Thursday, May 18, 2017

Day 13 - Corvallis, OR

Not a lot to report. I used a level on the floor by the door when I was leveling the trailer yesterday. It was not a good choice. To level the trailer, you use blocks under the wheels. The wheels are then chocked. After raising the front using the landing gear, the trailer is unhitched from the truck. The landing gear is then used to level the trailer front to back.

My inner ear got a workout yesterday as it wasn't very level. I re-hitched up and fixed it this morning. It feels a whole lot better now. Since the trailer is level, I was able to set up the LevelMate Pro. This talks to your iOS or Android device via Bluetooth LE and shows how unlevel the trailer is and displays with 1/4" resolution. I.e. You tell it the track and the distance from the rear axle to the front landing gear and it tells you how many leveling blocks are needed. 


Yesterday afternoon, I made a run to an RV shop to pick up some things that I hadn't ordered previously. Such as a 30# propane tank (only one was installed though there was room for two). A sewer hose, some chemicals for the black tank and some wheel chocks. I had ordered some X-Chocks but there wasn't enough room between the trailer tires. Fortunately, the gentleman behind me in line was going to buy some X-Chocks. I sold him the ones I had bought from Amazon. 

Another easy update was replacing 24 inside light bulbs with led replacements. The incandescent bulbs drew about 1.5 amps per bulb while all 24 led bulbs draw 3.2 amps. That's less than 1/10th the power. Plus, they run a whole lot cooler. 



I installed a 31" Samsung TV that we purchased from my son when he moved out of the state. I also set up the Ubiquity Nano and Gateway. To get power to these things, I had to dig into the electrical panel seen at the bottom right. The outlets by the TV (and the ceiling fan?) were on the same circuit as the converter aka battery charger. I rearranged circuits (only 6 duplex outlets) so all of the outlets are on the same 15 amp circuit and the converter is on it's own circuit so it can be easily shut off. 

Yesterday morning, I was seeing 18 amps from the panels and that was without the sun overhead.

The next project is to pick up another strain relief so I can run the cables from the automatic transfer switch into the electrical box. This would allow power for the outlets (mentioned above) to be powered off of the inverter when no shore power is available. And as soon as the RV is plugged into the campground, power switches automatically to the campground.

The main shore power cable runs through the little cabinet next to the electrical panel and that seems to be the logical place for the wired in surge protector. 


6 comments:

  1. This all sounds as easy as an open heart surgery to me, Richard...

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  2. That leveling app sounds awesome! And good job on selling the x-chocks you couldn't use!

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    1. The leveling app and gadget seems to work pretty well though we've only got to try it a couple of times so far.

      I just happen to glance at him and noticed the X-Chocks.

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  3. And I thought that I was a gadget freak! :) I hadn't even heard of the leveling app. Sounds fun. haha. And kudos on selling the x-chocks. We didn't like ours at all.

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