Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Day 44, 45 - Benson, AZ - TT

Tuesday (44) - I turned off the battery charger last night to see how the additional solar panel helps. This morning, we were down to 92% on our batteries as we didn't really use that much power overnight. But, even with a lot of cloud cover, we were back up to 100% by 9am. The upper blue line on the graph is the battery state-of-charge (soc). Pink-ish is DC consumption and orange-ish is solar. This screen clip is from the Victron portal. 

This is a screen capture from the touch screen. It is showing max power and current. This is better info than I was getting from the Raspberry Pi setup on the 5th wheel. And, I’m able to access the local screen through the portal. Pretty slick. I can see why the Victron stuff is so popular. 

Tomorrow, we leave this park and plan on dry camping on our way to the next park north of Los Angeles. 

Oh, now I’m officially “senior citizen”. Social Security called to let me know that I’m all signed up effective April 1, 2021. Oh joy…

Wednesday (45)
 - A long driving day today. Benson, AZ, to Twentynine Palms, CA. Google says 436 miles but I took the Phoenix bypass which adds a few more miles. To me, it’s worth the detour. We are lot-docking at Tortoise Rock Casino, a small casino that we found on the AllStays app. Free parking for up to 72 hours. Nice to just go inside and order food after a long day on the road. The parking lot is slightly tilted but it’ll be fine for one night. We had the generator running while driving for about five hours with both of the roof A/Cs running. It got warmer as we dropped in elevation to a high of over 90°F. 

The RV ran fine. Even on the long grades with 90°+ air temperatures, the engine temperature never exceeded 206°F. So that was a win. We are near the northern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park but we aren’t planning to visit. Tomorrow is another travel day. 

2 comments:

  1. Senior Citizen eh? Am surprised the SSA called, was there something you did beforehand to prep for this event in terms of paperwork?

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    Replies
    1. Yes, I filler out the paperwork back in February. This was a call to acknowledge that the received the paperwork and wanted to verify my selections.

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