Day 16 - Quartzsite, AZ

Dinner took about 60 amp-hours of power. That was 2½ hours of the sous vide and 7½ minutes of the microwave. (Plus I watched TV for about 45 min). I had the sous vide plugged into the Kill-a-watt to measure its power consumption but when it was finished, I unplugged it before reading the display. Oh well, that just means I need to repeat the experiment. I’m curious to see if we are still above 50% in the morning with the power hungry propane furnace running. For tonight, I just have the rear furnace set to 66°F.

Monday Morning - At 8:00 this morning, the SOC (state of charge) of the coach batteries was 67% or about 143 amp-hours used. I cranked up the generator, which is a 7.5kw Cummins/Onan diesel unit mounted up front, and the Magnum inverter/charger was generating 83amps of which about 75amps were going back into the battery. It’ll take several hours for the generator to recharge the batteries. I’ll probably shut the generator off when the current starts to drop. I’ll fire it up again late afternoon.

Assuming there was about 4 hours of good sun, we would need about 500 watts to recover. Given the inefficiencies in charging, 600 watts. Which is what we had on the 5th wheel. The nice thing about solar is you start the evening with a fully charged battery bank.

We went to the local grocery store here in Quartzsite and I was hoping to pick up a turkey breast to sous vide for Thanksgiving but they didn’t have any. I did pick up a small whole turkey which I separated into about four meals. So that was a bargain. Today, I have the dark meat ready to go in the hot water set at 148°F for 6 hours or so. This time I’ll be sure to look at the power consumption on the Kill-a-watt.

It’s windy today so I brought in one of the slides as the worn out slide topper was really flapping. And the forecast was for double the wind speed this afternoon.

4:00 - Fired up the generator again as the SOC was down to 66% again as I’ve been running the sous vide for over 5 hours. This is not really a boondocking friendly cooking appliance as it draws a modest amount of power for a long time. But, since I wanted to use it for turkey on Thursday, I wanted to “practice”. Since dark meat cooks to a higher temperature, they shouldn’t be cooked at the same time. It’s interesting looking up some of the sous vide recipes. E.g. turkey thighs. Time varied from two hours to two days. But temperature was pretty consistent at 148°F.

Still windy. May leave the living room slide in until tomorrow. Since I had used about 250 amp-hours in one 24 hour period, I may need at least 1000 watts just to stay even...