Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Day 22, 23 - Yukon, OK

Tuesday (22) - After the warm and sunny day yesterday, today is mostly overcast with some rain. One of the other campers mentioned that there are some tornado warnings for the area west of here towards Amarillo. I didn’t think it was “tornado season” anymore. 

This morning, I was up on the roof looking at the rear air conditioner. I purchased SoftStarts for the A/C units to allow them to run without the current spikes when the compressor starts up. The wiring was slightly different from the instructions so I sent an email off to tech support. I also asked it it was alright to install the SoftStart unit next to the blower motor. They responded within 30 minutes with what I needed. Unfortunately, there is rain with lightning in the forecast for the rest of the day. But it’s supposed to be nice tomorrow. Lots of thunder to the south and west and the NWS says 50amp winds.

I tried to participate in testing yesterday afternoon but there was insufficient bandwidth on the campground WiFi and AT&T stopped working for about 5 minutes. Not reliable enough for the test. Fortunately, there as an extra VE logged into the session or else the test would have needed to be restarted.

The weather app says that there is a severe weather warning for most of the night though we are in the “less severe” area of the state. And they suggest having a weather radio turned on.

Wednesday (23) - This morning started at 4:40am with tornado sirens going off. I grabbed the dog (as the cat had seemed to vanish), a flashlight, phone w/external battery, and my raincoat. It was pouring buckets with lightning all around every couple of seconds. We went to the underground shelter and I passed the dog down the short ladder and followed. There were about 15 people and about 5 dogs. Normally our dog barks at other people and other dogs but he stood quietly watching everything. By about 5:15am, the manager came by and said that the warning was over and the sirens had stopped. 

This morning, after things dried out, I installed a SoftStart on the rear A/C unit. It was pretty straightforward and is running right now. The green LED shows that the compressor is running. Maybe I’ll install the front one tomorrow morning as it’s already getting warm.

4 comments:

  1. So, no more amperage spikes with the SoftStart? What is peak amp draw while running the single AC?

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    1. That’s kind of the idea. I don have an easy way to accurately measure AC current when we are plugged into 50amp. When on 30amp, there is a display inside that shows how much current we are drawing. I did notice that when the A/C starts up, the blower turns on first then about 5 sec later, the compressor turns on.

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  2. Being woken by tornado sirens and having to actually go to a shelter sounds terrifying! That is something we have not yet experienced, and something I do not look forward to. I'm glad it was all over relatively quickly.

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  3. Next time we're camping close to each other, I'd like to see if one of your AC units will run with just power from my small generator....I think max of 1600 watts.

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