Travels With Miranda

When I first came to southern Alberta, I thought that it looked exactly like my vision of Texas: mostly flat with a few rolling hills, lots of county roads with super high speed limits to explore, more pick up trucks than cars, and lots of jeans and stetsons. Add in palm trees, and you’ve got Texas so far.

This is the first place I’ve been with my truck that I can legally drive at a speed that requires me to shift into fifth gear! My truck is a speed demon, the ride just gets smoother and nicer the higher over 110KPH I go. This could be a Ford engine design thing; Miranda drives much more smoothly at 110KPH than she does at 90KPH.

I drove to Rockport and back just to get a charge on the laptop. Nothing much was open, but I did get out of the truck to take some boring pictures:

I met my neighbours, nice folks from Colorado.

My batteries are fully recharged, and I now know my battery monitor is NOT working correctly. I resynched it to show that I am at a full charge and it immediately dropped to 98% because it claims that I am running 8A when I have nothing running at all except the fridge, which is only an amp if that much. I should have just paid to get a pro to install the damn thing. I saw a couple of ads for mobile RV repairs and I’m going to make a few calls to see if I can find a mobile tech who can come take a look at it for me. Anyway, I’m not worried about power for the next few days as I’m barely running anything and it’s sunny enough to get a full charge by mid-day.

The laptop charging situation has completely floored me. I can’t believe it’s taken this long for me to realise that it’s not possible to charge a laptop through an inverter drawing off batteries! Are all other computer using boondockers charging theirs when the genny is running?!

Both my Mac and PC need 16.5V to charge. The Mac is a little less fussy than the PC and I can charge it on the small inverter while I’m driving. But that’s still not high enough voltage for the PC! I’ve found a DC charging solution for the Mac that I will be getting on Saturday, but the PC is trickier. I found a charger, but it’s not for my model exactly, so I don’t even know if it will work. It should also be here Saturday, I hope, and am crossing my fingers it will work.

In other wonderful news, the AC on the truck isn’t working. This is not news to me, but I only just remembered to mention it. I’m hoping it’s because of the leaves I still haven’t attacked. I’ve been a bit gun shy about this repair since step one is to remove the radio. The AC worked fine when I bought the truck, so I’m not convinced at this point that there is anything majorly wrong with it. Ha, famous last words.

It’s quite warm today, but there is a lovely breeze coming off the bay so the rig is comfortable. My neighbour says the water is just below 60 degrees. I bought some wading shoes at Walmart on the way home, so I am probably going to get a little wet today.

The time has come to truly test my new electrical system. I’m starting with a full charge, my batteries are watered, and I’m looking at a long stretch of warmth and sun. This is going to be my first attempt to truly live off grid on a fairly normal routine. The only thing missing is the DC charger for my Mac and that will be here Saturday. So I only have about another hour on my Mac tonight and an hour total tomorrow, then I’ll need to take it for a drive on Friday. Hopefully, the DC charger will work and I will have enough power to use my Mac as much as I need to!

One thing I am going to aim for is to live as much as I can by the sun. The days are short, so that won’t be super feasible, but I am going to try as much as possible to restrain my computer usage to daylight hours and use my iPad in the evenings.

I tend to spend my evenings sitting in the dark when I boondock, but I’m pretty sure that’s ridiculous with my set up. So I am allowing myself one LED light on in whatever room I’m and will see if that’s sustainable.

Finally, I have a ton of projects to do that do not require power but do require good weather. So I will attempt to spend a little less time at the keyboard and a little more time on other things while I am here, in addition to road tripping around the environs.

Well, methinks it’s time for dinner. Spinach salad, bratwurst, and sweet potato fries anyone?

I did some more research about Macbook Pros and voltage before shutting down my computer earlier this morning and found information that led me to believe that I could still charge under slightly lower than optimal voltage, it just wouldn’t be as efficient.

The motorhome engine battery puts out more than 14 volts when the engine is running. Could that be enough to charge my Macbook Pro while I was driving? Hmm…

All of my inverters are designed to be hard wired to a battery, so they do not have a 12V plug. I had a one of those left over from when I added my 12V outlet in the study, so I spliced it into my 300W inverter. I got into the cab, plugged in the inverter, turned on the engine, turned on the inverter, plugged in the computer and… voila! I got a solid hour of charging while getting to the next rest area, giving me 50% battery capacity.

By managing my computer use, I will be fine for computer power while I’m traveling, but this is obviously not going to work when I stop to boondock for an extended period of time. So I will be ordering the 12V charger to be sent general delivery to a post office in the New Orleans area.

I’m feeling much, much better now that I understand what has been going on and am now confident that my battery bank is working as it should be! It’s wonderful to be sitting here with the solar array monitor telling me the batteries are fully charged and that the battery monitor and the batteries themselves confirm it!

I called ahead to the Walmart just south of Charlotte that I was eyeing and they definitely allow overnight parking! They’re only a couple of hours away from this rest area, so I will spend several hours here and will leave around 2PM or so to avoid rush hour.

Tomorrow is the big day: Atlanta. I’ve done my research on the RVing forums and the consensus is to stick to the interstate’s centre lanes through the city rather than use the bypass and to go through at either midday or midnight.

At the rate I am going, I could be in New Orleans by Thursday or Friday, but I’m just playing it by ear. I’m really enjoying these short driving spurts coupled with long pauses at rest areas, even if the semis are noisy!

This morning, I ran my battery bank through the paces to eliminate problems one by one. The problem is either my inverters or my laptop. I can’t imagine having three bad inverters, so the answer must be the laptop.

I’m running off a battery that’s at about 97% right now (12.5V) with a draw of about 0.3 amps, which is the fridge. BTW, I never, ever run my fridge on auto, so it cannot switch over to electric.

If I turn on the big inverter. No problem, I’m now drawing about 1 amp. Turn on the UPS for the office stuff and run the external drives. No problem, I’m below 2 amps. Plug in the laptop and it charges for about five seconds, long enough to tell me I’m drawing about 6 amps, and then the inverter starts shrieking that the voltage is too low.

I pulled the Kill-O-Watt metre into the inverter to see what kind of wattage the charger is drawing right before the inverter cuts out, and it fluctuated between 90 and 120 watts, the lower end of which is comparable to what the battery monitor was telling me.

So I finally did a search on solar powering a MacBook Pro and, surprise, surprise, there is no easy answer… because the MBP requires a higher voltage than that supplied by an RV system. There’s the answer! The MBP is trying to draw something like 16V out of my system, which obviously won’t work!

I found many references to a guy who has successfully hacked a Magsafe MacBook brick to run straight off of 12V power, not through an inverter. It’s pricy, $170, but if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. In the meantime, I need to find a Starbucks. Gaaaaaaah. Apple, why do you do this to me!

I was working at my computer without any incident for several hours since unplugging. The minute I plugged my laptop charger in, my system went hay wire! The solar control monitor reading dropped from 14 volts and change to 11.5 volts and my inverter started shrieking!

This is not good! I really need to get that battery monitor working to figure out what is going on. I also got a Kill-a-Watt metre to figure out what I’m drawing on the 120V side of things.

FYI, the maximum wattage for a 17″ Macbook Pro is 85, with average draw running 35 to 60 watts. On 12V power, that translates to a maximum of 7 to an average of 3 to 5 amps. I really can’t figure out why my system can’t handle, but maybe I’m running more than I thought I was. I’m going to go get some fuses to hopefully get that battery monitor working again.