Sep 12 2010

Salt, paper, brownstone and hot dogs

There is one major problem with camping at the seashore: salt. I have fought quite a battle with airborne sodium chloride pollution (i.e., salt spray) over the past week, and I have not yet won. Our five days at Horseneck Beach resulted in the car and the Airstream being coated with sticky spray, and the entire time I could practically hear the Airstream corroding.

To its credit, the Airstream is made of aluminum, with stainless steel rock guards, and the fasteners are all made of non-corrosive materials as well. So the trailer resists the elements well. But nothing is perfect. Every exposed bit of steel on the hitch (where rocks have chipped the paint, and bare metal parts) quickly went to a bright rust orange. The trailer has bits of damaged clearcoat on the aluminum edges, where curly white “filiform” corrosion had previously begun, and the mixture of salt and humidity is ideal for speeding up that process too.

It’s a problem to wash trailers on the road. A 53-foot combination does not fit into standard car washes. Most campgrounds don’t permit washing the trailer while on-site, for various reasons including water conservation. We occasionally stop into Blue Beacon truck washes to get the entire rig (Airstream + Mercedes) washed, but I couldn’t find any truck washes on our route from Horseneck Beach to Portland CT. Finally I found an opportunity to thoroughly rinse off the trailer (details deliberately obscured to protect the guilty) and seized it. Now the trailer is relatively clean, with just a few streaks of diluted salt here and there.

However, I was shocked to find greenish deposits atop the chrome of the clearance lights and taillights after I washed the trailer. Some sort of chemical reaction has occurred. These deposits look like corroded copper, and they rub off cleanly with a rag and a little pressure. A yellowish deposit has adhered to the sea-facing side of the backup camera as well. So the job of recovering from the salt will not be done until I can get a proper wash with some scrubbing. Such a price to pay for a few days at the beach. It’s not normally like that. We’ve camped on beaches many times and usually there’s not that much airborne salt, but this was a particularly windy trip and we were right on the shore. When I get a chance I’ll spend a day sanding down and repainting all the rust spots on the trailer’s tongue and hitch as well.

The car, of course, is easy. I ran it through a local car wash as soon as I had the trailer disconnected. The car wash was was on the way to a mid-day visit about 25 miles away with relatives that I have not seen in many years. That visit turned out to be a big success, and we followed it up with dinner in Waterbury with our good friends (Airstreamers) Rick & Sandi. While Friday was unproductive from a work viewpoint, it was at least a day filled with pleasant visits and good chow.

On Saturday we decided to roam around the local Portland-Middletown area while getting some errands done. I had a massive amount of mail overdue to me, and it all arrived at the Portland Post Office via General Delivery. Even with all the efforts I’ve made over the past several years to eliminate paper mail, I still get too much of it. I don’t want paper statements from any business, but some just can’t seem to get the concept of electronic delivery and payment yet. My current Tree-Killers Hall of Shame:

#1: Golden Rule (our health plan administrator): Every doctor visit results in a shower of paper, including Explanation of Benefits statements that are generally incomprehensible anyway.

#2: Bank of America credit card: Despite signing up for electronic billing multiple times (and being successfully enrolled for two years), they still send paper statements every month. Because of mail forwarding delays, I get these a week or two after I’ve paid the bill electronically.

#3: EBSCO (a magazine order service that handles all the Airstream Life subscriptions from Amazon.com): 3-4 pieces of paper in an envelope whenever they process orders for Airstream Life. They try to consolidate orders so that I get 3-4 in a package, but we still get about two dozen of these envelopes every month.

If I could get these three on the electronic program, my forwarded mail package wouldn’t have been three inches thick and my working day would be 30 minutes shorter on Monday.

But rather than go back to the Airstream on a perfect September day, we continued around Portland. The town is known for its quarries by the river, which for centuries have been mined to supply stone for nearly every brownstone building in New York City. I’ve never really studied brownstone before, but upon seeing a fine example you can tell why it was prized for construction of elegant homes and offices. It has a beautiful grain and color, and can be worked readily. The current working quarry is quite small and can be seen just a short distance from the center of town.

The historic quarries are quite a bit bigger. In fact, they have since been flooded and turned into a unique urban fun park called Brownstone Exploration and Discovery Park. This place is a must-see. You can swim, scuba dive, snorkel, ride zip lines, and there are all sorts of water toys to play on. I wish we had planned our Saturday around it, because it was the perfect day to spend at a water park, and the weather won’t be nearly as nice the rest of the week.

Since it was already mid-day and a bit late for us to prep for a day in the water, we continued across the Connecticut River to the college town of Middletown. This is the home of Wesleyan University, which I’m sure contributes to the liveliness and diversity of the downtown. Portland’s downtown is not much to get excited about, but Middletown is pretty vibrant and worth a prowl. The restaurants in particular look good. We’ll be checking out a few of them for lunch later this week.

Coming back to the Airstream later, we ran into an old acquaintance: the famous Top Dog trailer. It is normally parked right on the highway just about a mile from the marina where we are camped. If you have a copy of Airstream’s book, “Wanderlust,” you might remember seeing a picture of this trailer. Look closely and you’ll see a little kid squinting into the sun. That’s Emma, age 4, at the Region One Rally in Woodstock CT.

Well, she’s ten now, so I thought it appropriate to get an updated picture of her with this 1960s Airstream-turned-catering-trailer. See the results, at right. (One of the things I like about having a daughter is that I get to travel with two good-looking babes all the time.) Emma did, of course, get a hot dog.

We spent the rest of the afternoon just chilling at the marina. Eleanor and I went on a walk to look at the boats and see which ones we’d like to own (in our dreams).

In the evening, Eleanor decided it was time to shoot another cooking video. She’s been getting asked by some Airstream friends, so we recorded some of her preparation of Saturday night’s dinner. You can see it on YouTube.

Maintenance note: I replaced one of the Hensley hitch’s spring bar jacks in June because the internal gear started binding and it eventually stripped. The other one began to exhibit the same symptoms when we left Vermont last week. Hensley shipped me a replacement for that one this week, which I installed on Friday. (Installation is an easy job that requires only one tool, an Allen wrench.) Both of the jacks were replaced under Hensley’s lifetime warranty. They were about four years old and had been in heavy use.

Sep 10 2010

Marina camping in Portland, CT

We’re in central Connecticut now. On the recommendation of some fellow Airstreamers, we’ve settled in Portland on the banks of the Connecticut River at a marina.

We’ve camped at marinas before, most memorably in Florida’s panhandle, at Blue Mesa Reservoir in Colorado, and on Lake Powell. Marina camping is a fun change when you can find it. There’s always a guaranteed water view, and usually a background of boats coming and going that makes the camping feel more lively. There’s often an industrious feel about the place, with people working on boat repairs or getting their fishing gear together.

Being post-Labor Day in New England, the weather has turned cooler and there is a distinct hint of fall in the air. Boaters aren’t as active. The campground is empty except for us and an uninhabited fifth-wheel trailer, so we basically have the place to ourselves.

The campsite is at a marina on the Connecticut river in the town of Portland. We’re the only ones in the little 22-site campground. The season is mostly wrapped up after Labor Day. The days are still nice, with low 70s expected all week (50s at night), but the kids are back to school and this is a pretty unknown campground. I bought a week of camping for $150. We see boats going by once in a while, little dinner cruises, students from some local school doing crew, etc. But mostly it’s just quiet.

The downside of this particular campground is that it lacks sewer connections and has no dump station. Campers get a referral to a city-owned dump station in town, which is only open Monday-Friday. To use it, we would have to hitch up and tow into town, which is more effort than its worth. We’ll be here for five or six days, and our gray water holding tank simply won’t last that long, so the solution is simply to use the marina’s public shower. That’s not a huge sacrifice, and the compensation is a fairly moderate fee: $150 for the week, or about $21 per day.

The plan for the next several days is to do a bunch of work (for some reason I’m amazingly busy with projects), get some schooling done, explore the town of Portland, and visit some relatives about 40 minutes drive away. It’s a pretty low-concept plan, but every full-timer knows that’s part of the lifestyle.

Sep 09 2010

A short history of the sun

Several people wrote to me yesterday to say “thanks” for yesterday’s blog post on solar. It’s amazing to me how much information there is on the Internet about RV solar power, and yet how little of it is actually useful or even accurate. So I’m going to write a little more about it today.

Wednesday was a less challenging day for solar power than I had expected. By afternoon the skies cleared up and we had good power generation for a few hours. You really get the bulk of power between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., no matter what time of year or latitude, if you have fixed panels that always face directly upward like we do. (People with tilting panels have a big advantage, because they can capture light at a more direct angle during the morning and late afternoon. I’d like to install those on the Airstream but so far I haven’t found a practical and cost-effective solution.)

The batteries started the day down 34.7 amp-hours. I used the laptop for eight hours, and Eleanor used hers for about an hour, plus we recharged phones and camera batteries. Even with this relatively heavy load, the batteries ended up at -15.4 amp-hours (a net gain of 19.3 amp-hours). When you figure in the power we used while the sun was shining, we probably generated about 40-50 amp-hours during the day. Not bad for a half-cloudy day.

I give these statistics as guidelines of how things might work for you, but it’s important to keep that the bottom line of solar use is that every situation is different. The key variables are: sun angles (time of year, latitude, time of day), cloudiness, panel generating capacity, and storage capacity. A lot of the websites go on and on about wiring losses and other electrical engineering details, but in real life a single leaf on your panel can have a much larger effect on power generation. Don’t get hung up on whether your wires are big enough if you haven’t first tried cleaning the glass.

Because there are so many variables, it’s impossible to answer the question I get all the time: “Is my system big enough?” Big enough for what? From trip to trip, I never know how much power we are going to generate in advance (I’d be a great weatherman if I could). The best description I ever heard was that “solar makes your batteries bigger.” Think about it that way and don’t worry about having unlimited power — even with a generator, it’s an illusion.

I’m just happy that we can camp for long periods without power connections, at least in the summer. We’ve been here at Horseneck Beach since Saturday. Just for comparison, if we had the original factory batteries and no solar panels we would have run out of power on Monday.

Now, since I mentioned generators, I feel obliged to explain why people who have generators often are seriously deluded about what’s really happening when they use it to “re-charge” the batteries. It really doesn’t work, at least not with the standard gear that comes with most trailers.

The reason is based on the fact that batteries will only accept re-charge at a certain rate. As they get more charged, they resist, and so the rate of charge declines. It doesn’t matter how big your generator is; you could plug that battery into a nuclear power station and it still won’t charge any faster. A “smarter” charger will do better than the really dumb 2-stage chargers that seem to be installed in most trailers, but only to a point.

For example, your batteries might accept a charging rate of 15 amps (DC) when they are really heavily discharged, and 5 amps when they are 25% discharged, and 1 amp when they are 10% discharged. If you’ve got an 80 amp-hour battery bank, getting from 90% to 100% charge could take eight hours or more. That nice quiet 2000-watt generator you use will produce a whopping 150 DC amps at its normal maximum output rate, which is obviously way more than the batteries will accept at any given time. The rest of the power is wasted, unless you are running the microwave or some other AC appliance while the generator is running.

The other problem is that the factory installed “battery monitors” are almost always cheap-o versions that guess at the batteries’ state of charge by measuring voltage. This is incredibly inaccurate, especially those lousy units that show the battery condition using Red, Yellow, and Green LEDs. Would you drive a car with a gas tank gauge that just showed red, yellow, and green? Even worse, these units will show Yellow when there’s a heavy power demand even if the batteries are full, and they will show Green when the batteries are actually quite discharged but have recently been charged just a little. Imagine that the car’s gauge went to Yellow every time you pressed the accelerator.

Try it sometime. Use your batteries for a day or two, until they show Yellow constantly. Then plug in for 30 minutes, unplug, and watch as (miraculously!) the monitor reports Green or “100%”. Don’t believe it. That’s what is sometimes called a “surface charge.” It’s a symptom of the battery monitor being fooled because it measures voltage. The voltage pops up for a short time after charging, but it won’t last. To get an accurate view of battery charge using voltage, you need to let the batteries “rest” (no drain, no charge) for at least an hour. That almost never happens in a camping situation.

So here’s the scenario I see all too often: After a day of camping, the owners decide it’s time to charge up the batteries. They fire up the generator, plug in, and let it run for an hour or two. The voltage-based battery monitor says all is well, so they turn off the generator and go to bed secure in the knowledge that they are “all charged up!” Except they really aren’t.

In two hours, the best that generator is can do is pump in maybe 10 amp-hours, if the batteries were moderately discharged to start. Rather than being “100%” the reality is that if they started at 70%, they might now be at 85%. So the next morning, the campers wake up and use a little power for the water pump, and by 10 a.m. they are amazed to see that they are back in the Yellow zone. What happened?

So they plug in the generator again, and this time they run it for three hours, getting up to 88% charge. At this point the batteries are really resisting further charge, so only about 1 or 2 amps of the 150 amps that generator can produce is actually getting into the batteries. The next day, same problem — the battery monitor says they are still stuck in the Yellow zone.

Solar has a huge advantage here. A steady all-day charge will get your batteries up to 100%. It’s like the turtle and the hare. With batteries, slow and steady wins the race. If you have both a generator and solar panels, use the generator only when the batteries are heavily discharged (for an hour or so in the morning, for example) to get the bulk charge done quickly, and then let solar finish the job over the course of the day.

If you only have solar, keep in mind that during the morning and mid-day, moderately or heavily discharged batteries will probably accept every amp the panels can generate. Then the charging rate naturally slows down. In our case, by mid-afternoon the batteries are usually in the 90-100% range, and the charging rate has slowed to perhaps 1 amp. If the panels are still generating 5 amps, we have surplus power, and so that’s the time of day we plug in all of our rechargeable accessories like phones, cameras, Kindle, laptops, etc. This strategy takes maximum advantage of the power being generated.

Another good time to use a generator is when power demand is high. It’s much easier to avoid using battery power (by being plugged into the generator) than to try to recharge battery power later. So if you have small batteries, use the generator in the evening when you are making dinner, and any power consumed will be supplied by the generator.

Sep 08 2010

Good kite flying weather

The wind is back at Horseneck Beach campground. The reservation website did warn that “sites can be breezy.” People who come here regularly seem to be prepared for it, as I see a lot of kites and streamers attached to poles. The big round rocks from the beach make handy weights to keep your belongings from blowing away, too.

So we broke out the kite that we’ve owned for many years and hardly ever flown. Eleanor admits to being a hopeless kite pilot, and Emma has surprisingly little knowledge of kites, so there was some initial confusion, but eventually up it went, and it flew very well … until the inevitable crashes in the wild rose bushes. The kite survived to fly another day.

We didn’t do much else. In the morning, we cleaned up the Airstream and relocated it to another campsite. (We’ve booked two more days here, but that meant we had to switch sites.) I was tied to the computer the rest of the day, editing articles for the upcoming Winter 2010 and Spring 2011 issues. Still, working near the beach on a beautiful sunny day gives the opportunity for very pleasant breaks, walking along the seashore or just enjoying the sun and salty breeze blowing through the trailer.

We had thought that in the evening we might hit one of the local restaurants for another seafood dinner, but of course being post-Labor Day, all of the tourism-related businesses are closing or reducing hours. We settled for some interesting takeout from the local grocery and a movie at home. It has gotten very quiet here, and that’s nice.

Solar report: Since not much is happening, I’ve got an opportunity to talk a little more about solar. Forgive me if this topic bores you, but I get a lot of inquiries from blog readers, so I know there is a need for real-world information. Yesterday was full sun again, and with our 230 watt panel array, at this time of year (when the sun angle is still fairly high), we really can’t store all the power we generate.

We started Tuesday morning with a 36.0 amp-hour deficit, which is fairly normal as a result of using lights, water pump, and laptop the night before. During Tuesday I was on the laptop for at least six hours, consuming about 9-10 amp-hours in total, and Eleanor used probably another 3-4 amp-hours charging her laptop. Still our batteries were at 99% by 5 p.m., indicating that we generated more than 50 amp-hours during the day.

That’s all well and good while the sun shines, but the other half of a solar charging system is storage. You’ve got to have battery capacity that is matched to your power needs and the capacity of your panels. Long-time blog readers know that since January 2010 we have used a single Lifeline GPL-4D, which has a rated capacity of 210 amp-hours. Today (Wednesday), we will see that half of the system put to the test. The forecast is for gloomy skies and rain — in fact, it just started to rain as I am typing this. Under the rain cloud, our power generation has been cut from 8-9 amps when sunny to a miniscule 0.8 -2.1 amps (depending on the thickness of cloud). Essentially, at this moment we are generating only enough power to make up for the parasitic drain that is inherent in all modern RVs. So, under those circumstances our power supply would be entirely reliant on the battery.

We started today with a deficit of 34.7 amp-hours. If we generate no power today, I would expect the battery to be drained by a further 20-30 amp-hours by 5 p.m., just as a result of my laptop use and normal parasitic drain. (Parasitic drain comes from the circuit boards and always-on electronic modules in the stereo, refrigerator, thermostat, propane leak detector, etc., and totals about 0.5 amps per hour.) Tonight, we will use another 25-35 amp-hours, which means we could end up tomorrow morning with a deficit of 80-100 amp-hours.

Ideally you never want to discharge the battery by more than 50%, which means that at 110 amp-hours we need to either find some sunshine, or plug in to power. If we are not cognizant of our power budget today, and the weather continues as it is, we’ll be up against that limit tomorrow.

Now, there are three practical responses to this. (1) We could add more battery capacity. A second Lifeline GPL-4D battery would double our capacity, but at the cost of about $500-600 and 135 pounds of added weight. Also, given the rating of our solar panels, we would be hard pressed to recharge a deficit of 110 amp-hours under typical conditions. Certainly we’d never be able to do it in a single day. So our batteries and panels would not be well matched, although that’s not a big problem.

(2) We can plan ahead. For example, we know that tomorrow we are pulling out of the campground and relocating. There’s a very good chance that we will get at least partial sunshine while we are towing, which will yield power for the batteries. (The tow vehicle does not add a significant amount of power to the batteries while towing, by the way — that’s sort of an urban myth.) Or, if we know we are going somewhere that we can plug in, we don’t need to worry about reaching our power limit tonight.

(3) We can cut our power usage. I could relocate to a coffee shop somewhere and use their power for my laptop. I could take the afternoon off. We could use only the LED lights in the trailer tonight. We could use the campground showers to avoid using the power-hungry water pump in the trailer. I find that a lot of people hate conserving because it makes them feel deprived, but we don’t mind so much. If I’m “forced” to quit work early, I can live with that.

But I probably won’t get that excuse. That’s because, in the real world, the weather changes. It probably won’t stay cloudy all day. Even as I’ve been typing this, the rain has stopped and some breaks have appeared in the skies. Right now we are generating 6-8 amps, which is a very healthy rate for recharging the Lifeline. Despite fluctuations, we should generate at least enough power today to offset my laptop use.

It’s important to consider this, because people who don’t like solar power tend to invent worst-case scenarios to “prove” that it is impractical, and those scenarios often include cloudy skies. That’s like proving generators don’t work when the gas tank is empty. Especially in the northeast and northwest, it is quite possible to have extended cloudy periods that make solar impractical, but even in those cases it is useful. The point is not to have unlimited power capacity. For us, solar is a tool to enable us to camp peacefully while silent, maintenance-free power streams into our batteries automatically and extends our time in a great spot like this one.

Sep 07 2010

Cliff Walk, Newport RI

We awoke on Labor Day to find a peculiar calm following the storm. In a radical change from the day before, the ocean’s fierce winds and thundering waves had been replaced by a placid waveless bay, with no breeze at all. All across the campground, the people who had wished to spread out for the long weekend finally got their chance, and out came the vital camping accessories: awning, folding chairs, outdoor rugs, colorful umbrellas, rope light, telescope, flags, tiki torches …

Being light-weight travelers as much as possible, we don’t carry a lot of accoutrement. We also don’t spend a lot of the time at the Airstream, when there’s exploring to be done. I think that’s a difference in traveling philosophy. The folks who are out here for the weekend want to establish their territory and create a mini-palazzo by the sea. We are not the types to sit under the awning and admire the ocean for very long, and whenever I set up the awning it seems that the wind will kick up or a thunderstorm will come by. So our site remains bare relative to the festive campers nearby.

Instead of admiring the calm sea, we made plans to head to nearby Newport RI, to hike the famous “Cliff Walk” along the magnificent “summer cottages” (mansions). These mansions were built with Gilded Age money from railroads, oil, and other industrial concerns when income tax didn’t exist and monopolies were allowable. Many of them are open for tours, and along with the pleasant streets of central Newport and the Cliff Walk, make for an interesting day. When we lived in Massachusetts we used to come down here regularly, and I used to lead bicycle tours right through the city, but Eleanor and I just calculated that we haven’t been to Newport in about 20 years.

Newport is more pleasant to navigate by bicycle, in my opinion, especially if you want to hike the Cliff Walk. Parking is a problem at peak times, and it doesn’t get more peak than Labor Day. Luckily we snagged a space in the parking lot at nearby Easton’s Beach (above), which is just a short distance from the formal end of the Cliff Walk.

From there, it is 2/3 of a mile to the first exit of the Cliff Walk at Narragansett Avenue. The trail winds above the edge of the sea and just below the elegant houses. Some are open to the public, a few have become inns or restaurants, and the rest remain private. All told, you cross the property lines of 64 owners if you traverse the full 3.5 miles of the Cliff Walk.

At times the trail reminded us of the hiking trails along Lake Como (Italy), with cut stone and meticulously built retaining walls. At other times the trail is more modern, and at still other times it is rustic and rugged like some hikes in Acadia National Park (Maine). There’s no time, however, at which the trail is anything less than beautiful.

From the back the houses protect their privacy with tall hedges and fences. But you can take one of several exits up side streets to drop in on the ones that are open for tours, like the famous “Breakers” pictured below.

The idea behind these “cottages” was that super-wealthy New Yorkers could exchange the heat of summer for the breezes of the oceanfront. In the 19th century you didn’t have air conditioning no matter how wealthy you were. The elite would hold conduct an elaborate social season in their American castles while admiring the view and the grounds.

Now of course, anyone can do the same thing in a smaller way. The palazzos by the sea are out in great numbers here at Horseneck Beach, for the price of $15 per night. We don’t have ballrooms large enough for 400 of the “best” people, but on the other hand we can still live quite happily listening to the waves, and we don’t need a gardening staff.

Solar report: Full sun again on Monday, and batteries were at 100% when we returned at 7 p.m. With more sun predicted, and work resuming on the laptop, we’ve let our power budget rise. At 8:00 a.m. Tuesday batteries were reading -36.0 amp-hours. Even with a few hours of laptop use I expect nearly full power by mid-afternoon. We don’t usually get a lot of use out of our solar panels while on the east coast, but with no trees at Horseneck and plenty of sunshine this week, living within the budget of solar power has been easy.