Tag Archives: AC Electrical

batteries, Electrics, learning

Replacing Bus Batteries (Part I)

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So, I’ve always tried to be careful about the bus batteries.  Without them the bus really doesn’t move, which can be frustrating as you sit in your driveway ready to go somewhere, and really frightening if you’re at a site and it’s time to leave. I’ve run into both of these situations, and learned a lot from them.

The two batteries wired in in parallel.

One of the things I had learned was that the two batteries that our bus came with didn’t keep a charge long-term. When we first got it, and I discovered this, I went through the system with as fine a tooth comb as I could for the seeming miles of wiring looking for places where there could be a drain.

I ended up removing a tachograph which had a clock that kept running, and disconnecting a number of system from power, even though they were on a circuit that ran off the ignition switch triggered power relay, just in case.  The one thing that I couldn’t detatch was the ECM, which draws some 700 mA  to maintain the error codes and other brain-related functions.

In order to combat this small drain, I picked up a small solar panel to essentially be a trickle-charger and offset the ECM’s needs over the long periods of not being used. 

As our driveway faced west at the time, and the house and a big elm tree blocked the southern light, I ended up mounting it just on the windshield defroster duct, and running the power over to the line that connected to the batteries/ECM/alternator inside the cab.

While this helped, I continually was having problems if the batteries were left alone, to the point where I’d throw them on the charger before I went anywhere if I hadn’t had a chance to start the bus in the last month.  Overall, it wasn’t so bad.  And after the bus had run for a bit, the batteries would be fine.

Once I installed the DC inverter and ran AC power in, I had thought things would get a little better. The inverter was supposed to not only change the AC power to DC, but also charge up the DC batteries.  I had hooked it to the house batteries, but found after our fateful trip to Evangola State Park (when the alternator died, as did the bus batteries) that it wasn’t doing any charging.

Subsequently, I got a couple of battery-tenders for the battery sets. 

Products from Amazon.com

These will give a full charge, if needed, and the switch to a trickle when the batteries are set, and will work for either AGM, sealed, or lead-acid batteries.  And up until this spring, they worked like a charm on both battery sets.

Unfortunately, due to a number of factors, I didn’t move the bus (or even try to start it) from October to April.  It sat with the maintainer attached, so I wasn’t worried, but when I went to start it to go get it inspected, there wasn’t enough power in the batteries.  A little annoyed, but otherwise un-phased, I got out the car charger, and sit it up to charge overnight.  The next day, I went out to start it, expecting the batteries to be ready, as they usually were after a charging event like that, but they just barely got the engine going.

Usually after some driving time the alternator cranks out plenty of power to charge the batteries, and as I watched the voltmeter on the dash, I could see that the alternator was pushing out 14 volts (which is pretty high compared to the 13 or so I normally see), so I was sure the low batteries were getting what they needed.

So, it was a bit of a surprise to talk with the dealership on the phone (there were some issues with the suspension system in order to pass inspection) and find out that the batteries were dead when they went to bring it into the garage for the inspection.  They asked if I wanted them to deal with the batteries, and I said no.  So long as they could give me a jump to get the bus back home, I’d deal with it.

One of the big reasons for this is that if there’s a short somewhere that’s causing the drain, it could rack up some serious dealership-level mechanic’s hours in fees.  And it’s something that I could trace and deal with on my own.  I was also sure that nothing was an unnecessary parasitic draw (the radio, for example, runs off the house batteries, so even the electricity for the memory for the preset stations doesn’t drain the bus batteries), and I didn’t want to have mechanic time going to check that.

So, I started in on testing …

(Continued in Part II)

Appliance, Backup Camera, Dash Cam, Destination, driving, Eclipse Trip, Electrics, school bus RV, Skoolie

Our Eclipse Trip (Part 2)

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(continued from Part 1)

We planned out our meals, assuming that there would be days when it would be too hot to want to cook over the fire, but leaving room for a hot meal too.  My wife had shopped just before we left, and had looked for some steaks to take with us.  The store, however, had some ribs that were on sale (50% off!) so those were what came, along with some hamburgers, luncheon meats, hummus, snacking vegetables, cheeses, frozen pizzas, bagels …  The list went on.

The regular canned & dry goods pantry.

Luckily, our fridge is pretty big, and everything we wanted to take that needed to be kept cold fit.  We also had a bunch of canned goods, soups, beans, tomatoes, spam (of course), herring, you name it.  I usually keep a stock of those on the bus, but we added in some more soups and things.

By 11:00 am, we were all packed up, the house was secure (after being locked and alarmed and then me realizing that ALL my directions were sitting on the kitchen table!) and we started off. It was a pretty nice day, and after a quick weekend trip to Sprague Brook Park the weekend before (as a sort of shakedown trip) I’d filled the tank, so we were all set.

Except that the inverter wasn’t working.

Rolling farmland and countryside as seen from a moving bus …

I didn’t think it was a big deal, and we just kept going.  Along through New York on I-90, the speed limit was 65 mph, which is the top end for the bus, so that was fine.  It was a hot day though, and the temperatures kept creeping up over 200, so I feathered things a little to watch that.

I was also watching the output from the backup camera that I had finally installed.  It does a nice job, the static lines on the screen indicating about 1′, 3′, 5′, and 12′ from the rear bumper.  It also has a large field of view as I mounted it just up above and to the side of the rear door. (It was a little odd at first though, as the 140 degree fish-eye picks up the break and signal lights!)  The screen is nice, because if I turn the power to the camera off with a handy dash switch, it goes to sleep until it gets a signal form the camera.

But I had plenty of time to get used to the camera and watching temperature gauge along in New York. The I-90 through Pennsylvania, though, had sections of the 90 that had a 70 mph limit, which meant that I was holding some of the trucks back (especially on some of the steeper hills where we lost speed).  I really felt badly about that, but we continued on into Ohio.

Which also had 70 mph speed limits.

And the hills got steeper, so our average speed dropped some more.

Many people don’t realize that there’s a major watershed divide in Ohio, and as we headed south from Cleveland, we were heading uphill toward that.  Using a really cool website called www.flattestroute.com, I’ve been to find out the grades of the possible routes that we’ve looked at to travel on.  The route from Buffalo to Cincinnati is interesting as we start out in Buffalo at about 600 feet above sea level, and end up at about 485 feet above sea level at Cincinnati, but hit altitudes of almost 1400 feet along the way.

North of the red line goes to the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence River, and south of it ends up in the Mississippi.
Altitude and slope of the route between Buffalo on left) and Cincinnati on right).

Just for interest, the first peak on that altitude graph is just east of Erie, PA (1259′), with the next lowest point being just east of the Pennsylvania/Ohio state line (677′), followed by the low point at the I-90 and I-271 interchange (648′).  The next high point was near Woodmere (1193′), but when we got to where 271 crosses the Cuyahoga Valley National Park it was lower (968′), only to rise again when we got to the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River/Mississippi River Watershed boundary, just south of Medina, OH at about 1216 feet.  Then it was down again near Burbank (920′), and finally up to the highest point of our trip near Lexington, at 1391 feet, before our next low point just south of Lou Berlinner Park in Columbus (707′).  Another climb after we were out of the city brought us to the next high point at Exit 58 for Bowersville (1078′), then the next low near Mason, OH (762′), the next high point near Landon (871′), then finally the low of the Ridge Road Exit where we got off for the night (588′).

So, just looking at our starting and finishing altitude for our first day, we went down 12 feet, but if you look at even just the major high and low points along that day’s route, our ups and downs total some 5210 feet of altitude change!

And by the time we hit Jeffersonville, we were near a quarter tank of fuel, and decided to stop at a Love’s for fuel.  As per all of the travel stops that I’ve been to, I expected that the diesel pumps to be set for easier access for large vehicles, and away from the gas pumps.  Accordingly, Love’s has a banks of diesel pumps, and all the trucks are lined up right there, so I pull the bus in.  We wait for 10-15 minutes for the trucks ahead to fill, clean their windshields, and finally move ahead, and try to run our cards in the automated pumps.  Not a single one of them is accepted, they’re all declined.

I go through a minor panic, and my wife runs in to find out if there’s something wrong with the card reader.  And she has to wait on line for several minutes to find out that ALL of the pumps in those banks only take corporate cards, not regular credit cards.  If we want to use a regular card, we have to go to the one pump mixed in with the gas pumps that dispenses diesel. Which I was able to do.  And finally we got filled up and were back on the road.

Anyhow, we have friends who live not far from the Ridge Road exit in Cincinnati, so we got to drive down some lovely quiet little streets to get to theirs. We had talked about parking in front of their house on their dead-end street, but there were too many cars, and the exhaust pipe of the bus scraped about half-way up the slope of the entrance to their driveway, so backing in there didn’t work either.  So it was a multi-point turn (made much easier by the back-up camera) to turn around head the bus back out on their small street where we parked in the lot of a small apartment building at the end of the street that was in renovations (and our friends knew the manager who said it was okay).

We were treated to a great meal and a tour of their house (all the cabinets were hand-made by our friend Jeff, and they’ve stripped and refinished all the original woodwork, so it was great).  The rain which had been forecast for our trip had been spotty as we got close to Cincinnati, but really let loose once we stopped.  But at that point, it didn’t really matter, we were tired and ready to sleep.

But …

Without the inverter running (and since I don’t have the LP plumbed for the fridge yet), our fridge was a big cooler.  We had some worries, but there wasn’t much we could do right then, so we just left the doors closed.

The first day of the trip was done, and tomorrow would be a Kentucky day …

(continued in Part 3)

 

 

 

Allegany State Park, Electrics, learning, RV oven, RV stove, school bus RV, Skoolie, trip

A Week in the Bus (Allegany State Park trip – Part II)

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(Continued from Part I)

After arriving around midnight at the campsite, we set up the basics, and got to bed. My wife and I ran into a bit of a problem with our bed situation, as the air mattress we had been using had developed a leak that I couldn’t patch, and the replacement we brought was a king-sized one that wouldn’t fit in the back area. Luckily, with just the three of us in the bus, we could share the bottom bunk, while our son took the top bunk.

We had a nice site near the top of the hill on our loop. For the Red House camping area, the A loop and B loop had their own bathroom facilities, while the C and D shared a bathroom, I think with the E loop. There were abundant water taps, and fairly nice stone rings for firepits, though no grates. We realized that we’d been spoiled, as the fire pits and rings at Sprague Brook and Evangola had attached and adjustable grates to cook on.

Luckily, the camp store was literally down the hill and across the road from our site, and they had a nice round grating that I could perch on stones in our firepit and make a cooking surface. They also sold a 30amp to 15amp plug adapter, which I found I needed, as the 15amp power plug on the power tree was a GFCI outlet that kept tripping when I plugged into it (which of course was happening after midnight in the light rain.)  

I was totally perplexed as to what was tripping the outlet, as the system worked fine on my garage’s 15amp breaker, so after going through everything and eventually unplugging a number of non-essential systems including the plug from the inverter (even though the breaker for the inverter’s power feed was off), I finally got us basic power for lights and the fridge. After spending part of the morning tearing apart the main power in plug and the breaker box, I found that it seemed that the GFCI was being tripped by the ground of the plug of the inverter.

As the ‘main’ of the box is just a regular breaker, I had wired in the plug end of a 12 gauge extension cord into an unused breaker in the box, with the understanding that in order to power the system with the inverter, I would first turn off the main, then turn on the inverter breaker, and to go back to land power, the inverter breaker would go off first, then the main would go on. But as the inverter was set to take a grounded plug, but only connected to the 12VDC positive and negative, it seemed that the GFCI ‘saw’ the system with a return/ground fault in the 110AC system. Once I put the adapter in and plugged into the 30amp outlet, there was no issue, and all worked the way it was supposed to.

We finally got to use the stove, and it preformed admirably. While most of our cooking was done over the wood fire, the burners of the stove did a nice job with popcorn, and the oven did a great job with flatbread pizzas (and a 12” round fits easily). However, I’ve found that I need some small receptacle for spent matches, though I’m realizing that all those ashtrays that have fallen into disuse should provide for something both suitable and attractive.

The troubleshooting/improving never stops …

 

(More on the park in Part III)