In the bread machine post I promised more foolish experiments. Here ya go, I run a toaster oven offgrid with solar so you don't have to!

Bonus content: I derated the oven's wattage using a harbor freight triac.

• the big idea
• testing and potentiometer adjustment

My first time doing a pop rivet and it worked perfectly. Woot!

{Edit: it was based on my usual dried beans recipe}

This was enough for dinner that night and lunch the next day. So divide these costs in half to get the per-meal cost:

• 170Wh of energy
• $1.11, if my math is right:
  • ~$0.24 for onion, $0.49/lb at the local mercado.
  • 180g of small red beans. These were free because someone had them but couldn't/wouldn't cook them in their rig...
  • ~$0.01 5g of salt
  • ~$0.03 dried chili pepper from a bulk bag, again from the mercado
  • $0.83 1/2lb of louisiana smoked sausages (hot) from the manager's discount bin

Pressed the Beans button on the 3qt Instant Pot and forgot about it until it was done. Served with cold beer....

Each winter brings a flurry (ha!) of first-timers wondering how to keep warm. Not giving advice in the above post, but explaining how I do it.

The article talk about camping but also describes full-timers. There is also a kind of Green Book angle that might be useful.

I am fully aware most folks won’t have the interest, space, or power to run a bread machine. But for me it’s cheap fun.

Did I burn down the van? Did I kill my my batteries? Did it make actual bread?

Another silly experiment in a week or so.

I maintain a list of all the vehicle-dwelling laws I can find primary or secondary sources for. Just added Belleville. Yay.

Many of the articles specifically mention that stricter laws on this kind of thing are a direct result of the SCOTUS Grants Pass decision.

Including some data on charging the LiFePO4 bank underway.

Trigger warning: reddit link follows :-) I've been trying to give away a 50Ah Chins LFP to a cardweller, but no luck so far. The batt is now with me in Alamogordo, NM. After this it will be in El Paso for the winter.

Kaylee may be best known for her ability to live very frugally in a van and experiments cooking with what is available. She documents it all for the benefit of others.

In this post she describes using one of Zatarain's cajun-style mixes as the base for a crockpot meal.

I usually keep a box of their Jambalaya mix in the pantry, waiting for the chance to pick up some smoked sausage on sale/closeout. The local grocery store had a sale on Andouille so I got 1lb of it for $3. Will cook it up today or tomorrow.

My kitchen situation is a bit different, because during the build I had sufficient salary and time to build a robust power system. This allows running a fridge and the smallest Instant Pot. In practice this means I typically cook in full batches and store the leftovers in the fridge for another meal.

I adapt the Zat for Instant Pot by reducing water from 2.5c to 1.25c and cook at pressure for 13 minutes instead of simmering for 25. If I'm at elevation (like 8k-10k') I will bump the time to 14-15 minutes. Natural release in all cases, mainly because it reduces foamy messes that requires lots of water to clean up.

Related RVwiki article: cooking with excess power

the Business Plan proposes to increase current fees from $180 to $600 per long-term permit, and from $40 to $200 per short-term permit. It would also modify the short-term permit length from 14 days to 30 days

There is a comment period for the public.

I subscribe to the RSS feeds of all the NF/BLM districts I boondock in while snowbirding. So I knew that a small section of NF land outside Santa Fe, NM where I was headed next was closed for a year.

I picked a spot at least a mile outside the "designated area" that was closed.

A friendly ranger pulled up this morning and asked how long I'd been here (4 days). He started to gently/professionally inform me the area was closed. I pointed out this spot was outside the designated area. He was skeptical and rechecked the map on his phone.

I think he was embarrassed (and thinking of others he might have punted) because he wanted to show me how hard the map was to read on his phone. He also said I was the first person he talked to that had actually read the closure notice. We commiserated a while about the misuse that caused the closure.

He was a good guy and I assume he will go back and clarify the situation for anyone else he misinformed.

#takeaways

• reading the district's announcements can be both directly and indirectly useful
• bringing up the NF's official language ("designated area", "dispersed camping") seems help establish rapport

Details are on reddit. Hopefully going back there won't give anyone PTSD. :-)

... in which I relate my first wild bear sighting (with crappy pic) & and double the size of my LiFePO4 house battery bank .

Living in a vehicle the last few years has helped me save & keep all the money I would've otherwise paid to a landlord. So I can afford a security system now, and urgently need one because people are starting to catch onto my patterns and hover around my vehicle like vultures. Please tell me the best security system you know of. I am not savvy with electronics and gadgets, and I never will be. So I need someone to tell me.

I'm thinking of a fuel kill switch or battery kill switch or whatever that thing is;

I'm thinking of camera system that I can monitor with my smartphone from wherever I am, etc

I'm thinking keeping several air tags all around my vehicle, in pockets of clothing, and in bags, and under my mattress (can I use Apple air tags if I don't own any apple devices??, I run on Samsung and Lenovo and Linux);

Please tell me where to get these things, what the best brands are of fuel/battery kill switches, camera monitoring system

Alternative Youtube Link

The domain name is up for purchase ($9999.99 according to my registrar), so it looks like it's lost rather than just temporarily parked for a slightly overdue bill.

Luckily the site was recently backed up by the Internet Archive and the archived All, gpx, and csv links seem to work.

(Me= vanlife.)

If you have your starlink satellite thing mounted on top of your vehicle, the only time you can get internet is when you are within range of your vehicle, right?

In case there's no Wi-Fi available, and you're away from your vehicle, which is a situation that is pretty constant in my life.

I presume there's no starlink hotspot to carry around(?)

Like it's been nice to have my Verizon hotspot "Orbic" shitty little thing when my phone's unlimited data service is slow or spotty but even the Orbic has shitty service sometimes.

I definitely want to abandon evil extortionate Verizon. Please tell me if I become a starlink customer, I won't be able to use my phone indoors at work which doesn't allow us to use their Wi-Fi, And when I'm walking around town, what to do for internet?

Please tell me your most highly recommended ISP that isn't extortionate & manipulative.

a swamp cooler and humidifier of this design are doing the same thing: blowing air through a wetted, porous medium. The goals are different (humidification vs cooling) but the mechanism is the same.

TL:DR: I saw a set of cheap panels with weird specs at Home Depot. I bought some to experiment on and to use as portables to augment my mounted solar.

Home Depot is selling 200w of panel for $114. That's $0.57/Watt. Not amazing compared to used panels (typically $0.33/Watt) but HD is all over the place and has free ship-to-store.

It also comes with mounting brackets and one of those single-stage PWM controllers. I'm not bagging on that kind of controller, but it's not a great fit for this particular set of panels.

#THE CATCH

The panels are a weird design, apparently 24 cells in series. Normal "12v nominal" panels have 36 in series for ~18Vmp. These have a Vmp of 12.0v, so I think we would call them "8v nominal".

This makes them practically unusable in parallel for charging lead or LiFePO4.

You could run the panels in series on the PWM controller since it has a 50v input max and the series Voc would be 30v. But, due to the way PWM works the panels would be running at in the 14v range at the most. This is way, way off the 24.0Vmp of the series array. I'd expect a max harvest of ~120w with that kind of setup. If these were normal panels in parallel and on PWM I'd expect a max of ~160w. We can go into the math on that if anyone wants.

The best case scenario IMO would be to run the panels in series with an MPPT controller. This would get us closer to ~170w max harvest.

some other thoughts:

• The panels might work well enough in parallel for 3S Li-NMC because of that chemistry's lower voltage
• HD has a 10% discount program for veterans if you provide them with a bit of documentation.

... in which I camped in a spot infested by mule deer, picked up spent brass, and trusted the local forecast enough to do my cooking off solar....

in which I bumblefsck through figuring out why my solar setup no worky

I was outside the zone of totality, so was still making some power.

Notice that panel voltage did not decrease like many think, it does. Vpanel is stable above ~10%-15% insolation, depending on the panel

I did this because the hotplate was a bit more than my offgrid rig could handle comfortably. Been using it at ~500w to very good effect.

This is probably worth considering in general, but dealing with financial lockouts on the road is a particular kind of dumpster fire.

TL:DR: I deposited a check and things went weird (not an NSF scenario). My bank got spooked and locked not just that one account but all of my access for two weeks.

I scrambled to open new accounts elsewhere and move direct deposits over. Soon (like 12 hours) after completion my bank said "oopsie!" and restored my access to the accounts this morning. Having pre-existing accounts at other locations would have been stressful because one institution could not bogart my funds.