New Build Begins- 2021 CV 515

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

The other optimistic side of things is that we are heading to where +30° above outside temperatures is still frickin cold so, unless the system turns itself off again , we should be real toasty.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

We've been able to spend the last week around Loveland Pass (Summit county CO) and now we are finally starting to test the "fourth season" capability of the habitat and the chassis. Sleeping elevations have been between 9,150 and 10,300' and night time lows have been at zero the last two nights.
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[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

We had previously been having problems with our hydonic furnace/burner but the replacement has been perfect over the last 10 days. Testing the furnace at elevation was something I was looking forward to getting into. I didnt know how much of a problem fuel gelling would be either but we were able to kill two birds with one stone. We are running #2 diesel with "Power Service" anti gel additive at 26 oz per 100 gallons. The furnace hasn't blinked. No smoking. No misfires. It's great!!! df

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

Back in the planning stages I wasn't able to get a comfort level on how many kBTU we would need to heat the habitat. One factor I wouldnt have even thought about was how much heat we would be venting out of the roof for condensation prevention. We are still a little scarred from our condensation snafus back east so considering we are in a less humid environment we I think we are running the roof fan faster than we need to.
On the first zero degree night I stayed up to keep tabs on everything. When I got worried about a pipe issue (more on that later) I decided to max out the demand on the diesel furnace and we were able to keep the cabin 62F warmer than outside. The air exchange fans and heater were running constantly.
Last night, with the pipe issue resolved, I lowered the thermostat but also slowed the vent fan down. Cabin still stayed 60+ degrees hotter than outside but air exchange fans came on only in small, low speed spurts and the burner did not run continuously either. From the Elwell controller you can see the heater hours and it seems as though it was 'combusting' somewhere between 80-90%.
I translate all that to mean we can get an even greater temperature differential than 62 degrees out of our set up for sure and that is only on diesel.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

When the night time lows were only in the upper teens we would shut the Elwell system off and run a 120v Dyson space heater in the loft.
The VRM custom widgets are so awesome and easy.....The graph above came from one of those. The blue line is exterior temp, red is interior and orange is AC demand. It's easy enough to look at the battery SOC when you go to bed and when you wake up to know how much juice you used the night before but this helps me quantify that SOC depletion with the internal and exterior temps.
I consider electricity to be 'free' and diesel is not. Being able to harvest data like the above has helped me feel good about shutting the hydronic system off at night and just using the Dyson when lows are forecast to be above 18. Then we have only burned about 7-10% of our batteries to heat the loft to about 56F. The 'downstairs' is in the low 40's so the diesel gets fired up at sunrise and 15 minutes later it is t-shirt toasty.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

We wrapped up our shakedown trip about a week ago and are starting to break ourselves into the setup. Upon return we settled on name for the rig which is now "Wandering Wanda".
After getting the hydronic going we had very few surprises with the habitat and it's systems. I'll get into those.
We do however have a tremendous way to go on becoming good off road pilots for her. With the top of box at ~11'-11" the top heavy teeter totter can feel hyper sketchy with even small, bumpy cross camber.
The other elephant in the room as far as driving goes is that she is heavy. 7,500# front axel and 13,050# rear.
That makes soft stuff bad. I'll go through the habitat hiccups first then get into the handling/driving discussion.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

As far as habitat 'performance' goes the items that made the 'that could have been better' are
The gray tank, at about 45g, is probably 2 times bigger than necessary. Spending so much time in BLM or USFS provided lots of easy and respectable places to empty the gray. That said our bathing situation is a shower pan with a plastic sheet duct taped to the ceiling so gray water production is urine and some real frugal plate rinsing.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

Second issue with room for improvement is the AC unit. It's a standard Coleman 15kBTU. Short story is it's ok for the keeping the whole box cool when day times highs are 98F and I need to lock the dogs in there or humans are tired of desert. It pulls 1,470W full tilt and needs to run about an hour to knock down the first 20degrees. Then it pulls about 900W per hour to maintain. I'm happy with that as far as our battery bank goes.
Use for sleeping is not so great. If there is a hot humid night at the beach and fans aren't cutting I was hoping to seal off the loft and just cool that for the evening. The 38 degree air coming of the coil is too cold to point at the loft even on the lowest fan setting and heavily diffused. We end up under a blanket. Not so good. The solution was we were having to blast the kitchen and ice down the whole habitat all night. If that usage is followed by a cloudy day and the battery bank is taxed.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

I want to make the switch to a DC unit but I need to finish round one stuff like a shower and cabinet doors instead of tupperware. After our under chassis storage boxes are figured out we will be able to remove our 14" tall roof mounted cargo box. Then I can loose the roof top unit and we will be 8" shorter and also lighter up top by about 450#.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

Last item habitat related kink worth talking about was with the Artic tern window blinds. When the blind, not the screen, is pulled down if there is even a moderate breeze the material will puff up like a parachute and pull the material out of its track. This happened even when the window was in the vented but locked setting. So at night when we wanted to black out the room you had to close the window entirely or listen to the stiff vinyl inhale and exhale. Then in the morning you have to realign the material. Simple but requires a little force and a tear in the material is already starting.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

Now onto a recap of our self taught drivers education course. As far as terrain and topography goes we went west on the I-70 corridor, took a left in Grand Junction and headed south to Purgatory. Went back up to Moab, then over to St. George via the Dixie Forest.
From there we boogied to Big Bend. The onto Corpus Christi then made our way back east along the Gulf ntil the muddy river and then took a left towards home.
So we hit sand, snow, rock and mud. Hot, cold, high and low.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

From a driving perspective the bullet points worth talking about are:
1. We had some issues with the differentials going into 4L in a variety of situations.
2. We have to be extremely careful in wet clay, sand or mud. Deep snow on frozen hard pack, she's a beast. But after a sunny day in the mid 20's that hard pack isn't so hard and is easy to spin to China.
3. We did some paved switchbacks that were at least 13%. Our truck Wanda struggled. If we didnt carry at least 1,000 rpm into the curve I was pretty sure we were rolling backward.
4. Learned some things about how long the block heater needs to pre-heat.
5. Learned some things about long uphill assents in hot weather.
6. High CG. She's a weeble-wobble and acclimating to driving from the top of a flagpole takes time.

I'm putting the keyboard up for a while and will get into the details of what we came across next.

 

[2 bikes 2 brown dogs]

I had a PM about some wheel adaptations.
Here are the close ups of the wheels.