RSS FEED IDEMS: Hitek Homeless
- Juice! (johnny)
One of our goals is to be able to boondock most of the time and avoid as much in the way of campground fees as we can. One of the nice things about campgrounds is that they offer electrical hookups.
Now, common wisdom on solar panels is that they take 10-15 years to pay for themselves. I did some back of the envelope calculations based on our home bill and assumed no price increases. Fifteen years looks reasonable for our usage; probably a fair bit less once you factor inflation in.
On an RV, things are a bit different. Why? Because campgrounds average around $30 a night. Alternately we could run an annoyingly loud generator and pay high fuel prices. For simplicity's sake, lets assume we could average $20 a night one way or the other. If we can avoid paying that $20, the system will easily pay for itself in under a year.
Currently I'm thinking about a 700W solar panel installation. I haven't started shopping around for batteries and accessories just yet, but I have been able to find solar panels as low as $4.25 per watt. I believe that price may come down a bit more before we're ready to start bolting on panels. This is the new price of course. There is an electronic salvage shop in town that may be able to bring that price down if we can find some relatively new 12 volt panels.
One of the challenges will be lowering our overall electrical usage. We'll be generating roughly 10% of our current usage in an apartment on a good day!
- We'll be cooling roughly 10% of the current volume.
- We'll be using laptops instead of overpowered gaming rigs.
- We'll move from 4 servers running at all times to a single file server running when we are actively using it.
- We'll be actively trying to prepare food with a minimum of energy usage.
- We'll only need to run the water heater 10-15 minutes a day.
- We'll be traveling to avoid too much in the way of extreme heat or cold (except when it's time to go skiing!).
- We may look into using a swamp cooler some out west. It's not terribly practical where we are currently.
- We'll be using a catalytic heater instead of electrical.
- Jenn already works for the light bulb police.
I'm sure we'll come up with many more tricks along the way, but as a start I think we'll be some of the most energy efficient folks in the country without losing too much in the way of comfort.
Wed, 01 Aug 2007 12:02:15 -0500
- Drive Thru Windows... (johnny)
Here's a shot from the shopping trip Saturday. Yes, we have drive thru liquor stores in Florida.
And here's a picture of us trying to race the storm home before chaos tore loose. We ended up having visibility problems for about an hour as this monster dumped water on us non-stop.
It was definitely one of the worst storms we've driven through in a while. I think the last bad one we drove through was hurricane Ivan after it turned into a tropical storm. For intensity, this thing had Ivan beat hands down. Luckily, it was only about an hour of white-knuckle driving instead of 4-5 hours.
Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:28:12 -0500
- Can you hear me now? (johnny)
It's funny how the bleeding edge folks often miss the train. For instance, Jenn and I have spent a lot of time working on VOIP networks. Jenn single-handedly ran the NOC for a small VOIP provider and I wrote a software package to do large-scale wiretapping of VOIP networks for a CLEC. In spite of all this, we had never used Skype until last night!
In researching our communications options we decided that we wanted internet and voice communication that would work pretty much anywhere and of course we want it as cheaply as possible.
Cell coverage is pretty good with relatively high speed and low latency in the data packages. However, you have to be near a cell tower and preferably near one of the newer towers for high speed internet service.
Satellite internet works pretty much anywhere, but with significantly higher latency than cellular internet service. We can add in VOIP for a very low cost and piggy back our voice communications on top of our data communications much like a cellular network in reverse.
The variables we have to deal with are cost, coverage and quality of service. So far, I believe cellular data + voice is roughly twice the cost of satellite data + voice. On the east coast, cellular coverage is pretty good, but still spotty in a lot of remote locations. Out west it is considerably worse. Latency and setup time on a satellite connection are the two biggest flaws. You can't really use satellite internet without spending 15-30 minutes setting up unless you drop 5k or so on a high end installation.
As our plan is to only drive 50-100 miles at a time and stay for a week or three at each location, the setup and lack of mobility isn't too much of an issue. We've already sworn off internet gaming for the short term, so the biggest latency issue is likely to be with VOIP.
Last night, I decided to test out Skype. In order to simulate satellite latency, I routed a call via an overly complicated method. Caller was a laptop connected via 'blackberry modem mode'. I'm not sure what data speed this really connects at, but the virtual serial port gets sets to 115.2kb, so that's about 1/3 of satellite upstream capabilities. The party being called was using another VOIP phone on a separate network; as such, routing of the call was something like this:
Computer->USB->Cellular->Internet->PSTN->Internet->VOIP box.
Overall, call quality was very good. We experienced up to about 2 seconds latency at the peak and maybe .75 seconds average. Voice quality was excellent except for a few streaming/encoding glitches coming from the non-skype telephone. Our overall impression was that we could easily hold a conversation across a pretty low-bandwidth, high latency network.
Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:13:07 -0500
- The best laid plans... (johnny)
Well, another weekend pretty well shot. People just don't understand how to take care of RV's. Everything we've looked at has had water damage due to not being regularly resealed. I'd like to believe that people tell us there is no water damage out of ignorance rather than actually lying, but it's getting hard to believe in a lot of cases.
We've pretty well decided to consider anything we come across at this point. We've looked at class a's, class c's and 5th wheels. We're pretty open to the 5th wheel idea as it will let us get a 4x4 diesel truck for gas milage and accessibility. The hard part is finding one that isn't ginormous! We're having a hard time finding anything nearby that's 26 feet or less.
After a weekend of frustration, we headed over to the range again and I ruined a few more arrows. I'm not too happy with the replacement arrows I picked up last trip. The fletchings are a bit more 'rubbery' than I've been using and they tend to deform and rip when I get my shot groups too tight. The archer was off today, so I'll have to get him to build me some new arrows the next time we're in. Range fees: $4, replacement arrows: $14. I've gotta stop aiming for the center with every shot!
Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:30:53 -0500
- Geared up for RV shopping (johnny)
Well, it's almost the weekend again and we finally have what I think is a pretty good shopping plan worked out. We keep records of everything we've looked at or considered looking at. At the rate the good RV's are getting snapped up, we figure we have to hit the new listings ASAP. We can quickly cull through anything that we've already deemed unsuitable and will probably assume anything that was already listed in a previous week is also unsuitable.
We've done a bit of this earlier in the week; a handful of publications have already come out for the weekend. We compared everything that was roughly the size/price we wanted with the ones we looked at last weekend and only had 1 unit to look at. It appeared to be in very good condition, but had recently developed a leak and was holding a gallon or two of water in the cab over.
Tonight, we'll be making lists and culling out the unlikely ones. This will probably mean we don't have a large amount in one area as we did last weekend, so lots more driving will be the order of the day. Even if we don't find the perfect RV, we will hopefully be looking at less units that have been sitting week after week without being sold.
We've got to remember to take the camera this weekend. We missed all the goofy pictures of Christmas, FL (where it's Christmas all year round!) last weekend. Neither of us had ever been to Christmas before and Jenn has lived in FL 2/3 of her life. We drove through a neat campground there that gave discounts to Airstream trailers. There must have been 7-8 Airstreams there... in July... in Florida.
Using Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007 (henceforth referred to as KIA for 'Know It All'), we got to see a lot of interesting back roads we would have missed just hammering down the interstate at 80 mph. We've already decided that when we find the perfect vehicle, we will never drive it on the interstate. There will be no hurry, so we'll just tool around on the older roads and soak up the scenery and culture. Finally we will get to see whats in all those gaudy tourist traps that our parents never wanted to stop at!
Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:13:11 -0500
- Cooking With Sunshine (Jenn)
I told Johnny that as long as we can fit my banjo, laptop, bicycle, rollerskates, sewing machine, bow, and one plant (and maybe some skis or a snowboard) in the camper, I will be happy. Well, I think I have found something else that we need to make room for. It shouldn't take too much convincing. It is rather practical, and its probably the only thing that I want to bring that can be called such. Its a solar oven. An oven that uses the sun's energy to make tasty baked goodness. Once we get past the thought of leaving our fresh meat out in the hot mid day sun before we eat it, I am sure we will be glad we brought it.
It has many benefits. One of which is unattended cooking. Its a lot like a crockpot, which I love, in that you can pretty much set it up and walk away as there's no chance of burning your food. It uses energy directly from the sun. No draining electricity from our batteries or gas from our tanks. That means more boondocking time. Yup, no fuel needed at all. No gathering of firewood or spending time tending the coals. No fire = no smoke = drawing less attention to ourselves. No fuel also means that cooking will have less of a health and environmental impact as well as no risk of forest fire.
Yes, it is pretty creepy to leave a roast out to bake in the sun. 
However, done correctly, it is completely safe. You can use it disinfect water. You can also can your fruits and veggies with it. It even works on a cloudy day. There just needs to be sunlight 30% of the time. However, I wouldn't try it on a stormy or a cold day. I also wouldn't feel comfortable without a thermometer. You shouldn't try to can anything that wouldn't be save using a bath. In other words, only things that are highly acidic are safe to can with it.
I had heard about solar ovens in the past but had never really looked into them. I ran across them again while looking at more primitive cooking methods. I know that we cannot rely on it all of the time. There are also things that the solar oven cannot do, such as drying and smoking, that we will need a fire for. But, weather permitting, I plan to use it as our main cooker as much as possible. For the days that using it is not feasible, we will have the backup options of a wood fire and a propane stove.
Well, off to search for more ways to make life easier, safer, and more ecologically friendly in the kitchen.
Sat, 28 Jul 2007 21:07:48 -0500
- Shooting too well (johnny)
(note: this is not my photo... we left the camera at home)
It's pretty cool to split an arrow at 20 yards! And then you realize you have to buy a new arrow at $7+ a pop. On the bright side, if we have to depend on my accuracy with a bow to eat, I won't be shooting twice... well unless I completely miss the first shot and the food keeps standing there.
One of the more interesting ways to save money on food is hunting and fishing. However, non-resident hunting licenses are awfully high and ideally, we will only be staying in the same state for a month or three at a time. I suppose if we know we are going to be somewhere for 2-3 months during hunting season, it would be worth it to buy a $150 license. Some states offer short-term licenses, but I'm not sure we'd take enough small game (large game and turkey are usually excluded) in 5 days to justify the fee.
Fishing licenses are a lot more reasonable. An annual license is usually a good investment if you enjoy fishing and like fish. It just doesn't seem right to be able to fish for trout all year or plink at squirrels for 5 days for the same price. Where is the 'small game only' hunting license issued?
In Florida, resident licenses start as low as $12 with non-resident's at $150. Somehow, I'm doubting I'll be able to convince too many county clerk's that the motorhome parked nearby makes me a state resident until I move it out of state.
Sun, 29 Jul 2007 09:33:58 -0500
- Everything Must Go! (johnny)
Thankfully, we can't take everything we own with us in the motorhome. We have way too much stuff and it will be a pleasure to get rid of most of it. The last few times we've moved it's been quite a chore and we've actually had to start considering 'do we want to move all this crap?' everytime we consider changing apartments.
For starters, every piece of furniture we own can be given away or sold with the exception of our camping chairs and tables. The entire room full of old computer hardware will be useless. The only computers we plan to keep are 2-4 laptops, the NAS (network attached storage - a little black box full of hard drives) and a wifi router. We may keep one of the 19" wide screen LCD's if we end up with an RV large enough to sport a permanent workstation area, but that remains to be seen.
It's amazing how much things depreciate. Our extensive technical library probably ran 2-3 thousand dollars over a 10 year period. It looks like we'll be doing very well to get $200 out of it. Oh well. I'm keeping a few of the more useful programming and network books and the rest of the subject matter we can find on the internet. The harder decision is which fiction to take with us. I have a large collection of electronic fiction stored on the NAS, but it's nice to have hard copy when you're relaxing outdoors.
We've got relatives lined up to store and borrow some of our things, but the more we get rid of, the less we have to haul out of state and try to find a safe place for. It looks like we'll be keeping both vehicles in storage for a while until we're sure we like the lifestyle. Then Jenn will probably sell her vehicle as it still has decent resale value. My pickup has depreciated about all it's going to and is still in excellent condition, so we'll probably keep it stored a bit longer.
Unfortunately, we don't have room to have a garage sale where we are currently, so we'll have to get rid of things slowly via craigs list and ebay. Maybe we'll make a bit more money that way, but it's definitely going to take a lot longer, which means will be spending more time living with only the things that have no resale value.
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:50:32 -0500
- Cool as a Cucumber (johnny)
For those of you looking into portable air conditioners, I ran across this site:
Portableacguide.com
It looks like I may have found an even better unit for us. At 543 watts, that little Danby unit may actually be able to run at 100% during the day without too much battery buffering if we put 4 or so 160W solar panels on the roof.
5,000 BTU should cool 1250 cubic feet of space. I'm guesstimating 25x7x7 for 1225 cubic feet - and there will be a lot of dead space inside that for storage, bathroom etc that won't need to be cooled.
Too bad the rest of the day wasn't as productive. We looked at 8 or 9 RV's and put 200 miles or so on the pickup. No luck. Time to start planning for next weekend.
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:52:48 -0500
- People Suck (johnny)
Well, we had a nice little Tioga lined up to look at today. It was about an hour drive, so we made sure to have the owner answer a bunch of questions before we left. Everything sounded great.
We spent a good hour and a half going through it. Some minor issues that we didn't care about and the owner was upfront about them. Then, Jenn found the nasty secret. A fair bit of recent water damage, buried under a pile of junk. This was something we had specifically inquired about and had been assured was not a problem. It's a small enough area that we can probably repair it without too many issues, but there were enough small things that we decided to keep looking a bit longer.
On the bright side, we got to use the new navigation software. Jenn hates the copilot already. Overall, it does a pretty good job, although I think the fastest way to confuse it is to do a u-turn. It takes a bit of getting used to some of the ways it gives directions. On occasion it will say something like 'turn left and make an immediate right'. Then, it will give you the next direction in between those two steps. Also, it wouldn't hurt if it announced the street names instead of just the distance and direction to turn.
Next, I'm going to pair the laptop up with my bluetooth headset and see if I can get voice recognition to work. If nothing else, I can tell Jenn when to turn and she'll think I'm the smart one!
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:53:29 -0500
- Are we there yet? (johnny)
Today, I've been looking into some of the tech I expect to use on the road. Now, I'm a bit of a UNIX geek - earned a living on the command line for the past decade. However, in my old age, I've adapted somewhat and I can actually use windows machines for simple things like video games and web browsing. In fact, I picked up a Fujitsu Lifebook 1510 a year or so back and actually left Windows XP tablet edition installed. At home, I run a windows machine side by side with a FreeBSD machine, using synergy to share the mouse and keyboard between them.
As I already have a very nifty ultra-portable notebook running Windows with a working touchscreen, I figure I'll try MS Streets and Trips for route planning and navigation. Google Earth will be a nice addition, but it requires bandwidth that won't be available while we're on the road. I figure we'll us MS S&T for driving and then pull out Google Earth to do some daytripping via hiking / biking / scooters or whatever.
Jenn has found a couple more motor homes for us to check out tomorrow whose owners claim they have no water damage. I think I'll try and get MS S&T installed tonight so we can use it for navigation tomorrow. I still haven't decided what type of GPS to use. I just can't seem to find a portable unit with a good display and blue tooth connectivity for $100.
Oh, and before I forget, this is the coolest mapping API project I've ever seen. I'm sure we'll be using it to avoid asian bird flu and volcanic eruptions.
Emergency and Disaster Information Service
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:54:12 -0500
- Poop! (johnny)
We're working up another list of motor homes to checkout this weekend. Meanwhile, let's talk about poop.
Along with lots of solar panels, I've been thinking about what can be done to extend the boondocking time we can get in a small motor home. One of the things it's hard to get around is the size of your holding tanks. In a class C, we're going to have fairly small tanks. While we could tear down camp and go find a spot to dump as soon as the black water tank fills up, it could get darned inconvenient if we're 20-30 miles down a dirt road and enjoying ourselves.
One thing I stumbled across is the rather bizarre sounding composting toilet. That's right. You let your poop sit around until it turns into fertilizer and then toss it outside with a handful of flower seeds.
Before I did a bit of reading, it sure seemed like an odd idea, but I kept getting a nagging feeling that it could be a handy thing to have in a motor home. It is a bit large compared to most RV toilets and at $1300+, it's about 10 times the cost as well. But, it uses no water at all. Additionally, you could probably get by with a liter bottle for your black water tank if you need one at all.
It's certainly one of the more left field ideas we've had about retro-fitting the doomsday machine and will likely not be the very first modification we make. However, if we end up doing the conversion ourselves from a commuter bus, I'm damn sure going to stick an Envirolet in there.
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:55:38 -0500
- No Joy (johnny)
Well, so much for driving our home home. We drove about 250 miles round trip stopping at every podunk RV dealer along the way. Pretty much everything we looked at either had a lot of water damage, major mechanical problems or was just ridiculously overpriced.
I may not be the handiest guy around, but even I can spot oil puddling under the oil pan, smoke coming from some random part of the engine and walls that crunch when you push against them.
I'm not sure which was funnier - Jenn adding her own bit of damage to a cabinet made out of particle board when she opened it without unlatching or when she picked up a cushion and found a mouse had eaten all the way through it. A couple of times, I expected the ladder to come loose and dump me on my ass while I was checking the roofs. The amount of water damage we're seeing almost makes me wish we could take a quick trip to Arizona to look around.
So... anybody dig up a 25ish foot motor home they want to sell? Cheap? With fewer problems than the average marriage?
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:55:58 -0500
- Eureka?! (johnny)
I may have found just the thing to keep us cool without killing the budget. It will probably draw more power than we can generate if it's running at 100%, but I think it has enough btu's to to be running considerably less than 100% and the overall wattage is low enough that buying an inverter for it won't kill me.
Amcor Nanomax A12000E
Also, we may have found our next home. We've got an appointment to go check it out tomorrow morning. I hope it looks as good in person as it does from the pictures. Also, it would be good if it runs.
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:56:21 -0500
- My life savings for an air conditioner (johnny)
So, I'm taking a break from hardcore RV shopping and letting Jenn try to find the dream machine for a day or two. In the meantime, I'm figuring out how to put enough gadgets in the box on wheels to double the start up cost.
We're trying to avoid longterm costs like running a generator and camp ground fees as much as we can. We figure that a solar installation should pay for itself pretty quickly with campground fees of $30/night in many places. Also, we'd really rather not run a generator constantly both because of the noise and the gasoline costs.
Now, with solar power, we're going to have a relatively limited amount of power to work with every day. One of the biggest concerns is staying cool. Once we get out of the Florida summers, I think fans will work a lot of places. However, we expect that we'll probably want air conditioning if we can possibly manage it. I really thought it would be a simple thing to find a low amperage air conditioning unit. Let's just say I now understand why our power bill was halved after an A/C upgrade.
So far I've only been able to find two different units that I think we can manage on a mid-range solar install. And they're both pretty damn pricey.
There's a native 12V roof unit from DC Airco (who's website looks like it had a stroke in 1995) it claims a peak draw of 300 watts and 4400 btu. The unit plus mounting kit runs about $4k - installation not included.
The other unit is the SolCool Millenia from SolCool. It runs on 110V and claims 'less than 400 watts'. It has an impressive 16k btu which is way more than we need. I think about 7k btu would probably be a little on the high side. It's a 'portable' style air conditioner, so it would be taking up space somewhere inside the RV. However, it does have some handy accessories available. Apparently it can be converted to a heater and the dehumidifying effect can be harnessed to produce purified water (supported by the manufacturer!). This guy runs 'about 3k' according to the sales rep.
I'm leaning towards the SolCool unit a bit because it would be a lot simpler to remove the unit later and sell it separate than to try and convince the next owner of the RV that he should pay me an extra 4k for the after market AC. So far though, the SolCool folks don't have the latest design specs up on their website and the sales rep that promised to send me a pdf still hasn't done so.
There is at least one other option that is pretty cheap in both energy and dollars. Evaporative cooling would work pretty easily if we weren't starting out in Florida where its usually hot AND humid.
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:57:18 -0500
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