A Work In Progress

 Yesterday was a long day of sorting through our possessions, cleaning them, running the washing machine and pondering  our return to our home on wheels.  We have new solar panels, two 430 watt units in the roof.

I  prefer the invisible flexible panels GANNET2 cane with but when we were getting 10 amps from the elderly 400 watt array it was a sunny day. I’m hoping these will get us five times that.

Our fridge is back now converted from 110 volts to 12 volts so it doesn’t need the inverter to operate. And when we do plug in to shore power in a campground we will no longer care if it is 110 volts or 220 volts  as this little box will adjust it accordingly to allow our charger to manage the 500 amps of lithium  batteries.

And on the roof we have a 12 volt Dometic air conditioner  which uses 20 amps to run off our batteries, about 200 amps a night. Our Coleman 110 volt unit ran off our 3,000 watt inverter and used more than 100 amps per hour so even though the Dometic is half the size we can run it much longer. 

Unfortunately it sits a couple of inches above the roof so even though it’s only six and a half inches inches tall it may be too tall to fit in a container. That we can deal with later as I have no idea at this point when we will leave South America. The States no longer seems very welcoming to immigrants.

The other issue is the shroud that is supposed  to cover the inside of the unit is do damned wide it interferes with our overhead lockers. Why they make it so wide baffles me but Alessandro is solving that by having his carpenter make us a custom shroud which will probably look better than this cheap piece of plastic.

Meanwhile Alessandro was carving up our Starlink antenna. We’ve decided to stick it on the roof so we can use it while driving. We’ve covered vast areas of South America with no phone signal and getting out to set up the system is a pain after a long day driving so whatever flexibility we lose will be compensated for by simply being able to flip a switch to get internet service. 

One issue we have to deal with is the decomposing plastic fridge shelves which after five years are liable to cracking. We’ve tried to find replacements but they just aren’t easily available in the US or anywhere so we have resorted to JB Weld and Gorilla tape to keep them going. It looks weird but so far so good.

We are washing sheets and rugs and clothes and pondering packing choices in the new drawers and reduced spaces now taken up by hardware. The utility of the new solar array cannot be denied but it sure looks odd. 

I joke that we look like real overlanders now with the huge panels. So many details are yet to be completed but we hope by Thursday to be cleaning and detailing and packing.