Ah, another week coming to a close. A little more work on the van. The cabinet face construction is going slow due to the learning process, but the wardrobe and pantry are done. I will need to go get a sheet of quality 3/4 inch plywood for the cabinet doors and I will have to install the ladder racks to bring it home on by the end of the month. The more furniture that gets built in the van, the less it will carry inside.
Here's the pantry cabinet face.
I installed receptacles for the kitchen counter top and the microwave. I placed wood blocks and strips in the microwave spot to keep it from sliding out and crashing and to keep the left side away from the wall so the airflow from it won't get blocked.
The lower section that covers the batteries I extended 3 1/2 inches to the right to help protect that expensive 250 amp 12 volt breaker. I can reach in with my hand to turn it off and on. I opened the area in front of the 2 smaller breakers so I can see which is which when powering up or down the charge controller.
The 3/4 plywood that I made that cover out of looks quite distressed once I stained it and put on a few coats of polyurethane. The reason is that that sheet of 3/4 plywood was at the top of a short stack of plywood that I carried in the van for at least 7 years whilst carrying pallets of cement blocks, pallets of fertilizer and maybe 100 trips to the dump with piles of full garbage bags of household garbage. I did sand it a bit.
I've spent some time this week adding coats of polyurethane to the ceiling so I can get to the 3 coats recommended on the directions on the side of the can. one more to go tomorrow then I can put the trim rings on the roof vents and install the cheesy led light fixtures that I got.
I spent an hour today laying out for the bed which is the largest thing in the van. I marked the rear corner of the bed and the rear cabinet on the drivers side. it was starting to look a bit cramped so I brought in my porta potti and closed the back doors. I found that if I reduce the depth of the rear cabinet by 2 inches, I should be able to wipe my butt. Change made. So I started cutting more plywood.
Last night after applying some stain, I left the ceiling fan on for 4 hours when I went in. When I went out to shut it off, my idiot light battery charge indicator had dropped from 100% to 90%. So I figured I better finally put a charge to those batteries that been sitting around for awhile.
So this morning I drug out the old Honda 3000i and managed to get it started.
I love that thing. It started even after so many months and years of neglect. It had a half gallon of 2 year old gas in it but the gas had a decent amount of Stabil added when I bought it. After maybe 6 pulls, it started and I added some sea foam to clear the cobwebs. Good to go! I plugged in the new van coach cord and used the Magnum charger to bring the batteries back up. There was just a bit of reading and setting of parameters on the thing to be done before charging.
The Magnum lets you set the incoming amperage which I set at 25 amps to hopefully match the generator output. I guessed that it would have more juice than my extension cord which is well over 100 feet from the incoming service panel.
I was occasionally watching the ME_ARC display to see the charging as it progressed. I suppose I should have taken better notes for those that might be interested, but I was doing all the above mentioned polyurethaning and practice butt wiping ect.
It was in Bulk charging for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, then went to Absorption for quite a longer period. Absorption was at 14.7 volts and for amps I was seeing two different numbers, depending on whether I was looking at the BMK device reading (the thing that reads off the shunt but displays on the ME-ARC) or the inverter amp reading.
Bulk amps were up around 50 and Absorption amps started in the 40s, dropping to 5ish(on the BMK reading) when the generator ran out of the old gas. I refilled it with fresh gas and restarted it at which point the charger said it was in float. Float was at 13.77 volts and started out around 4.6 amps and wound down to about 3.6 amps. There was a bit of flutter to those BMK numbers, at the end say, from 4.4 fluttering down to 3.4 and back and forth.
The charger shut itself down at that point. At this point I'm not sure why it shut itself off, could have been amps or could have been timer.
I've read the instructions at least 5 times through, but I still need to focus in on that charging routine some.
I'm gonna guess the batteries are charged. oh, I had selected AGM-2 as battery type as that was closest to the Crown battery engineer's recommendations for charging. Voltages just one or two tenth of a volt over his recommends.
The battery bank is 440 AH.