Another electrical mystery

GM vehicles have a feature called Retained Accessory Power (RAP) that allows certain electrical accessories, such as the radio, to stay on for a short period of time after the engine is turned off. This is done to prevent the accessories from turning off suddenly, which could cause data loss or other problems.

The RAP feature is typically set to stay on for about 10 minutes after the engine is turned off. However, in some cases, the radio may stay on for longer, even after the doors have been opened. This can be caused by a number of factors, including:

• A problem with the RAP switch. The RAP switch is a small switch that is located in the driver's door. It tells the car's computer when the door is open or closed. If the RAP switch is faulty, it may not tell the computer that the door is open, which will keep the radio on.

• A problem with the body control module (BCM). The BCM is the computer that controls the electrical systems in the car. If the BCM is faulty, it may not be able to turn off the radio properly.

• A software problem. The software that controls the RAP feature may have a bug that causes the radio to stay on.

This is a weird setup to me. I believe that when you turn off the key all electrical things should shut down. If you want them on when the engine is off, then turn the key to the accessory position. That’s what it’s there for. But I’ve adapted to GM’s way of doing things.

Then, after getting the van back from the engine transplant, the radio no longer turned off when I opened the door. I had to turn it off myself. Hmmm, okay, so the RAP switch? The BCM? Something reassembled incorrectly? Sigh. So I adapted to that new reality.

Today, out of the blue, with no intervention from me or anyone else, it reverted to the GM standard way of doing things. Go figure.

 

Darn otoliths

A few years ago I started having occasional brief episodes of vertigo. They usually happened when I was in bed. I’d turn my head from one side to the other and my world would start spinning. Woah, I’m on the Tilt-A-Whirl!

The vertigo would last only a few seconds, so after a few of these incidents I settled into just letting them run their course. After all, I was already lying down and safe. Sometimes it would happen when I sat up to get out of bed. I would just flop back down and wait.

My type of vertigo is caused by tiny crystals called otoliths in my inner ear wandering into one of the fluid-filled position-detecting tubes that help us maintain balance. 

I learned all that this morning after googling information on vertigo, because an attack that had started as soon as went to bed last night was still going on. Besides finding out the cause, I also learned there’s a series of “exercises” sufferers can do to get the rogue otoliths back where they belong. They involve hanging your head off the end of the bed and holding your head in various positions. It helped, but I’m still not 100 percent. At least I’m not stumbling around and crashing into things.

I’m not all amped up

I’ve been on hold with customer support for too long, so maybe one of my solar-savvy readers can tell me why my two 200W panels are putting out plenty of volts but no amps.

UPDATE

After emailing, live chatting, manual rereading, forum browsing, some fiddling and a lot of hokey-pokey I got my solar contraption working. For now, but I don't know for how long. Ergh, electricity.

Solved that problem

Kitchen cabinets were intended to live sedentary lives, not to ride around in the back of a van. So drawers and doors have a tendency to open up and spill their contents when I’m trying to beat a left turn light.

My former cabinet had a functionally simple but aesthetically unappealing mechanism: cup hooks I would turn to grab the edge of the doors. I wanted something for my new cabinet that was nicer yet just as easy to use.

The soft closing feature of my Ikea cabinet isn’t good for keeping things closed. And I knew from past testing that magnetic latches weren’t enough against the force of several sliding cans of creamy tomato basil soup. I considered all the latches and hasps in several hardware stores. I dug through specialty catalogs online, but… nah.

Then I remembered a trick my nomadic friend Karin showed me. She uses bungee cords looped between the knobs on her cabinet doors. I don’t have facing doors, but I could approach it a different way. 

Voila! Now I just need to get more bungee cord for the drawers. 

I know the drawer police will be after me for not locating the knobs in the center of the drawers, but that’s the type of outlaw I am.

UPDATE: Got enough bungee stuff to do the drawers.

And in this corner...

 Cargo vans don’t have nice moldings covering all the wiring like passenger vans do. So the back corners of the Rolling Steel Tent are a bit of a mess. Not only are there the standard wires for taillights and such, there’s also what I’ve added: back up camera, antenna cable, cellular booster, overhead light… 

Finally, after ten years of trying to ignore all that, I made a simple panel to cover it. Ah, that’s better. Hmmm, maybe I should paint the back of that cabinet.

Going fancier

The original cabinet I built from scratch ten years ago functioned just fine, but there were some funky bits and some obvious flaws. I tried to fix those things as part of my upgrade, but I ended up making things worse. Sigh.

So rather than build a replacement, I explored pre-made cabinets, hoping to find something that would fit in the former cabinet’s space. And, surprise, Ikea had what I needed. I’d have to modify it to clear the fuel filler bump, but that would have been the case with any cabinet. (What, kitchens don’t have weird sticking out thingies?)

I had to pick up the kit at Ikea’s Albuquerque warehouse. There were seven or eight packages, which made carrying them much easier. 

The world is filled with jokes about assembling Ikea stuff. I’ve never had problems before. The trick this time was doing a large, awkward assembly single handed. 

The drawers were easy. Screw a couple of tabs to the drawer face, then snap the rest together. And the door hinges clicked into place. No problem. (I thought.)

In order to measure the cutout for the fuel filler, I had to partially assemble the 24 x 24 x 30 box, then get it into and out of the van without damaging it. It’s cumbersome, heavy and slippery.

In the meantime, we had the estate sale, selling off all of Lou’s tools. No more saws. But our neighbor friend Pat has an even better shop and she let me use it. I notched the base, back and side then built a box to close it in. Although Pat’s power tools are top notch, she doesn’t have many clamps. So I had to wait for one joint to dry before I could do the next. But it worked out.

Then the van was in the shop for the new engine and I couldn’t do measurements and test fits.

The top for the cabinet is separate and I decided I wanted to use butcher block. Lowe’s in Las Cruces had them in four-foot lengths an inch-and-a half thick—and about 5,000 pounds. 

“Hey Pat, Lowe’s wouldn’t cut the butcher block to size. They said it was too thick. Any chance your table saw can handle this slab?”

“I don’t know. Let’s try.” It worked and now Pat has the unneeded chunk of butcher block.

Then I had to decide how to finish the wood. If I wanted to use the butcher block for actual butchering I treat it with the proper waxy oil stuff. But I just need water resistance, so I went with some tinted polyurethane—after a lot of sanding.

The original plywood cabinet was made with plywood on a poplar frame. But melamine-covered medium density fiberboard is more brittle, and there was a chance the vibrations of driving—particularly on dirt roads—would cause damage. So in addition to Ikea’s fasteners, I glued the panels together, used more screws, ran a bead of super glue along all the seams, and added glued and screwed poplar reinforcements to the joints. It’s very rigid now.

Also, the original cabinet had been secured by a bolt through the van floor plus a couple more bolts attaching it to the end or the bed. But this time (partly because there was no one handy to hold one end of the bolt while I crawled under the van to tighten it) I attached it to the bulkhead.

Once the box was in place I could mount the butcher block and install the drawers and door. No problem with the butcher block. Just some marking of holes and drilling them, then using some lag bolts to secure it to Ikea’s brackets. But, oops, there was a problem with the drawers. There was a large gap between the drawer face and the butcher block. I thought I had screwed the slides into the wrong holes, so I unscrewed them and moved them up. But then the drawer was too high. I finally realized I had installed the faces upside down. So I returned the slides to their original position and… How the hell do I get the faces off the drawers? They snapped in, but how do I unsnap it? After about an hour of poking around in various holes (worried that I’d need to buy two more drawers) I finally found the secret combination! Whew!

So now it’s all done, except I need to mount the knobs, adjust the drawer and door gaps, and notch the shelves to clear my custom corner bracing. One more trip to Pat’s shop. Good thing it’s only a half mile away.

More power

My ten year old solar setup worked fine. I just had to be judicious with electrical usage during the darker days of winter. After a lot of debate with myself, and after acquiring some extra cash, I decided to make the leap from lead acid batteries to lithium. And I would boost both my collection and storage capacities while I was at it.

With deep cycle lead acid batteries you should use only half of its capacity each discharge cycle. Otherwise you damage the battery. So a 100Ah battery is actually good for only about 50Ah. Meanwhile, you can access nearly all of a lithium battery’s power each cycle, meaning a 100Ah lithium battery has almost twice the available power as a 100Ah lead acid battery.

I had two 104Ah lead acid batteries — 208Ah total. I could have replaced them with one 100Ah lithium battery, but that would still leave me with borderline power in winter. I decided to get 200Ah lithium — twice the power. And I chose to get one 200Ah battery instead of two 100Ah ones. It was a couple of bucks cheaper and easier to wire and locate in the van.

One drawback of lithium batteries is they don’t like to be charged in cold weather. Some people keep their batteries in sufficiently heated spaces. Some use the batteries’ power to run a heater or heat pad. But now there are self-heating lithium batteries. That’s what I got.

Having twice the battery capacity meant I needed to increase my solar output. I had a single 270W panel that took up most of the available roof space. But after considerable searching and measuring I found a pair of 200W panels that actually take up slightly less room.

Lithium batteries require a different charging profile than lead acid batteries. I could have found some solar tech guy who could reprogram my existing charge controller that didn't have a setting for lithium batteries, but it would be cheaper and easier to just get a new one. It would also be smaller. So that’s what I did.

Solar experts would probably blanch at the way my original system was wired, but hey, it worked. No shorts, no destroyed components, no fires. But I figured I could do it better this time. So I watched a lot of videos, read a lot of articles, and found a wiring diagram that matched my needs. The new system is more complex, with fuses, breakers, bus bars and such, but it’s actually less of a rat’s nest than what I had.

So, wheeeee! A new solar setup to go along with the new engine. I’m set for another ten year — assuming I last that long.

I continue to continue

Home at last!

Further progress

I checked in on the Rolling Steel Tent again. The new engine was in place and Manny was busy hooking up hoses and wires.

I said, “Van engine swaps are a real pain in the ass, aren’t they?”

He shrugged and said, “It’s the third van I’ve done this spring.”

He showed me the old engine. It wasn’t pretty. And it was wrapped up in preparation for a hazmat team to haul it away.

Gone at last

The truck topper that used to be on Lou’s F-150 was the last large item to be cleared off the property. It had been on Facebook Marketplace for two weeks, offered up for free, but there had been no interest. Yeah, it wasn’t pretty, and it was for a 7-foot bed in the age when most truck beds are shorter than that, so I sort of expected it. I was thinking about how I could have it hauled away when I finally got a reply to the ad from a guy in the next town over.

“Bring some extra muscle to lift this thing,” I advised. I was worried when just he and his wife drove up. Well, Lou and I had wrestled it off the truck, so maybe the three of us could get it on his trailer.

“No need,” he said, pointing to the crane on his truck. 

Ah-ha! Excellent. And excellent to have the topper gone.

So far

I was in town on other business this morning and decided to stop by the auto repair shop to see how things were going with the Rolling Steel Tent’s heart transplant. Some shops have strict liability-based rules against non-employees being in the shop, but the folks at R&L turned out to be cool.

The first chore when doing major repairs on a van engine is creating access to it.  Grill, bumper, radiator, core support, fan shroud, air filter and intake, hoses, cables, wires, pipes… All that stuff has to go. Then it’s time to remove accessories like the alternator, power steering pump, and water pump. That’s how far in the process the mechanic was when I dropped by. This is the ugly, sad looking stage of engine replacement.

I had already removed some things from the interior to maximize access to the engine and simplify the mechanic’s job. Just before delivering the van I decided to remove the mattress as well so it wouldn’t soak up garage odors. Good thing I did, because the mechanic is storing parts on the bed platform. Hmmmm, okay.

The service rep said everything had been going smoothly so far. I hope that’s more than just a standard customer-pleasing response.

More places

My new friend, Jason, is camp hosting just outside Flagstaff. When he learned I was on the road he invited me to stop by, stay a night or two. So I did.

Evening wandering near the campground

Morning walk in the other direction

After Flagstaff I headed south toward Payson and returned to my favorite (so far) campsite on the Mogollon Rim.

Looking down from my campsite

Road trip

With the estate sale taken care of, and a week before the Rolling Steel Tent goes into the shop, it seemed like a good time to do a little wandering. And I’d take the Loumobile and mini camper.

But where to go? Out of the desert, into the mountains and forests. Yeah, that’s what I wanted. So up the west side of New Mexico, into the Gilas, over into Arizona and the White Mountains, along the Mogollon Rim, then to Flagstaff before dashing back to my appointment.

I’ve taken that route a few times before, but usually with a get-from-point-A-to-point-B mentality. This time I’ll slow down, look around, explore a little.

Finally!

 The shop called today with the great news that my new engine has arrived, and with the not-so-great news that they can't fit me into their schedule until the 30th.

But, hey, I have a place to stay, other transportation while the van is in the shop, and enough money to pay for it, so life is good.