I am just under a week shy of completing one solid month of boondocking! I’m doing one night on FHU and then it’s back off the grid I go.

Boondocking for so long didn’t seem realistic when I first started as I had so many troubles with my electrical setup. But I persevered in my troubleshooting and have been rewarded with a 12V system I now only need to monitor as it is adequate and functioning well for my needs.

That said, I’m not sure I would still be here on the beach had I not been able to borrow that generator at the beginning of February or if L and B hadn’t installed a new continuous duty solenoid in the motorhome engine compartment. It really does take the proverbial village…

I’ve got my power usage down to a routine now. I charge my computer in the morning and leave it plugged in for the entire afternoon. It still consumes a few amps at full charge, but it’s a fraction of what it needs to charge, so I’m able to charge the house batteries fully by dinner time, and I have a fully charged computer for the evening.

I don’t leave the computer plugged in in the evening because of the enormous voltage drop due to undersized wiring that I still need to correct. If I leave it plugged in, I don’t have enough voltage to even run an LED light without it flickering.

Now that I know that the wiring is undersized, I can manage my 12V use so that the system doesn’t get over loaded and the DC charger doesn’t get hot, so there are no fire concerns. I am eager to beef up the wiring, but it’s going to be a costly job and there are other upgrades in line first.

If it’s sunny out, I can use 120V items, like the printer and vacuum cleaner without a second thought. If like yesterday, it is overcast, then I need to shut some things down (usually unplugging the computer is enough) or run the engine to get the added voltage boost.

As for plumbing, the holding tanks haven’t been a problem. I could likely go a couple more weeks.

I am sorely missing having water in my on board tank, but have conceded that my 10-gallon water heater means that having instant hot water while boondocking is a wasteful luxury. Having a navy shower is no better than bathing in a basin. So, really, hauling and heating water is always going to be in my boondocking future when I am not somewhere that I can fill up regularly.

I do so desperately miss my long hot evening showers as they were my transition time to bedtime. I need to find access to showers the next time I’m off the grid this long. When I had my house and the plumbing was off in the dead of winter, I’d just go to the gym. I need to find an equally suitable setup on the road. The RV park where I am going does have showers, but I’d have to pay an extra $5 per day to access them. Much as I love my showers, they are not worth that much!

When I started reading about RVing back in 2008, I thought of all the things I would have to give up, and the first that came to mind was my daily shower. I can’t even remember the rest, but the showers hold true. That’s really the only concession I make when off the grid. Otherwise, I am living a more electrically-mindful version of my normal routine and I don’t feel deprived in the least.

Finally, boondocking is infinitely superior to staying in an RV park with all its restrictions!

I didn’t post about this latest battery observation on Monday because I wanted to repeat the experience, which I did tonight.

When I shut down for the night on Sunday, my battery voltage was very low, about 12.3 when I was only down a few amps. I had left my computer plugged in all day, but it draws only about an amp when it’s fully charged rather than 4 or 5 to charge it, so I’ve decided to sacrifice the laptop battery for the sake of the house batteries.So, really, I should have been sitting at 12.55V once everything was off and the computer unplugged.

When I got up up the next morning, voltage was about 12.45V, much better than the night before but still not right. I ran the engine for all of five minutes. An hour after shutting down the engine, voltage had stabilized to 12.57V. It’s almost like the computer exhausted the batteries and they needed a little boost.

Similar situation tonight, except that when I unplugged the computer to see where I was at voltage-wise, it was 11.99V!!!!! Even though I knew that was not a true reflection of my amp hour capacity, I couldn’t spend the night with that little voltage! I ran the engine for five minutes and now voltage is holding steady at 12.5V, even with the computer plugged in and a light on.

I’m sure some of my experts have been chomping at the bit to jump back into the electrical theories arena, so have at it! 🙂

And for those who have heard enough about my batteries to last a lifetime, I do apologize. 😉

The hard drive on my early 2009 17″ MacBook Pro has been giving me hints for months that it was going to fail. The cost of a replacement drive and the fact that the swap is a DIY job meant that it just wasn’t worth waiting for the drive to crap out. Doing the swap now would mean doing so on my own terms when I was ready for it and well prepared.

First, I had to find a new drive. I did some (a lot) of research and found a WD Blue 500 GB Mobile Hard Drive that was well reviewed, suitable for a MacBook Pro, and available cheaper on Amazon than anywhere else, including Newegg.

The physical job of swapping the drive was very easy. I used a YouTube video to show me how to do it. Since I watched this before buying the drive, I knew to add a T6 Torx screwdriver to my order.

What troubled me was how, exactly, to get my new hard drive up and running. All my research was telling me that the new hard drive would magically boot up and I would be able to restore my system from my last Time Machine backup. That didn’t sit right with me and I dug deeper.

As it turns out, that above info is fine for folks who have newer Macs with internet recovery, as well as access to an open wifi signal or hard wired internet. This was not my case with an early 2009 Macbook Pro. What I had to do was create a recovery disk on one of my external hard drives.

I partitioned my 2TB drive and used the recovery assistant app to create a recovery disk on the partition, which took just a few minutes. That combined with a fresh Time Machine backup meant that I was ready to do the surgery.

One of the mounting bar screws was so tight that I stripped it and had to remove it with needle nose pliers. Otherwise, swapping the hard drives was just as easy as the video claimed.

The new hard drive installed, I turned on the computer, holding down the Option key after the chime. This allowed me to choose a drive for booting, and I selected my new recovery disk.

The recovery disk allowed Disk Utility to open. This made it possible to select the new drive and format it it correctly. I was then able to mount it.

The final step was to to restore my system by choosing my last Time Machine backup and having it restored on my newly formatted hard drive. This took about two hours.

And that’s it! I restarted the computer once the restoration was done and it’s almost like I never did the surgery. I am finding the new hard drive to be a lot louder, but this is something I was warned about in the reviews, so I’ll learn to put up with it.

I also gained 180GB of hard drive space since I went from a 320GB drive to a 500GB drive. Combine that with my external drives and I have 4TB of hard drive space available to me. I won’t be running out of space anytime soon!

I never did get to recalibrate the battery monitor since the big winds the other day because I’ve needed to use an inordinate amount of juice to keep the office running this week. I’ve been keeping an eye on the amp hour count up and down and the voltage at the end of the evening to make sure that my battery levels are at acceptable level until I can get a full charge.

All would have been well if we had gotten the sun we were supposed to get today, instead of a low cloud cover, which meant I drained almost 30A today. When the solar charger clicked off tonight, I unplugged my fully charged computer, and looked at my voltmeter. The reading was 11.9V, which is about 40% capacity, but I didn’t freak out because I know now that within an hour of unplugging the computer, my voltage creeps back up a few points as the batteries get to rest.

Regardless, I was low and I was pretty sure I’d have to run the electric blanket tonight as I should have done so last night and I ran the furnace for a full hour this morning! So I turned on the engine while I made dinner.

To my delight, a steady 17A began to flow into my batteries! It’s true! If you’re below 80% capacity, your alternator charges more quickly to bring you up to that 80% mark! It didn’t take long for the amount to slowly taper down and I cut the engine at 10A coming in. I’m now sitting at about 12.46V, which is about 80% capacity. Not great, but we should be getting sun tomorrow, plus I have errands to run so I can take some load off the house batteries by charging the computer in the truck.

So I now know that, really, there’s little point to running the engine to get a charge if I’m above 80% capacity, but it is totally worth doing so when I go below that.

I’ve been boondocking for over a month now in okay weather and it keeps getting better and easier as I slowly figure out how to use all the information available to me to manage my power use. The new solenoid has been a big help, as has been able to borrow a generator twice, that’s for sure, but they’re just a tiny part of a much larger puzzle I’m putting together.

And with that, I’m off to plug in my electric blanket. It’s going to be another coooooold night.