The last installment...
I had added a Pro-Fill battery watering system to the chassis battery last fall. I finally added one to the coach batteries before the trip. It was either that or pull the batteries to add water to the forward one. When I got done the pair of batteries took nearly a half-gallon of water!
My wonderful wife gave me this for Christmas – a Garmin 720RV. It works quite well.
No pic’s, but I added a chassis battery disconnect a la JamieGeek. While I was installing it I put a meter across the poles and measured the parasitic draw. It was
118 milliAmps. That’s more than enough to drain the battery pretty quickly.
While testing I noticed this little gem – the dual USB charger is driven off the chassis battery and has a nifty little green LED. It accounts for 11 of those 118 milliAmps.
I’ve no idea where the remaining 107 mA are going. Parasitic drain should be no more than 25 – 50 mA. Oddly enough, unhooking the multi-wire connectors under the radio had no effect. Also odd, with the chassis battery disconnected and the house battery switch set to “store” the radio clock held the correct time?
The last mod was to simply stuff a mess of pink, fiberglass wall insulation up each of the windshield trim-pillars from the engine compartment. (sorry, no pic’s). This did a amazing job of cutting the wind noise. My wife and I could talk in almost normal voices, and even listen to music without cranking the volume. There’s still more insulation work to do, but now it’s about securing the dash, eliminating front-end rattles, and reducing engine noise.
As usual, the trip generated a whole new list of mods to add to the to-do list:
- Rescreen all the windows with no-see-um gauge window mesh. We were camped on a lake outside Carlsbad NM. The evening was pleasant so we shut down the AC and opened all the windows. After a while DW hollers, “Close the windows! The bus is full of tiny bugs!” We spent the rest of the trip killing and cleaning up sand-flies. Yuck.
- Replace the front curtains. The lining on the driver’s side has started to disintegrate already. I’ll fix the tracks at the same time. They are installed in such a way that there’s a huge gap at the back. Not great for privacy.
- Replace the curtain track in the shower. The shower is actually plenty big enough. But the track is mounted well inside the outlines of the base creating that fun, “closed in”, feeling.
- Re-caulk the sinks. The factory acrylic caulk is coming apart.
- Clean up all the trim and molding. My son details new homes before final inspection. He informed me that it would be easy to make our “woodwork” look a whole lot better.
That's it for a while!
Regards,
Randy
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