Lou Schneider

Except for taking out a loan for a fixer-upper mobile home in my mid 20s, I always paid cash throughout my life. One good thing my ex-wife did after I married her at age 50 was to give me a couple of high balance credit cards in my name (her late husband was an early Microsoft employee and she inherited a seriously significant amount of Microsoft stock). I gave up my career when we married to move to her home in WA state, when we divorced 5 years later it was a clean break with no alimony on either side due to a pre-nupt. She kept the new house we built and gave me the 15 year old motorhome because she couldn't drive it. More than fair since her money paid for them. I had few assets after the divorce so I basically lived off of those cards for a couple of years, boondocking in the southern deserts in the winter and in the cooler mountains during the summer. This was several years before Bob Wells started pushing the same ideas on his Cheap RV Living website. Eventually I got a good paying job in Los Angeles and continued living in the motorhome after finding a long term space in a nice RV park for significantly less than renting an apartment. I paid off the credit cards using no interest balance transfer offers. I only had to pay a 4% balance transfer fee twice a year and then had no interest for 6 months. Much better than the 18% - 24% credit card interest rates. Just bounced the balances from one card to the next and paid off two years of living expenses in about a year and a half. This was about the time Derek was pushing the $20 Tesla stock and I figured I would be better off paying off my debt instead of investing. I never did have a good head for finance. Anyway, I've been debt free since then and retired 5 years ago after working another couple of years to build up a nice nest egg. Thanks to the low cost of having a home base in an Escapees co-op park I'm enjoying a comfortable retirement on my Social Security. Including having enough funds to travel whenever I want.

From everything I've seen the runoff damage and flooding was in the central part of the Park, primarily along Hwy 190 west of Stovepipe Wells and east of Furnace Creek, with canyon runoff carrying debris into the Furnace Creek/Death Valley Inn areas. Scotty's Castle is some 50 miles north of there and there's Park Service and/or contractor staff on site at the Castle. I'm sure if there was a problem at the Castle they would have reported it by now, so no news is probably good news. There are no reports of damage in Beatty itself, just to the Beatty Cutoff Road inside the park. Here in Pahrump the previous week we got a storm cell on the alluvial fan east of town that caused some moderate runoff damage and short term flooding (a few inches) in the southern part of town but nothing but intermittant rain since then. Latest word is they're concentrating on clearing Hwy 190 from Furnace Creek towards Pahrump to facilitate work crew and equipment access. They cleared a single lane to let people stranded at Furnace Creek get out with police escorts but the road will remain closed to the public until at least next week. The park will probably remain closed significantly longer.

Sounds more like a hardware problem than a software bug. Most 1/8" jacks have a set of contacts that signal whether or not something is inserted into the jack. That's how your phone or PC knows to mute the speakers when you plug your headphones into the jack. Most likely these contacts on the Multiplus' Current Sense jack get dirty over time, triggering the Multiplus and Touch 50 to display the (non-existent) signals on the jack instead of what's it sees on it's internal sensors. Inserting something into the 1/8' jack exercises these contacts, making them work for a while until the dirt or corrosion returns.

Check Out King's Row RV Park on north Boulder Blvd. Family run since the 1960s and although not all spaces have mature shade trees, many do.

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At 10 o'clock at night in an unfamiliar area?

Verizon has a history of cutting off without warning resellers who abuse their educational discounts. I had to rapidly find new service for a half dozen mountaintop transmitter sites before I retired when they did this. I don't know if T-Mobile has a similar policy but you should be aware these kinds of plans can be cancelled without notice.

They never made it to Vegas, which is what triggered the search. On their way from Reno they wandered onto Jeep trails in the mountains west of Tonopah/Goldfield instead of staying on Hwy 95 and got the motorhome stuck. Then they made the fatal mistake of taking off in their Kia toad to try and get help and got stuck again without food or water. Tragic but preventable.

When I lived in WA there was a small Indian casino halfway between our house and the town with major shopping. I'd stop there on my way over to get lunch in their buffet. One day I decided to put a $20 bill in a slot machine and noticed it would let me win $6 - $10 before taking the rest of my money. Since then I'd do this and cash out when I won enough to pay for the lunch. Never failed. This only worked if you inserted a $20 bill - if you had a ticket you'd just lose it. I guess they figured only a newbie would insert cash and it was their way of hooking them.

You have to know the voltage and current each panel produces. If they're connected in parallel, a higher voltage panel will be reduced to that of the lower voltage panel. If both panels have the same number of cells, you can assume they'll produce the same voltages and you'll have no problem connecting them in parallel. If there was a significant voltage difference between them, say one panel put out 36 volts while the other put out 18 volts, the 36 volt panel would be drawn down to 18 volts, losing half of it's output power. But if both panels have the same working voltage you can connect them in parallel without any problems.

The Trailer Life and Woodall's telephone book size directories had several teams visiting every RV park in the country. They visited each campground in their territory at least annually to update the listings and coincidentally sell advertising space in the directory. A small RV park where I stayed in the 1970s wasn't listed in either book, when I asked the owner he said he didn't think it was worth the cost because his park was always full. Back then it cost $350 a year for a basic listing in either book and the price went up from there if he bought additional ad space. Days End has always been a volunteer effort, originally it was simply places submitted by members and printed in the each issue of the magazine. Over time the listings were compiled and made available for purchase, as far as I know Guy is the only one who gets any compensation for his time and effort. I assume listings are only updated when someone discovers one is wrong and sends the updated information to Guy.

Actually, on a watt-hour basis both AGM and flooded lead acid (golf cart) batteries weigh about the same. Makes sense since they're essentially the same lead acid technology. A Renogy 12 volt 100 amp-hour AGM weighs 66 lbs, a NAPA 6 volt 230 amp-hour golf cart battery weighs 64 lbs. You'll need two of each to have a roughly equivilent amount of storage. Lithium batteries are where you get weight savings. A 100 amp-hour 12 volt BattleBorn weighs less than half that much, 31 lbs. and you can use the full rated capacity.

Only if the charging voltage is allowed to rise above the battery's maximum charging voltage, no? Are you saying something like a Progressive Dynamics PD 9180ALV converter can overcharge a single lithium battery since it can deliver up to 80 amps at a constant 14.6 volts? Or will the battery only absorb as much current at that voltage as it can safely handle?

Usually what happens when you select a constant amperage, the output voltage is allowed to DROP when the current reaches that value because the load's impedence is too low to support full voltage at that current. Conversely, as iong as the maximum voltage doesn't exceed the battery's maximum charging voltage, the current won't exceed what the battery can accept. The only way a charger can pump more current into a battery than it can accept is if the voltage rises above the battery's rated maximum charging voltage. If the Victron allows this it's a bad design. Or are you saying Ohm's Law doesn't apply to lithium batteries?

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Voltage is the critical charging parameter, it doesn't matter if the charger(s) can deliver 100,000 amps, if it's at the correct voltage the batteries will only draw what they want to accept. Anywhere from 50 amps each over most of the charging curve to 0 amps when the battery is full. If the charging source can't deliver all of the current the battery needs it will draw down the voltage, reducing the current the battery can absorb until it matches what the charger can deliver. If you increase the voltage beyond the recommended limit the battery can draw more current and overcharge. But it won't if the voltage stays within spec.

You can connect multiple DC charging sources together without any issues. They won't backfeed into each other, all that will happen is the one with the highest voltage will supply the majority of the charging current and those with lower voltages will back off. You can't supply too much charging current, as long as the charging voltage is within acceptable levels the batteries will only draw as much current as they want. For lithium batteries this is 14.6 volts or lower. Lead acid batteries lose water if the charging voltage is left at this level after the battery is fully charged, which is why multi-stage chargers reduce voltage when the battery stops accepting charging current. Lithium batteries don't care, and lithium specific chargers just stay at this voltage all the time. You didn't say what the voltage setpoint is for your solar system, but all of the output modes of the Charge Wizard are safe for lithium batteries. It's just the converter won't contribute much to increasing the charge level of the batteries when it's not in Boost or Equalization modes. But it will contribute power to keep the loads from discharging the batteries in all modes except Storage. To address oldjohnt's concern about the Equalizing voltage, note on the Charge Wizard it's the same as the Boost mode voltage. Other converters may push a higher voltage in Equalizing mode, which would be a problem. In practical terms this means your solar system will charge the batteries when sun is shining on the panels and the Charge Wizard converter will power the loads whenever the solar system isn't producing enough power (at night or when the panels are shaded). Lithium batteries charge at 14.4-14.6 volts and produce that voltage when they're fully charged, which reduces the charging rate to zero (you need to apply more voltage than a battery is producing to push charging current into it). But their voltage quickly drops to 13.8 volts at 90% charge and stays almost perfectly flat until it reaches 13.6 volts at the 20% charge level. So a Charge Wizard controlled converter will help the solar system charge the batteries in Boost or Equalizing modes if they want more charging current than the solar can supply and will keep the batteries from discharging below 90% charge in it's Normal mode. Close enough in my opinion.

Don't forget about inflation. $ 1 in 1982 is only worth 35 cents today so you'll have to triple your money to be in the same place as a similar amount back then. https://www.aier.org/cost-of-living-calculator/

Sorry about your medical issues, but I wanted to address your 39.99% loan interest. Credit cards? I wound up living on credit cards for about 2 years after my divorce since I was in no shape to hold down a job. Once I did get one, I received a couple of "zero interest for a year on balance transfers" credit card offers. I was able to transfer my high interest credit card debt to these, then did the same thing on another offer a year later. Not accumulating further interest for two years let me retire the debt I accumulated. The trick is don't use those cards for anything else, the trap is if you do your payments go towards retiring the zero interest part while what you purchased remains unpaid and continues drawing high interest.

I became a Life Member when they were first offered about a year after I joined Escapees. I think it was during the Fresno Escapade. I was in my 30s and figured it would more than pay for itself by the time I retired. Joe Lacey was Escapees Publicity Director at that time and came up with the idea of selling lifetime memberships to raise the funds needed to expand the park system. Changes in real estate law had made it impossible to continue developing new Rainbow Parks by pre-selling deeded lots within the park. He said Joe Peterson was opposed to the idea because of the long term drain they would put on club resources going forward (magazine costs, etc.) but decided to offer a limited number to raise funds to purchase an existing campground. North Ranch was the last park built using the deeded lots plan, Racoon Valley, Turkey Creek and Tra-Park were purchased with Lifetime Membership funds. On a side note, Art Rouse also offered lifetime Good Sam memberships around that time. The difference was he sold the company shortly afterwards, pocketing the cash and leaving the new owners with the ongoing cost of servicing those memberships.

If you're a current member you can find the Membership Directory in the Members section of the Escapees website. Click on the Member Login box in the upper right corner of the home page and if you haven't already done so, set up an account. There's lots more in the Member section than just the Directory, so it's worth doing.

History repeats itself. Back during the 70s energy crisis the argument that defeated the adoption of year round Daylight Savings Time was the danger of sending children off to school in the dark if sunrise was delayed by an hour during winter's shorter days. Funny how no one's bringing that up now, has the pandemic and Zoom classes made people forget about children walking to school or waiting for the bus?