Our RV Adventures

We haven’t left the rig since last Friday so about 12:30 we drove over to Willis to first have lunch at Whataburger and then pick up a few things at the nearby Kroger’s.

But Whataburger was not to be, as it was closed. Didn’t see any reason for it, since the next-door Popeye’s, Sonic, McDonald’s, and Chick-fil-A. The only other place that was closed was the Burger King down the road.

So Chick-fil-A for lunch it was. And a very busy place it was. But not really busier than I’ve seen Chick-fil-A’s at other times. And they brought our food to our table in about 5 minutes.

It’s easy to see why Chick-fil-A has the highest grossing locations in the US. At around $4,4 million average per store, they rank over $1 million ahead of  2nd place McDonald’s. And Chick-fil-A is only open 6 days a week.

Because of this, the last time Chick-fil-A released 100 new franchises, they had 24,000 applications. And if you lucky enough to be chosen for a franchise, the only cost is $1000.00, not the $1 million+ that a McDonald’s would cost.

Coming back to the Kroger’s we found it pretty much normal with only a few shortages. They had large stacks of bottled water everywhere, but the bread shelves were kind of bare, although they were restocking while we were there. The only other things in short supply were  rotisserie chickens, and for some strange reason, cat food. Dog food was fine.

As we were heading home, we were passed by a long line of power company bucket trucks . . . from Kansas. Looks like a lot of much-needed help is coming in.

Later in the afternoon I started working on my slide remote control. For some reason American Coach put the rig control panel in the overhead directly over the dining room table, which makes it a long reach to run the slide in and out.

So I decided to use another of  the Wireless 4 Channel Remote Control Unit from yesterday’s AC remote control.

When I removed the slide control panel I was happy to see that it had a nice long wire harness to make it easy to connect up to.

My next task was to find 12VDC to run the board so I first pulled out the Inverter control board thinking I’d find something there, but the only wiring was the connection to the inverter.

So I popped off the cover on the power panel and found what I needed.

Now it was just a matter of wiring it all up using a couple of saddle taps and spade lugs.

And here’s the finished product.

Not sure what’s in store for tomorrow, but it looks like the rain has pretty much stopped in this area, and we actually saw a brief glance of the sun this afternoon.

Thought for the Day:

Even T-Rex’s are running for high ground in Hurricane Harvey.

dfasdfadsf

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.

gsdfgsf