Saturday! We had great plans for today…the key word there is “had”, as Miss Laurie is still down and out…so our plans have changed our visit with Gilles and Francine is off, no sense of infecting any one else with this bad cold…especially people we actually like…just saying.

It’s another sunny day in Yuma, temperature should get into the low seventies today, that’s low twenties in Canadian, after the proper exchange as been applied…we have taken our battery bank to new lows overnight, but so far the solar alone is starting to bring it back, I have pulled out the Zamp solar suitcase and set it up, I have also tilted the fourth panel on the roof, after much consideration, it was just the right thing to do, and to give us a true picture of the solar, and we are now pushing over thirty amps back into the battery bank we have gained over 5% but it is obvious that we will need some more generator time today to get us back into a better SOC (state of charge), I’m going to try to get us back around 75 to 80 percent SOC which is a big push considering we started this push from 17% SOC. My first thought is that we are definitely going to need more panels, now it is determining how many more watts we will need to add, we need to get to a level that we can replace as much power as we have used, plus a little bit for a cloudy day or two.

The upside of being captured in the coach today is that some of the NFL wild card games are on the television today, and the Buffalo Bills are actually playing…well let me rephrase that they are being given the opportunity to play today, we will see how many of them actually show up to “PLAY”. I have not seen a Bills game since heading to Arizona so it will be good, I have to head out to get a couple of beverages before the game and pick up some supplies.

Sorry for not finishing this Blog yesterday but there were a number of issues that jumped up and fought for my attention …let me explain. The quick trip to purchase some beer got me side tracked by a hot chicken wing bar right beside the beer isle (talk about doing a great job of up-selling), and watching a Bills game it’s almost a requirement to have wings and beer so I purchased some wings and then of course had to sit down and eat said wing with a couple of beers. And then there was the GAME, and in typical Buffalo Bills style they sucked everyone into thinking that they might actually win a playoff game for the first time since 1995…just to crush our hopes by a few suspect play calls. Hell they even took it to overtime before taking an unnecessary suspicious 15 yard penalty to take themselves out of a possible field goal position to win the football game.

So because I had decided when I started writing this blog, I thought it would be best not express my thoughts while under the influence, and by the time I got to the end of the Bills game I was definitely under the influence I just knew it was best not to write what I was really thinking hence the delayed publication of this blog…just saying.

Battery SOC update: at the lowest level yesterday the bank was at a low of 17%, by late afternoon we had made it back to 49% gaining 32% just from the harvest of solars, my objective yesterday was to get back to at least 75%. So I added a couple of hours of generator time and at 8pm we got to the 75% level so I shut down the generator, now on Sunday we will just use solar to see if we can get back to 75% by 8pm on Sunday. I just let the state of charge get away from me this week by not increasing the solar harvest quick enough, so my bad. Now we will just wait and see what the results of Sunday’s solar harvest as we will be on the move again on Monday so time will tell.

Happy Friday! It’s six o’clock in the morning, the skies are clear and the temperature is 50 or 10 degrees, so all and all not a bad start to the day. Sunrise is not till 7:41 so we haven’t bottomed out yet but we are within a degree or two of the low temperature. We have been operating totally on battery power for two nights and while everything has worked as expected we are depleting our batteries faster that we have been able to recharge them with solar.

When we pulled in to the BLM land on Wednesday afternoon the lot was very full, so we ended up being parked with Thunder facing almost due south, so the sun rises on our left side and sets on our right, this does not afford me the opportunity to tip the panels to maximize our solar intake. So we only got a partial solar charge yesterday so as I check our status this morning we have used well over 70% of our available battery power supply. So my plan is to take a walk around this morning and find a parking area that will have us facing more easterly, then I can tip the solar panels to maximize our solar intake and hopefully start to gain on the recharge of the battery bank.

Well I decided not to move Thunder, as we are moving in a few days anyway, I made the corporate decision to just run our generator to see how well the batteries would accept a recharge from the inverter/charger. With the old batteries and inverter/charger they would accept up to 70 amps of bulk charge but it would only charge at that rate for about thirty minutes, before dropping into the absorption charge cycle. But after close to two hours of charging the rate of charge on the lithium batteries is still close to 100 amps, now I have understood this to be true from all my research, but seeing it is just a bit more than impressive. So we were able to bring the battery level of charge up 25% in less that two hours of generator run time, so by ten o’clock the solar is carrying the total coach load but not adding anything into the battery bank.

If Miss Laurie is feeing up to it, we will venture off to the theatre today, as we want to see the most recent Star Wars movie, a matinee showing most likely, you know us and a theatre full of old grey haired farts…lol.

Friday afternoon update: Miss Laurie is still down with a cold so no movie today, and I changed my mind shortly after lunch and decided to reposition the coach, I was just so frustrated that we were only just covering the daily load with full sun, so I repositioned the coach to have us facing almost west. I then went to the roof to tilt three of the four solar panels to get better sun harvest. This is not my normal direction for tilting so I had to make some minor modifications, the panel that I did not tilt is being partially blocked by the front air conditioner so the benefit would have be limited, considering the difficulty of reworking that panel.

That 20 plus amps is what is getting to the battery bank, the tilting of the solar panels has added the extra 10 plus amps.