Years ago, during a pre-purchase inspection before finalizing the deal to buy the Grey Ghost, the Volvo mechanic pointed out that both belt tensioners really needed to be replaced, but that it wasn’t urgent. I put the project off for a while–amost a year–until after successfully starting the world’s first nuclear reactor using heat pipes…
Category: Projects and How-Tos
This series will share our latest projects and give some insight on how you can perform your own maintenance and upgrades to your rig.
Microwave, Convection Oven, and Range Hood
The microwave and separate hood were one of the things I was looking forward to changing as part of the kitchen remodel. The hood’s fan made plenty of noise, but moved very little air. And the microwave was higher up than was comfortable. I also wanted to be able to use an oven for longer…
Cooking with Gas!
Ok, so I could cook with gas before. But now it’s a much more pleasant experience. The original RV oven went to a new home, along with the oven’s pilot light, too-small broiler compartment, and manual ignition stove top. I wanted to replace it with a fairly inexpensive, but good looking gas range. I wanted…
Back to the Kitchen Remodel for a bit…
Well, not necessarily more remodeling, but I thought I’d update with a few short reviews on the appliances used and my thoughts on the layout having lived with it for almost a year now. Since it was the first to go in, I’ll cover the refrigerator in this post.
Spoiler Alert!
So it has been quite a while since I’ve posted anything on the lithium battery project. I had a week of dry camping sneaking up on me, and made a kind of mad dash to get the RV out of winter hibernation (still in use, but parked for a couple of months), get the batteries…
Buying the Hardware: Inverters
If you’ve followed this project from the beginning, you know that one of the reasons I wanted to go to a 48V DC system was for generating AC power. At 48V, generally you get more capacity (in terms of power) for your money; because of it’s popularity in off-grid installations, there’s arguably more choice, particularly…
Buying the Hardware: Battery Monitoring/Charging
I mentioned in the previous post that a new battery monitoring system was going to be built to allow use of run-of-the-mill charging equipment, and that it’s cost would be less than $100. It’s also going to be internet connected–we’ll be able to log state of charge, voltage, and a number of other performance metrics…
Buying the Hardware
Here’s where things start to get pretty interesting–and where money really starts leaving never to be seen again. I’ve talked briefly about the battery pack itself, and still plan to write more about that decision process, but it’s in-hand and looks well suited to do the job. That’s the easy part. Now we’re into figuring…
Home-Brew Macerator Pump
I’m taking a little break from the lithium battery project today. Usually I don’t stray from hookups long enough to worry about emptying my waste tanks–it helps that I can handle 75 gallons down the toilet, and another 150 gallons of grey water–but for the first time in 10 years, I needed to empty my…
What am I trying to accomplish?
It’s probably about time to talk about what I’m trying to accomplish with this project, and why I didn’t just replace my aging lead acid batteries. That would have been easy, but not much of an improvement.