Picking up The Lady (Jupes)
I was of the opinion that we should stay down in Springfield, OR or neighboring Eugene for the week of the install. I have been wanting to explore the area for a while – I am eager to explore any area given the opportunity. However both Chris and I had localized work scheduled in our home base area in the middle of the week. I had two acupuncture shifts and he had podcasts to record. Any time we travel or are looking at an opportunity to travel we have to consider how much work we have to move around, or what we can do from the road. I cannot do my acupuncture shifts from the road, my lovely patient base is up near our home base. And while Chris can do shows from the road he needs a set up that is stable and a known entity – our RV works for most of his shows, but a hotel room is far too iffy. I can plan in advance and move my shifts around to accommodate a few days here or there, but we had been snowed in the week prior so I was backed up.
This is all to say that rather than staying at a hotel while the solar and batteries were being installed, we drove all the way back up to Skagit County after dropping the RV off with AM Solar Monday morning. We are lucky enough to have a place to stay up north when our rig is being worked on. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we worked, and then late Thursday afternoon we started back down again, staying at a dog-friendly hotel outside Chehalis, WA for the night. We finished the drive the next morning.
Our first stop was to exercise Levi at a dog park, poor little dog had been cramped in the car for two days! From there we called up AM Solar to get an idea about when they would be near complete, and oh, could we pretty please come see them in action? Dylan, the crew leader, agreed and we dropped in to see them working on our home in their bay. After that we went for a long drive into the country while the team finished testing the rig, and before they invited us back for the walk through.
I think we knew we were going to love this upgrade, but sometimes it feels like we aren’t sure if what we want to get we will actually get. We were both really impressed as they did the walk through and showed us our new system. In particular I appreciated the Victron Color System that displays the power coming into the rig, both from shore power when we are hooked up as well as from the batteries. It visually demonstrates where power is moving. And as I have played with turning on certain appliances or the lights I am finally grasping how the system works.
We now have 600 amp hours available. A vast improvement over our previous 150. And remember that our previous set up wouldn’t even charge our batteries.
Dylan also showed us the battery bay. Six BattleBorn Lithium Ion batteries, neatly tucked into one of our driver side storage bays. Alvin at AM Solar had to specially reinforce that bay, as the bay built for batteries was too small to house all 6 batteries, and any of the other bays were plastic and while big enough to house the batteries, definitely not strong enough. It was a piece of art – in particular the wire management. Both Chris and I would like to have the zen like capacity to do wire management. Maybe we can have the crew give us a tutorial. Not only was it all neatly tucked in there – AND LABELED – but they also gave us an extra fuse for every single item in there – also labeled. I would not be surprised if I find Chris staring into that bay just for the gratification of something being neat and tidy on our home, since neatness and tidiness IN our home is yet elusive.
We enjoyed some Thai food from in town, and spent the night completely running on battery. That included our heaters… one of which we didn’t even know was on – because usually that outlet isn’t running while boondocking. We’re going to have to rethink how we use our RV.
The entire pick up experience was seamless. Dylan did a good job explaining the new system – keeping an eye out for our level of understanding as we went so he knew where to go into more detail and which aspects we knew well enough already. We got an opportunity to snap a picture of Alvin with the battery bay, as well as a photo of Steve working on the top of another rig in the shop. It’s a fun crew. As we finished up and the team was packing up for the night, Chris hooked back up all of our automated stuff, I jumped on AM Solar’s wifi and quickly filed my state taxes that I realized were due that day, and Levi ran around the property with Blue Bonnet (that’s AM Solar’s mascot dog).
In the morning, at 5AM we shuffled back into driving move, pulled in the slides and settled in to leave. As we were rounding the building very slowly, Ray, another employee-owner, who was parked in his RV on site, came out in his PJ’s to help unlock and open the gate for us upon hearing our engine start.
Both Chris and I are always super appreciative of RV based businesses that GET what it means to live in an RV. With people like Alvin doing such beautiful work crafting us a custom bay for our batteries, or Dylan staying late to help us really understand our rig based on how WE use it, to the whole team letting us stay the night and trusting us on their property and finally to Ray waking up before sunrise (by a lot) to open up the gate for us – well it made us feel like while this was a huge job, it was money really well spent on a company that earned it.
Our drive home was largely uneventful, aside from a lot of rain, and we got home in record time – which allowed us to power nap before going to pick up the kiddos that Saturday evening. Chris records a show on Sunday, so it was right back into the flow of work, life and rving for us. And while we take care of our day to day local business & run around with our kiddos we are going to be chewing on the next question: Where to boondock first?