Casa Grande, AZ - TT

Friday - Another cool morning with a low in the 40s (°F) but it's supposed to be warming up into the mid-70s. I just finished the early test session with a candidate from Fairbanks. He passed easily and quickly. After that, I modified the ESP32 wiring and configuration of the microprocessor monitoring the living room temperature and humidity. Just moving a wire from digital I/O 4 to I/O 5. Apparently, I/O 4 is could also be used for something else and it was causing the display to blank out occasionally. No one signed up for the later session so now I’m looking for something constructive to do.

I brought back my small jump starter, an Anti-Gravity XP-3), back from Fairbanks in my carry-on bag. It’s way too small for the RV but more than enough for the Jeep. Plus, it’s a handy 12VDC source when testing things out. What surprised me is that after four years of sitting in the Ural trunk, it still registered over 50% charge. Not too shabby. 

Something that may be interesting to anyone considering adding solar to their RV is what happens with a shadow. The dips in this graph are from the shadow of a light pole passing over the panels. The dip furthest to the right is crossing two panels. Even small shadows make a huge difference.

Saturday - A mid-morning test session today. After that, I'll start packing some things up for our move tomorrow morning. We will be heading east through Tucson to Benson, AZ. 

Almost everything is packed up. I have the battery charger connected to the chassis batteries as they were at 12.2V. I think I’ll need to come up with a way for them to be charged from the coach batteries. I guess that means some other DC-DC charger to trickle charge them. I did have the chassis battery disconnect switch in the “Off” position but there must be some other draws. Entirely likely as there are around 6 wires on the chassis positive terminal and only one is the disconnect.