Hi Elvis Hargrove, hope you are having a nice day
PW>> Would be a most handy reference to have around here. 'Specially after
PW>> having lived for over a year off the grid, using the cars' electrical
PW>> system for power. (gotta love those old mil-spec vehicles)
EH> Tell us a little about how you did that, Paul.  I had a friend who drove
EH> a "Frito Truck" as his service vehicle, and he tried to do that, not
EH> real sucessfully.  His truck had a MONSTER 12 volt battery and a 100 amp
EH> alternator and he had a place he parked it with a connection beside the
EH> house.
 Not a lot to tell really. The wagon is a '79 Ford Fairmont sw, that
from all indications was made for military use, but ended up at a
civvie dealership. We bought it from the original owners.
(need to ask in oldcar, just how to id it for sure)
 What I did was to add a second battery on a separate feed from
the alternator (stock 60A) thru a 20A fuse. The feed to the house
came from that battery with the main one acting as a kinda sorta backup.
I did have to disconnect the fuse before starting the engine and
reconnect it once it was running, else it would try to start from both
and blow the fuse.
 The feed to the trailerhouse was a 15ft run using the power cord
assembly from a AIM-7B missile radar test set, which had 2 12ga. and 2 14ga.
conductors. Since the cord had a two piece 4 pole connector, that
made dis/connecting things a 2 second job.
 We didn't do too bad actually. We had tv, radio and a 40w fluorescent
light. Cooked for a while with wood on one of those little 12in bbq
grills (indoors no less) and then got one of the gas jobs.
Kept food in an ice chest, and hauled water for everything else.
(rusted a few brakelines doing that too)
 And during the cold snaps we used a kerosine heater, and kept a
pot of beans cooking on top. After 10hrs of slow cooking with
an ancho pod thrown in, a couple of cloves of garlic and a little 
olive oil..... :>~~~~~
 Both batteries seemed to do rather well, and never needed any 
maintenance other than you'd normally give them. The main battery
was about 450CCA and the other was about 300CCA. Our total load
was something in the neighborhood of 1.5AHr with everything going
at once. 
 Kinda miss all that, but then again being able to fire up ye old
compiler is kinda nice too. ;)
EH> Yeah, I'd like to have the HP articles here too.  There's substantially
EH>NO HP information available down here.
 That's one reason I'd like to get them myself.
 Oh! HP tip of the week. ;>
 The fluorescent light that I had wired up was a 40W 4ft lamp. The 
invertor otoh was from a 6W 12in portable. 
 To a certain extent the low power invertors don't care how big a 
lamp you connect them to. I did have to replace the single transistor
once, after a bad connection shorted it out. But after replacing it 
with a slightly larger generic replacement, had no trouble with the 
whole setup until the tube crapped out some 10mo later.
 New tube and we were back at it. And, I only gave $.25 for the lamp
that I took the invertor out of.
 -=> Yours sincerely, Paul Williams <=-
... "It'll just be twice as nice the second time around."--Syndi
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