Working on my problems
Instead of going to Parker, as I had considered, I spent the day fooling around with two of my plans to increase my battery charging capabilities, and so far, this is what I've come up with……
Plan one —— Find ways to limit the amount of electricity I use in a way that won't detrimentally affect my normal life. And so far, what I've come up with is not leaving my inverter on all night. Normally, I would leave my inverter on 24/7 because the owner’s manual says it only uses one-half of an amp every hour to idle, not doing anything. However, testing it with a clamp-on DC tester, I found it was using 2 amps per hour, which was a total waste since I'm sleeping and it's using up 16 or 20 amps a night for no reason. So turning it off when I go to bed was a simple solution to that problem.
Plan two —— find a way of getting more electricity from my solar panels. This took some experimenting, which involved driving around in circles for a while. Fortunately, while living out in the Quartzsite desert, I don't have too many neighbors around, and the ones that I do have are probably used to seeing some old desert rat driving around in circles, so I didn't have to worry about someone calling the cops or a psychiatrist.
I figured that with all the stuff on my roof casting shadows on the solar panels, maybe there's a direction I can point the truck that would have fewer shadows on the roof, and therefore more power coming in from the solar panels. I have an app on my phone that I get with my Renogy solar controller that tells me in real time what my watts and amps are that's coming from the sun into my panels. So by driving around in circles, I found a direction that gave me two more amps per hour coming into my batteries. A small amount, but it makes a big difference when you add up a day’s worth of extra amps.
Plan three —— Produce electricity in a different way than I'm doing now. All I'm able to do with this so far is Internet research, but hopefully next Monday I'll be able to do something that will make a tangible difference in my electrical woes.
Theboondork
I've got enough power built up in my batteries to take a chance working on some pictures. But I'm still not out of the woods yet; the 10-day forecast still has more cloudy weather than sunny. I keep hoping one morning I will wake up and find out that I've been looking at the Seattle, Washington, weather forecast instead of the Sonoran Desert.
I took this picture of Yuma at the VFW boondocking area. Most of the days I was there, it was cloudy and rainy.
What has become a typical day in Quartzsite? They'll be some sunny times during the day, but mostly cloudy.
You would think it would be a great time for sunrise and sunset pictures.... But you would be wrong. The clouds are so thick that the pretty sunrises and sunsets can't get through.