Our RV Adventures

I spent the afternoon finishing up a couple of things on our truck for our trip tomorrow.

After I filled up the windshield washer fluid tank with the Rain-X washer fluid I got at Wal-Mart yesterday. I’ve used this stuff for years and it really works. During light to medium rainstorms you don’t even have to turn the wipers on. The water just beads up and rolls up the windshield.

Then I installed my latest new toy.

A week or so ago I found this article on Road and Track’s site about the Top 5 Best Dashcams. And their favorite was the cheapest one at around $50. Then in one of those serendipitous things, a few days later I got an online ad from Amazon listing the $50 cam for $30 so I ordered one. Amazon DashCam  

It was quickly installed  and configured. I like the bigger screen and larger, easier to use buttons. We’ll give a good try-out on our trip tomorrow and I’ll let you know.

Well it was a lot of work but we now have all our Christmas lights up in the rig.

I think the one most impressed with them was Karma. After I put them up, she got on the kitchen counter and just stared up at them for about 20 minutes.

Over the years we slacked off our decorating. This was what we did in 2009, our first Christmas in our rig.

Talking about Karma, this afternoon she jumped up on the back of the sofa and was chasing something in the front end of the window, pawing at it. Then I heard a ‘yelp’ and Karma started licking her left paw. Looking down in the window track I found a honey bee. Don’t know how it got in, but I got rid of it.

Karma only licked at her paw for a few minutes and then it didn’t seem to bother her any more. I looked at it awhile later and it wasn’t swollen and didn’t seem to be tender, so I guess she’s OK.

This afternoon I came across this graphic on Facebook and couldn’t resist making a comment correcting all the misinformation in it.

And here was my comment.

Having spent 10 years at JSC on the Shuttle program, I can tell you why NASA didn’t use pencils. Pencil ‘lead’ is graphite. And graphite is electrically conductive.

When you use a pencil in space the tiny graphite particles shed by the pencil float off around the cockpit, coming to rest everywhere, inside instruments, electronics, etc., causing random shorts and problems. With the wrong short at the wrong time, you could lose a spacecraft.

While the part about the Russians using a pencil is true, the rest is just completely wrong.

Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Co. spent $1 million of his OWN money to develop the Fisher Space Pen for sale to the public. In 1968 Fisher sold 400 pens to NASA for $2.39 a pen, a 40% discount from the retail $3.98 because they bought in bulk.

In 1968 the Russians saw the light and ordered 100 pens and 1000 refills for their space program.

Then in 1969 the Apollo 11 crew used parts of a Space Pen to fix a broken rocket engine arming switch, letting them make the return trip back to Earth

A pretty good deal for $956 of Fisher Space Pens. And a lot better than the fictitious $12 Billion.

Oh, yeah. The pen won’t work at 300°Celcius either. That’s 572°F. The pen would melted long before that. As well as the person using it.

If life hands you lemons, you’re less likely to have scurvy.

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Just as soon as I told you how much I liked my PowerMax Power Converter that I got from Amazon, it cratered.

Well not completely. It’s still putting out 13.2 VDC and keeping the house batteries charged with no problems. But it’s no longer running through its 3 voltage level cycle.

When it’s first plugged in, the power converter starts up in ‘Boost’ mode at 14.4 volts to quickly bring a battery up to full charge. It then switches into ‘Standard’ mode at 13.6 VDC. This mode is where the converter stays when there is a steady drain during normal use.

When there is little or no drain, the converter drops back to ‘Trickle’ mode at 13.2 VDC, and then toggles back and forth between ‘Standard’ mode and ‘Trickle’ mode as needed. By itself that’s fine and dandy. But I need more.

Because the isolator between the house batteries and the engine batteries only pulls in above 14.0 VDC, that means that the engine batteries only get charged when the converter is first turned on and is in ‘Boost’ mode. And since the converter normally stays on all the time when we’re on shore power, that means that the engine batteries weren’t being kept charged.

But I had a plan. (I always have a plan. Often three or four of them) My idea was to just put the power converter on a heavy-duty timer. Initially I set the the timer to turn the converter off  for 30 minutes (the minimum the timer allows) every 8 hours. After a couple of weeks, I backed it off to powering off only twice a day. And that’s the way it’s been for the last two years. This keeps the engine batteries topped off with no problems.

Until a few days ago. Coming in the rig I noticed that the engine voltmeter was showing only about 12.4 volts, lower than it should be. Thinking maybe there was a timer problem, I restarted it manually. With no luck.

The power converter was stuck in ‘Trickle’ mode at 13.2 volts and would never run through its cycle. I even unplugged for a couple of hours, but that didn’t help either. So this morning I put in a call to PowerMax to see if there was any thing else I could check. Turns out, No.

Right now I’ve got my auto battery charger keeping the engine batteries charged, while I see about getting the converter replaced. When I purchased the converter from Amazon in December 2014, I did purchase an extra 2 year warranty for only $9.90. Seems like a really good deal now.

My next call this morning was to the McDonald’s in Cuero, TX to see if they were going to be open Thanksgiving morning. Finding out that they would be, we’ll stop there for a breakfast sandwich on our way to our daughter Brandi’s in Katy for Thanksgiving.

Then it was outside to install my new Sylvania SilverStar Ultra headlight bulbs. Unlike many vehicles where you can access the bulb sockets from under the hood, with our Dodge Dakota the entire headlight assembly has to be pulled by removing 3 bolts from around the outside of the lens.

One thing you need to watch with these halogen bulbs is that you don’t touch the glass with your fingers. The grease from your fingertips will burn black and create a hotspot, cracking the glass. If you do it accidentally, use an alcohol-soaked cloth to clean the glass.

I finished up by adding a quart of oil to the truck. Even at almost 250,000 miles it only uses about a quart every 1000 miles, pretty much the way it’s been since day one.

A little after 4pm Jan and I headed out to have dinner at Bella Sera once again. We’d always heard how good their pizza was, so this time we wanted to give it a try.

We got the large (16â€) Meat Lover’s Pizza, adding mushrooms to the pepperoni, Canadian bacon, hamburger, and Italian sausage. We always get the large so we have leftovers.

Jan and I both agreed that this was probably the 2nd best pizza we’ve ever had, second only our number 1 favorite, Grimaldi’s. The only thing Bella Sera misses out on is the coal-fired brick oven that Grimaldi’s uses. You can taste the difference.

Before heading home, we made a Wal-Mart stop to pick up a prescription for Jan, gas for the trip, and finished up with a carwash to get all the dust and grime off before our trip on Thursday.

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.†― Jack London

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