Our RV Adventures

Here at the Lake Conroe Thousand Trails we’ve had very little rain today, and when we did it was mostly just a slow drizzle.

But according to some forecasts, now-Tropical Storm Harvey is supposed to move back out into the Gulf a little and then come back in over Galveston with as much as another 24” of rain.

Yikes!

They’re saying that so far Harvey has dropped between 9 and 13 Trillion Gallons of water on Texas.

Yikes again!

All of our kids are still high and dry so far. Certainly hope it stays that way.

Here’s a good link that shows Houston Traffic Road Closures and Speeds in real-time. Check it out.

Houston Traffic Overlay

The last two nights the temps have been dropping down into the high 60’s, and I don’t think the rig AC’s ever even turned on today. Nice.

One thing that the storm did was give me a chance to get back working on the remote control modules that I got about a month ago.

Wireless 4 Channel Remote Control Unit

At less than $15 each, these units looked to be an inexpensive solution to a couple of problems I would like to take care of.

These have four separate independent channels capable to handling 20A from 12VDC to 120VAC. And each channel has both normally open and normally closed contacts. Plus there is a jumper that will set the unit for either momentary or on-off switching.

Although I bought two, one for the slide and one to play with, I decided to actually use the 2nd one too. When we’re traveling with the generator on and both AC’s running, occasionally the generator will shut off, or sometimes, keeps running but the 120VAC output goes offline. And when this happens, the 120VAC output will not come back online if both AC’s are turned on.

So Jan has to get up and turn off one AC for about 15 seconds until the power comes back up. Then she can turn it back on and everything is fine. Now this doesn’t make a lot of sense, because when the AC’s lose power, the thermostats go into a two minute timeout to protect the compressor before they will allow the AC’s to come back on. So nothing should be putting a load on the generator at that point.

So before I tackle the slide remote control, I decided to set up a remote control on the rear AC. And it turned out to be very simple.

After putting 12VDC on the unit I pressed the Learn button on the circuit and then pressed the ‘A’ button on the remote. This synced the remote to that particular board and Load 1.

Then it was just a matter of wiring it all in and mounting it on the wall.

I picked up the 12VDC for the unit from the Floor Light switch on the wall, and then fed the control wires behind the wall up to the thermostat where I wired it into the system. Then a little double-stick tape mounted it in place.

Now before we travel I just turn the AC off at the thermostat and then use the remote to turn it off and then back on when needed.

And the blue glow makes a nice night light.

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