Sunday, June 4, 2017

Day 30 - Harvest Host Site, CA

Our second Harvest Host experience is at a fruit and vegetable farm. They had us park by the loading ramp and the spot is pretty flat. In fact, we did not need any leveling blocks and once I used the front landing gear to take the load off of the hitch, the trailer was level. I went ahead and left it connected. We stopped in the store and picked up dinner (plus a bit more). The chicken pot pie and fresh strawberry pie looked too good to pass up. Some of the reviews were kind of negative but the owner was fantastic to deal with. Very nice, he came by to check on us several times to see if we needed anything. He invited us to go ahead and pick some berries for our cereal or dessert.

On our way here, we stopped at Costco and Target to pick up some food items before having a wonderful lunch with my cousin in north Sacramento. Driving through Sacramento was without incident and the gps continues to work well guiding us through the interchanges complete with pictures showing what lanes to be in. I do ask Bridget to use Google maps satellite view to look at parking lots in advance to find parking. E.g find parking at the Woodland Costco/Target.

About a half hour before the store closed, I dug out the two 2000 watt Champion generators and the parallel kit.The parallel kit allows you to wire up two of their generators and, in this case, supply 30 amps. This allows us to run the air conditioner. The Progressive Industries EMS that I installed complains that there is an open ground, i.e. the generator isn't connected to earth ground, and disconnects to power from the RV. I could ground the generators or this is the one instance when I would flip the switch on the EMS display to disable the EMS. Now power from the generator is passed straight through. This was the first time I've tried either the generators or the parallel kit. Though I did ask my brother in-law to unpack and run both generators shortly after they arrived from Amazon.

When we first arrived here, I turned on the inverter so we could run some electric fans to keep air circulating. The Trimetric monitor was reporting a 16 amp draw from the battery bank. It took me a bit to figure out that I needed to manually switch the refrigerator to propane when the inverter is on. That's when I noticed that the "check" light was lit on the refrigerator. This usually means that the refrigerator was unable to light the burner which translates to out of propane. I had only turned on one of the two tanks. Problem solved. So for us 30 lbs of propane translates to about 2 1/2 weeks of use. Not too bad at all.

10 comments:

  1. We've a 76lb onboard tank, still at 1/2 tank since my first RV camping trip in Buena Vista in November. Propane is key for the fridge unless you're on shore power as you've realized. You have ceiling fans!?

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    1. Two 30# tanks with a shared regulator and an auto-switching valve. Yes, there is a ceiling fan in the main living area. It runs on 110.

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  2. You had me at strawberry pie........

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  3. Harvest Hosts has been interesting. Are you enjoying the experience? Do you have any problem getting there within business hours? (We tend to drive late and not stop early, so wondering if it is good for us.) 2.5 weeks on one tank is great.

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    1. We tend to stop early anyway so it's working for us. We have another planned for tomorrow...

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    2. BTW, this is completely different behavior from when I had a limited amount of vacation.

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  4. Excellent to see things going so well for you! We are about to do our first boondocking since the heat started. Ugh. It's supposed to be most 100 when we get to Tulsa. Yuck.

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    1. High temps aren't fun and when combined with high humidity it's horrible.

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  5. Yes, agreed. And sadly, that's what we have to look forward to at home. Boo.

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