Life's a Beach, Padre.

A few additions to the Beast..

Most importantly of all: I finally have an inverter installed. This baby came straight from the hard working folks in China, unfortunately all American versions were well outta my price range. For the low price of $299.00 and free shipping, we now have power in the RV for all of our 120 V appliances and powered by our battery bank that powers the a/c.

2500 Pure Sine wave inverter, just roughed in and testing.

To connect this inverter directly into my power, I had to fashion what is called a murder cable, basically an extension cord with 2 Male plugs on it, so you just plug it directly into a power outlet. This in turn powers all of the outlets and appliances on the same pole in the circuit box. We are setup with 2 poles, so I created 2 cords that plug into 2 different outlets, and hence power my entire RV.  I tested it and it handles the load of the Washer/Dryer, Microwave, the wife's hairdryer(which takes more power than anything else), and the all important Keurig.

Murder Cables fashioned by me

Also, the way my RV is wired, the 12 V charger plugs into one of the 120 volt outlets, so when I have my inverter powered on I am also providing power for all of the 12V circuits in the rig as well (this is all of the lights, pumps, stairs, and a few other things I'm surely forgetting.)

So, the inverter was really the last piece we needed in order to Boondock and be off the grid completely. I no longer need a power cord when visiting my cousins house to prevent my 12 V batteries from draining. The Solar now keeps everything charged either directly to my 48 V bank of batteries or indirectly thru the inverter, to the charger to my 12v systems.

Okay..If you are still awake after the boring electric stuff, onward to our first Boondock trip: Padre National Seashore!

It's about a 450 mile drive directly from Plano Texas to Padre, but we broke it up into 2 days and stopped at my favorite halfway point, Snook Texas. From there we finished off the remaining 250 miles the next day to Padre. At the entrance gate I went ahead and purchased my Annual National Parks Pass for 80 dollars, which will let me into all the National Parks in the country for a year for "Free". After that I pulled into the visitor center to see what the 'grocery' section had as far as necessities, picked up a couple 6 packs of Coors Light and drove to South Beach. We drove down about 5 miles, passing just a few campers and continued maybe a quarter of a mile past the sign that warns only 4x4 vehicles recommended.

This is our site, no one within miles of us either way.

View to the left

View to the right

Our camp and fence setup

View from the front door

From the dunes(Only point to get a bar or 2 of EDGE network)

Sunrise the 2nd Day

The Neighborhood watch

The 2nd night a cold front blew in FAST, and we relocated off of our beach as the Tide was coming up fast.

After a little scouting the next day I found the RV/Campgrounds. It was still primitive, just gravel parking lots with a bench, but it had grass and some protection from the winds that came constantly off the coast. Plus we enjoyed meeting many of the full timers that were enjoying the Beach. The beach was maybe 100 Yards directly in front of us, easy to access via the handicap access pier/boardwalk thing. For 8 bucks a night, it was worth the piece of mind of not waking up buried under sand. Plus some grass for the dogs to utilize(though it had a million burrs).

Our new site

The experienced folks did start getting me pretty scared by the 4th day, as we had not prepped the Beast for the hardships a beach can do to a rig. Specifically they recommended an uncoat sprayed on before coming to help stop some of the rust. Having never lived in the north where they salt the roads, this was new to me and had me a bit worried. My new grill after 1 day the screws were already rusted, who knows what was going on under my rig.

Enough for now, on that note I'll give you guys the birds. Please keep in mind with the sun out in full force I could no see any of these pictures on my phone as I took them, I just pointed and shot blindly.

Snook, Solitude, and Solar

So this last week I took the Beast down to Snook, Texas to do the Solar work at my Uncle's farm. Since he was away on vacation, it was pretty much The Beast, some donkeys, a dog named Fritz, and myself.

First things first, I needed water. I didn't feel like driving the 200 miles with the extra 800 lbs of aqua in my tank.

Filling the 100 gallon tank up water

The front yard.

Since this was taking forever, I took some pictures of where I would be doing my working and sleeping the next few days.

Pretty sure I'm the first one to ever sleep in the workshop

Nestled in among the tractors and tools

Had to unfurl this mighty satellite one more time before removing it to make room.  As well as the HD antenna behind it and the fan vent to the back right.

Over the next few days, my cousin Jason and I got to work on the solar install. We managed to get most of the panels installed before the weekend hit and he had to run off to some fairs and such showing some old tractors. But we did finish the seven hardest to place ones, leaving just a few for me to finish.

First 4 panels on front glued and screwed on

Framework for 2 of the panels in the back right

I took to the road back to Plano Texas early Saturday morning and subjected the build to a 80 mph wind test on I-45. Happy to report that none of the panels blew off! I stopped and checked at a couple rest areas along the way to make sure nothing was amiss as well.

This Sunday I completed the Solar install, building a platform for one panel in which the cords all connect and go down into the electronics cabinet below. I also hooked up five of the panels to test out the supply to the batteries. They were putting in about 5 amps at 95+ volts.  Once I connect the second set, it should be up to about 10 amps. I may have to juggle this around a bit to optimize my amps to the batteries.
The OCD among you might want to just ignore the panel in the lower left...there was just no other way.

Late today some MC4 connectors I had ordered arrived which allowed me to create the cables I needed to connect the 2nd set of five panels. Unfortunately the sun had gone down so I had no way of testing if they were working as I planned or not. I have to wait until tomorrow. Once the test is complete I'll do the wire management and secure some of the hanging wires.

In other news, the interior of the RV got a bit of an upgrade. The uncomfortable leather got replaced, though we did save the old covers. Here's the transformation:

New Faucets

Well, this was a post I was supposed to write a couple weeks ago and it was supposed to have complete story about how to change the faucets and pictures pronto and all those shenanigans. Guess what, it isn't.

We have tried for couple of weeks to change the fancy golden faucets from the 80's TV series Dynasty, I can not stand the gold, black and white interior we have, it is so outdated looking that nobody believes the RV is really from 2002. All that is cosmetic after all and we are not in huge rush to change everything but I believe once we hit the road I will be spending most of my days trying to get the RV to look like fairly modern couple lives there.

Still thinking we have it done in next 5 mins. Not so much.

We bought the new faucets, and were kind of limited to one hole models or to those that allow you to choose 3 or 1 hole option. The pickings were slim but we made a purchase. We are not raving about the faucets, they are not exactly what I really would wanted but considering that what I really wanted is not going to ever work where we need it to go, nor would I have money to pay for such a piece of art. So all in all we are quite happy with our non-golden choices. We are replacing both kitchen and bathroom fixtures and were first bummed that we couldn't find them with the same kind of finishings but since we aren't most likely staring at them at the same time, it will most likely be forgotten issue as soon as we figure out how to connect the new ones.

Whaaaat????

It took a bit of time and a degree in magic to get the old kitchen tap out. The space is really tight and the visibility is very poor. After shoving your hands through the hole in a wall, the visibility was non existing. But after all, that was the easy part. We thought we are just going to re-attach the new one and move on to the bathroom to do the same. We ran into the problems as soon as we got the new faucet to where it was supposed to be, re-attaching the water was not as easy as we thought, the piping for cold water was for some reason too short, so we needed to find an attachment that will make it a bit longer and as we became to notice, also deliver the water to the faucet and not leak under the sink. Finding the right piece has been a case of trial and so far only error. Lee has already gotten tired of driving back and fort to the Home Depot and made the decision to drive the rig over there so he can fix it close to where he can just go to exchange the parts that more than likely weren't right. The size of a piping is not standard, so getting those the faucet and pipe to connect might take some adjusting. It doesn't help that Lee works 14 hour days, not much is left of a day to work on other projects once he is done and on his days off, hockey rules our lives. Ok, hockey rules his life.

This should be the after picture, but it is just
the meanwhile  picture.

So hopefully I will have something to report soon about our fantastic new fixtures, other than we are still working on them. We are glad we didn't decide to do this while on the road. We aren't used to doing the handy stuff ourselves but this is going to change right now. We are going to have to do it ourselves once we hit the road, so we have to start rather sooner than later.