Successful Experiments

~Tuesday, August 18, 2020~

Day 65

Happy 81st Birthday Mom!! And I have nowhere to try and reach you. It’s killing me that this will be the first time I haven’t been able to talk to you on your birthday. Not good planning either that I didn’t give you a heads up that we’d be out of cell/internet range on your special day. And I also have a bill due today. I guess I’ll have to do a little damage control when we get back to civilization.

I spent the day editing posts for our travel blog that will hopefully be ready for launch early next week. Jeff got the generator fired up for the first time and experimented with powering up the most power sucking appliance on an RV…...the air conditioner. In general, you have to plug in an adapter to a generator so he plugged in the 30A cord that twists and locks into the generator where it converts it to 50A. We can only run 1 of our 2 air conditioners off of this generator. But we’re thrilled we can even run 1. Most generators can’t even power up an air conditioner (which is when it uses the most power). It labors a little bit at first but once it gets going, uses less power. Success and it’s so quiet.

Next experiment…..transferring fresh water from the collapsible cubes to the freshwater tank on the RV. Even though we have enough fresh water from our fill at the Mountain Motel/RV Park, we wanted to experiment with the bags to see how they would hold up without leaks and to see if our solution would work. We were only experimenting with (1) cube. But how do you smoothly transfer water from the cube into the 1” fresh water hole on the RV? Thanks to RV with Tito, Jeff watched a tutorial video of his that showed exactly how to do it. You basically take a plastic tube and add something to it to make it more rigid and less bendable so that it’s easier to drain the water out of the cube. The rigid piece became what we had on hand…..a bamboo skewer. Jeff zip-tied this to the tube. Near the top end of the tube, you place a tiny water pump device that sucks the water from the cube to the hole. To get the water pump to operate, you use a cordless drill that turns the pump. (make sure your drill is fully charged before boondocking!) It took about 5 minutes to transfer the water and no spills. Pretty genius!

Before our delicious taco dinner, Jeff made a campfire (and no rain tonight!). Nice to be using the firewood we bought at Jennings Lake. But the challenging part was finding the perfect marshmallow stick for making S’mores (the grounds are so clean).