Day 57 - Palm Desert, CA - TT

This morning, we packed up after our five days behind Chiriaco Summit. A nice campground that I would recommend to anyone. Besides the camp host, there are only two other vehicles and they were tent camping. Since I wasn't able to test out the new Progressive Dynamics converter running on a generator, I pulled out the other Champion 2000 watt generator. We have two of the Champion generators in case we want to run the air conditioner. But we only needed one at Quartzsite and none here. The batteries were down to 73% in the morning so I thought that this would be a good test of the converter.

I started the generator without a load and let it warm up a bit but left "economy mode" off so that the engine speed would stay higher. Then plugged in the converter and it was drawing 10.6 amps AC. The generator supported the load just fine. When I looked at the Trimetric battery monitor, it showed 72 amps DC were being pushed into the battery. This is what I was looking for, a way to charge the batteries with a minimum of generator run time. After running the generator for about 30 minutes, the batteries were up to 85%. BTW, that 72 amps were from the combination of the converter and the solar charge controller. I wanted to test this as someone on a forum mentioned that his Champion generator would shut down when the converter was plugged in. This was about 1000 watts which was well under the spec for the generator.

We arrived at Palm Springs Thousand Trails a bit before the official check-in time and found a convenient pull-thru site. This place is more a typical RV park but the sites are reasonably spaced out. And there are these nice palm trees. And we can see the pool out of the back window. Today is the first time that we are running the air conditioner. It's 81°F right now.

I'm flying back to Fairbanks tomorrow morning for a couple of days and this RV park is only about 14 miles from the airport.