Daily Archives: April 22, 2013
I Swear I Haven’t Been Trying to Buy Cluster Bombs . . .
After coffee, I started the morning by heading down to the office to pay up for the next 10 days. It’s nice to be only paying $3 a day again instead of $20.
Wednesday, May 1st, we’ll head northwest about 300 miles or so to spend two weeks at the Las Vegas Thousand Trails. We’re really looking forward to being back there again, especially since it’s cooler there than it is here in Apache Junction.
My next stop was Nick and Terry’s rig to do some electrical work. Nick’s been having a problem with his house batteries not staying charged when he’s plugged into shore power.
Supposedly there’s a contactor/relay that causes this, so Nick ordered a replacement last week, and today’s the day to replace it.
The first thing we wanted to do was to disconnect all power from the coach, shore power, house batteries, and chassis batteries. But we ran into a small problem. Although Nick’s Winnebago Ultimate Advantage has a switch to disconnect the house batteries, as far as we could tell, there’s no way to disconnect the chassis batteries except to disconnect the cables at the batteries themselves.
But after that, we still had voltage on the contactor, but strangely enough it was about 18.5 volts. After scratching our heads for a few minutes, we finally figured it had to be coming from the solar panel battery charger on the roof of the rig. And after Miss Terry put a rug over the panel, the voltage dropped to zero.
Getting the contactor out wasn’t hard, but it was hard to get to.
The mounting screws were blocked by the large gauge cables, and the cable’s mounting lugs were blocked by the adjacent relay and circuit breaker panels.
But eventually I was able to get the old one out, carefully labeling each wire as I went.
Then it was time to get the new one back in
When that was done it was time to hook up the batteries and check things out. And it was good to see that everything seemed to be working fine. But it will take a while to be sure it’s charging the way it should.
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Here’s another picture of Zoe Nadeau, Landon’s beautiful red-haired 2nd cousin. Hard to believe she’s only about a week old.
Between the red hair and those blue eye, she’s going to break a lot of hearts.
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About 4pm we picked up Nick and Terry and drove over to the #1 Eastern Super Buffet to meet Ken and Paula Lougee for dinner.
Ken and Paula have been gate guarding for the last year and it was good to compare notes. Unlike Jan and I, who moved four times in four months when we were gate guarding, Ken and Paula have been parked at the same gate for over a year.
We had a lot of fun exchanging stories and experiences, and talking about the weird things that happened. They plan on being back on their gate after a month off, while Jan and I plan on gate guarding from August to November this year.
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I swear I haven’t been Googling Cluster Bombs, but you know how you Google something and then the next website you go to has ads for what you were just looking for.
So this is what I had pop up earlier tonight.
I’m sorry, but who orders bomblets online?
What if I need something bigger?
Can I get a quantity discount?
Is the DHS going to be checking me out because I wrote about this on the blog?
If there’s no blog tomorrow, you’ll know why.
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Thought for the Day:
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which. — Douglas Adams
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