else on the interwebz is a bargain. Caveat Emptor, buyer beware. Before you spring for anything, anywhere, look around a bit. You might be surprised at what you find.
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naturist
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09/01/22 07:22pm |
Around the Campfire
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RE: Daisy chain cable size?
small detail: do not daisy chain a bunch of batteries. Doing so will cause them to carry uneven loads, ware out unevenly and make headaches down the line. If you have a "bunch" of them, connect them all to a single common connection point using carefully measured cables of matched lengths. To be sure, this will have the closest batteries with excessively long cables (or so it will appear), but the resistance will match, they will carry the load equally, and work much better in the long run.
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naturist
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09/01/22 06:29pm |
Tech Issues
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RE: Solar Removal (advice/ideas)
improvement in solar panels would have me leaning to leave old ones and get new ones.
Yep!
I tend to agree.
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naturist
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09/01/22 06:24pm |
General RVing Issues
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RE: no noise generators
How much time did you spend building your unit including research?
My point is you have no labor or overhead in your pricing. So how does that make those for sale over priced?
I can make my own hamburger or I can go out and buy one.
Does that mean McD's over priced?
You are right, I didn't include my time building. I also neglected to mention having purchased my parts at retail, rather than wholesale, unlike the "power station" manufacturers.
And you are right about Mickey D and the hamburger situation. But if I make my own, you can bet it'll be better than the McD version!
Being retired, the time/labor of building such a device falls into the hobby category. But to be fair, if I charged myself for the labor of building these devices, I get to pay myself around $500 a day for my efforts, paid for by the difference in cost between the commercial unit and the home made one(s). While that is below my daily rate when I was a working stiff, it is well above what I'd make greeting at Wally's. I call the commercial units overpriced because that labor rate is well above what the guys in the factory are making, and the wholesale/retail markup make for what looks like a very profitable product. Maybe that's why it appears everybody on the planet it going into building the things.
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naturist
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08/24/22 03:01pm |
Tech Issues
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RE: no noise generators
Everyone saying how over priced they are should chime in with there actual cost for there system that they use....There not cheap to do it right..
Lol
While I didn't chime in, I do say they are overpriced.
So I have built myself two such. The first cost me about $1600, the second cost me about $2500. Both have 2200 watt continuous/4400 watt surge pure sine wave inverters. The first uses 2-125 Ah AGM batteries fed by 400 watts of solar panels thru a 40 amp charge controller. I can draw approximately 1500 watt hours from those batteries to take them from 100% charge to the 50% level beyond which battery life begins to degrade. The solar panels produce around 1600 watt hours on a good day.
The second one uses 1-300 Ah LiFePO4 battery fed by 500 watts of solar panels. I can draw about 3000 watt hours from the battery before affecting battery life. The solar panels will produce about 2,000 watt hours on a good day.
I looked into the manufactured units, and what I saw was that matching the capacity of the more expensive of my two units was going to run me between $3800 and $4500 depending on which brand I chose. YMMV.
It should be noted that I chose to not include a shore power charger for the battery to either of them, which commercial units have standard. If you want that capacity, add another $100 to $200 to the cost. And therein lies one of the advantages of building one: customization. Skip the solar panels, you don't need a charge controller either (that would save about $600, counting the added shore power charger).
The standard "marine deep cycle" battery most small trailers come from the dealer sporting is an 80 Ah flooded cell battery weighing around 60 lbs, and costing around $200 give or take. The 300 Ah LiFePO4 battery I used cost $1079, and weighs 70 lbs. If you have a converter capable of dealing with a lithium battery, you could just swap in such a battery to get the capacity of about 6 of the batteries that came with your rig, add a mere 10 lbs to your tongue weight, and never have to replace batteries again, as the life of such a battery should be around 10 times as long as the flooded cell battery.
Those "solar generators" are, however, aimed at people who are not handy enough to build one, and for such a person, they will do the job, provided they are sized correctly for your needs.
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naturist
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08/22/22 07:30pm |
Tech Issues
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RE: When you want to take your conversion project ...
Road? What "Road?" Don't need no stinkin' "Road!"
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naturist
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08/22/22 07:02pm |
Around the Campfire
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RE: Coffee Quality?
When on the Big Island a few years ago, I took a tour of Greenwell Farms, a family run coffee plantation that was one of the first established on the Kona coast. One of the trivial facts that landed in my brain was that green beans are good for no more than two years, and roasted beans are worthless after a single year. As others have pointed out, your date of purchase has nothing whatever to do with the age/freshness of the coffee. Given the recent supply chain issues, God alone knows how old stuff might be. It is quite possible that a supplier somewhere was scraping the bottom of the barrel and sold stuff that in more normal times they might have thrown out as too ancient/stale.
Being somewhat of a coffee nut, and a fan of Kona coffee, I've taken to buying direct from the farm. Greenwell Farms sells direct to the public, and I've enrolled in their coffee club, which automatically ships me a supply every few weeks. I know it's fresh -- the faint scent of coffee fills my mailbox every time a shipment arrives. But I am also willing to pay their price, which is currently around $40 a pound. It's my guilty pleasure.
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naturist
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08/21/22 10:30am |
Around the Campfire
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RE: search engine
The usefulness of information decreases with age, doesn't it? (Unless, of course, you are a history buff.) And digital storage space does bear a cost.
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naturist
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08/21/22 10:16am |
Around the Campfire
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RE: Fridge won't stay lit
I am not familiar with that unit, but my experience with various propane/natural gas appliances over the years has convinced me that the two most common points of failure on all of them are crud/dead bugs in the burner assembly and the thermocouple that keeps the gas flowing after light up. Everything else is pretty much bullet-proof. It has to be from a strictly safety standpoint.
From your description of symptoms, I think you have a failed thermocouple. These are a designed point of failure, frankly, and the last one I bought cost $5 and took me 15 minutes to replace. Given the low cost and ease of replacement, I'd throw a new one in just because and see if that doesn't fix the problem.
EDIT: Btw, no need to try to find the exact thermocouple specific to your fridge. You can buy a generic one at Lowes, Home Depot, Menards, etc. That's where I get them.
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naturist
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08/21/22 10:04am |
General RVing Issues
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RE: Portable Solar Generators
I don't have any experience with the Jackery/Bluetti/EcoFlow/etc. units. I have, however, built my own. Two, in fact. Both work exactly as designed.
The first one I built used AGM batteries, and thus was too heavy to take boon docking but it has proven great for those all-too-frequent power outages at the sticks-n-bricks. The second one uses a LiFePO4 battery, thus is much lighter, and will go camping with us in future. The lithium one with it's 500 watts of solar panels and the folding hand truck weighs just about 100 lbs, and provides 300 Ah and 2200 watts continuous AC power. With that much capacity, I don't even care if it rains for a couple days in a row.
As long as you sized your unit correctly, you should expect to be well served.
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naturist
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08/21/22 09:51am |
Tech Issues
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RE: Dumb Things We Did as Kids on 4July
We forget, don't we, that when we were 18ish, our brains had not yet gelled, and we were prone to doing stupid things, at least in part because we knew we were invulnerable. There is a reason we don't let 17 year olds sign contracts, drink, etc.
I am not going to tell you about any of MY peccadillos even though I do have a 6 inch scar from one of them. All I'm going to say is God I'm glad none of them actually killed me, even though I was threatened by such a penalty a couple times by parental units.
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naturist
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07/17/22 03:45pm |
Around the Campfire
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RE: Power cord connections melting
When I've had such a problem in the past, it has proven to be a bad receptacle into which I had plugged the power cable. Given that melting/burning on one side of the junction will cause melting/burning on the other side. Replace both plug and receptacle when you have that issue. This being the simplest and probably cheapest fix, I'd start there before looking into more exotic/expensive potential problems.
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naturist
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07/17/22 03:23pm |
Fifth-Wheels
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Solar power cart v2.0
So almost 2 years ago, I built a solar power station on a folding aluminum hand truck. With 2-125 AH AGM batteries, 400 watts of rigid solar panels, and a 2,000 watt pure sine wave inverter, the whole business weighs about 250 lbs and provides up to 125 AH (1500 watt-hours) of power which is replenished daily on good days.
I'm now building v2.0, which features a 300 AH LiFePO4 battery, 2,000 watt PSW inverter, and 500 watts of flexible solar panels. It will weigh in under 100 lbs, hand truck included.
I put them both on hand trucks to facilitate moving them around. We don't full-time in the RV, but we do experience power outages at the sticks 'n' bricks. Twice this last week, btw. It sure is nice to be able to still have power where we need it even when the other 471 AEP customers who seem to go out with us go dark.
That 300 AH LiFePO4 battery cost only $1079 (plus, of course, tax). This is about what 100 AH lithium batteries cost just 2 years ago when I built v1.0. So I'm here to tell y'all that not everything is suffering the throes of inflation.
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naturist
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07/03/22 12:14pm |
Tech Issues
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RE: UH-Oh! Akin Cancer
I had a basil cell carcinoma on my chest about ten years ago. It was small, a couple millimeters, and the doctor removed it with a small incision. At the time, he told me that almost nobody ever dies from either basil cell or squamous cell cancers unless they ignore them for a long, long time.
I required no further treatment. I do see a dermatologist annually, since at 74 I'm old enough such things are common. Every year he freezes one or several spots that at worst are pre-cancerous. And yes, the left side of the head is often involved, no doubt because years of driving have exposed that side to more sunlight than the right.
Take care of it and you'll be fine.
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naturist
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07/03/22 11:53am |
Around the Campfire
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RE: Note to Newbies with Children
I agree they are good reminders but the same can be said for the seniors who are hard of hearing and are yelling at each other at 5:30 a.m. Etiquette goes both ways and then some.
Indeed it does. At the same time, I have noted that there seem to be a lot of people who do not realize how their voices carry when there are no loud traffic and other city noises to drown them out.
We camped once next to a family whose adolescent kids wakened each morning at the crack of dawn, and proceeded to quietly play games until their parents got up to fix breakfast. They were trying hard to be good, they really were, but their whispers back and forth were the finest stage whispers I've ever heard. They just did not realize how loud they were. Mom and dad slept right through it, but we in the next campsite, inside our camper, heard every word.
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naturist
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07/03/22 11:42am |
RV Lifestyle
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RE: Why do I need a W/D or sway control
You probably don't. I wouldn't spring for one if the truck doesn't sag and you have no problems with sway.
Whoever told you you needed one was either trying to sell one or has too little TV for their rig. Just my humble opinion.
I do not have either TV or trailer like yours. I tow a 21 foot, 5000 GW TT behind a diesel SUV rated to tow 6,000 lbs without a WD or sway control. Works fine. No sway, tows straight as an arrow.
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naturist
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07/03/22 11:32am |
Towing
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