This afternoon I filled the water tank up with the little meter. It said that I put in 28.5 gallons before water started flowing out the fill tube. The “gauge” on the inside of the RV said 2/3 of a tank. The same thing it said practically the entire time we were at Quartzsite. But, a few days ago, I pulled 44 gallons out of the tank after adding filling it with 27.5 gallons. Before filling it back then, the “gauge” read 2/3 of a tank. I can understand the little meter being horribly inaccurate especially since the flow rate is low. The meter is only a plastic housing with a small propeller in the water flow designed for sprinkler systems. So we are back to not really knowing how much water we used while boondocking for nine days. The only way to know is to run out of water. How annoying...
In January, the most current that we’ve been able to get out of the solar panels was about 14.5 amps. Today, we got almost 19 amps. A website shows the amount of energy striking a surface given the angle of the panel and the city you are in. The graphic below is an example for Phoenix, AZ.
Between January and February, there is about a 25% increase in solar radiation on a flat surface such as my untiltable solar panels. By March, it's over 50% higher than January.
It always amazes me how much difference there is sun strike from Dec to Jan to Feb to March.
ReplyDeleteI've wished for better water fill/use measurement. We use the same little plastic gauge for fill along with the RV's built-in gauge. I have slightly different problem, it has a 90 gal tank and I don't need that much or want the weight for our boon docking trips in the mountains.
As I fill the fresh water tank, the air from the tank comes out the same hose so the flow rate has to be kept rather low. I think that’s why the little plastic gauge isn’t reading very accurately. The overflow hose just sticks down next to the drain hose and seems to start overflowing when the tank is far from full. And the fresh water seems to drain from the tank while traveling from the overflow hose. I don’t know what the setup is but it doesn’t seem to work very well. I put a valve on the overflow hose and that eliminated the drain-while-traveling problem. I’m thinking of running some Pex from the overflow hose, through a gate valve, into the city water line and just use that to fill the tank. The old fill hose will then become the overflow and vent. The tank should fill a whole lot faster...
DeleteRichardM, were you the one who told me that once the water starts coming out of the overflow tube, its important to plug the drain tubes at that point since it also becomes a siphon and results in my case in only 3 of 4 lights on the panel indicator?
ReplyDeleteThe use of plugs has, in my case, kept the water in the tank as I travel...
I also carry the extra water (15 gal) in containers in the bath tub so I don't worry as much about running out. Hmmm, typing this, I just realized switching to the 'T-Dub for exploration means losing the ability to carry water cans easily for refilling when out and about.
I don’t know. I discovered that I would lose most of the water from the overflow last June when driving down from AK. There was one place where we found a nice city campground to stay at enroute from Edmonton to the Spokane area and we had no water. This was after I had filled up the tank in Edmonton. While in Corvallis the following September, I installed a drain valve on the overflow hose. We haven’t had a problem since. Then again, when boondocking, you could just keep your water containers filled and store them on the much lighter trailer...
Delete