The camper passed the test.
It's supposed to reach the low 60s today, a big improvement over yesterday's low 50s. Since I don't deal with cold very well anymore, thanks to the blood thinners I'm taking, I was used to the 90s only a couple of weeks ago; now, rather suddenly, I'm having to get used to the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Low temperatures also mean running my heater on and off during the day and dealing with the higher cost of propane. I never run the heater at night; I just have plenty of warm blankets, so it's during the day that I'm totally dependent on my factory furnace sucking up expensive propane.
Well, my test is over, and my new battery system and eliminating the use of the inverter as much as possible have proven to be worth the effort and expense. In three solid days with no sunshine that wasn't at least somewhat covered by thick clouds, I managed to slither through life, living perfectly normal out at Pete's.
Now, those of you who have boondocked know that a "perfectly normal life" of boondocking isn't the same as a perfectly normal life for anyone else.... We boondockers don't jump out of bed and switch on our air conditioner, turn on our electric coffee pot, and throw something in the microwave, as we blow-dry our hair, as if I had any hair to blow-dry. Boondocking is fairly austere at best, and somewhat confining when you're living in something as small as a truck camper, so my wants and needs, by necessity, have to be rather limited.
But I was able to live what I call a normal life: running my computers, my LED lights, and, of course, my factory furnace, which gets its heat from propane but uses electricity to run the fan, just like normal, while finishing up this entire three-day test with FULL batteries in the battery bank.
This showed me that even though every day was nothing but thick clouds, the entire day, the solar panels both on the roof and deployed out in the yard, were still bringing in enough power to keep my life comfortable and not stress about running out of electricity.
So now I feel a bit better about dealing with a winter in Arizona, facing the devastating effects of a super double-whammy mega El Niño, and may very well be the only boondocker in Quartzsite to survive an El Niño of this magnitude.
theboondork
I took these three photos on three separate days. Just to give everyone an idea of how cloudy it's been. I've never seen it this cloudy at Pete's before. But that’s probably because I’ve never come out here after seeing a weather forecast this bad.
The endless cloudy days remind me of time I've spent in Oregon and other parts of the Pacific Northwest…. I didn't like it then, and I sure as heck don't like it now.
My teeny tiny home is keeping me relatively comfortable in uncomfortable weather.