I'm going back to Phoenix tomorrow and staying at Ben Avery's gun range. I'm looking forward to having full hookups again, I've been Boondocking for 16 straight days and it will be great to have utilities again.
I spent the morning changing the florescent light over my kitchen sink into an LED light. It was a bit more complicated than I thought it was going to be and I have three more to do so I hope it will get easier now that I have some basic knowledge on how to do it. I was concerned that maybe it wouldn't be bright enough because I had two florescent tubes in the light and I only put in one LED light but this one LED tube is at least as bright as before and may be a little bit brighter. But the main reason I put it in there is to save electricity. This light is used a lot even in the daytime so it was worth putting the time and money into making it into an LED. The old florescent light used 2.6 amps and the new LED uses .4 amps that's a big savings and will make life easier on the cloudy days when the solar panels aren't putting out very much power.
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I spent most of the day finishing up the installation of my heater, since I was making a video at the same time I believe it took twice as long to put in the propane lines as it should have. But it's working in fact it's heating up the Arctic Fox as I write this. And so far I'm a happy camper. The heater is absolutely silent, uses no electricity at all, and according to the advertising is 99.9% efficient, which means that you get all of the heat out of the propane that it can produce. A trailer furnace is nowhere near that and one way you can tell is to go outside your RV while the furnace is running and feel what's coming out of the heater vent. There are some downsides to this type of heater but they seem pretty manageable. One thing is you have to make sure that you slightly open a window or a vent just a tiny amount to make sure that oxygen is coming into the room, the other thing is that burning propane puts humidity into the air, but in the places I've been staying I consider that a benefit. There is also a rumor that these heaters don't work very well at high altitude. I've read some people that used it in the mountains and said it was fine. I guess I'll find out this summer because I plan on staying in Colorado in the mountains. The heater is called a HearthRite, and mine is a 10,000 BTU radiant heater.
I went by the solar panel store today and they were closed up maybe they close on the weekends or maybe they're closed for the holidays. I'll try again next week and if they're still closed I'll have to put off my solar panel project for another time.
In the meantime I started on another project, I'm going to start installing my radiant heater, I bought it about a year ago with the intention of installing it when I had nothing better to do but since the weather's been kind of chilly I thought that this might be a good time to get started on the project. This heater is supposed to help me in two different ways, it is supposed to hardly use any electricity at all and it's supposed to use less propane than my furnace does. So if that actually works I will have less trouble keeping my batteries charged up and I'll be spending less money on propane and that's a win-win that I can use right now. I'm making a video of the installation and I hope it turns out a lot better than the video I tried to make of my digital thermostat installation, that one stunk so bad the whole thing had to be thrown in the trash and never spoken of again. |
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