Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Soon, we'll be so full of hot air...

Mounted the house heater.
First, VHB and screw down a riser.

Then measure 25 times  to get enough confidence to drill the burner vent holes.

Whew, the holes  and heater align!

Goop up the vent cover with lots of caulk. Mainly building up enough to fill the curvy part of Annie's wall. Screw it in nice and tight.

Cut the excess caulk and paint it silver to match Annie.

Screwed the heater to the riser, and we're done.

This marks (or almost marks) a milestone. I don't think there are any more openings to cut into Annie's driver side wall!  I need to find out from Airhead if I can run the composting john's exhaust vent through the floor, instead of high on the wall, or through the roof.

If I can, here is Annie's complete left side.

Friday, November 20, 2015

Wiring without enough coffee to get us wired

The water heater is mechanically installed, so we've gone back to electrical work.

This is a short entry, since pulling wire isn't particularly exciting. I may revisit the topic if something challenging shows up.
Me being unexcited:


I created a spreadsheet of what needs to be wired to what. I use that as a reference when pulling the lines.

 I've run most of the upper DC power and control lines from where the fuse/distribution box will be:

To where they'll end up at various switches, gauges, sensors and self-destruct timers. There will be a control panel on the john's outer wall, near the fridge. I've also run the lines back to the items that get switched or sensed (like the battery & solar monitors and controllers, water heater, H2O pump, water & LPG levels {the white/red pair going into the floor behind the LPG valves}, etc.).


Finally ran the line to the LPG level sensor and hooked it up. Clearly, I need to stress relief this end to the wire feed-though.


Next step is to mount the house heater and and cut its combustion vent holes.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

I think we're getting into hot water

The AC and DC fuse/distribution box will be inboard from the water heater. I decided to get the heater mounted before all the cabling gets in the way. Once again, we have a case of needing to do "A" before "B", "B" before "C", and "C" before "A".

The heater is an Atwood propane fired on-demand unit. It needs to be raised above the floor to avoid cutting the plastic outer body panels, and to more or less vertically balance the curvy part of the outer wall.

So, it will sit on a riser box just aft of the propane valves. Here I've marked where we need to slice Annie open. The riser is being used to set the height.

Reasons for choosing this location are that there is a minimum amount of inner wall to cut, and that the inner and outer wall are connected on both sides of the cut pretty close to the hole. That will help keep things rigid.

 The inner hole is cut.

Measured and marked for the outer hole, and drilled corner pilot holes.

I cut the hole from the outside. Covered the hole with a bit of plastic sheet because we were expecting rain.

Dry fitting the heater, while saving the hole cover for a rainy day. Not sure what the next step would have been if I'd screwed up the cut...

Installing the riser that the heater sits on. The riser is screwed to the floor and VHB'd to the outer wall.

Because of Ford's stupid form before function curves of the sidewall,  the vertical center of the heater hits the wall well before the heater top and bottom. In other words, you can't mate the two flush. So, I'm adding aluminum spacers and LOTS of caulking tape to convert the warped sidewall to a more-or-less flat mating surface.
Adding spacers:

Made sure the heater is seated properly. I'll be tying it down with some plumber strap as the last step.

Then the caulk tape, non-sag lap sealant, and mounting screws.

Removed a bunch of the excess lap sealant and painted it silver. That sealant stuff is a real pain to work with and finish smoothly. I pretty much failed at the task (as the aesthetics committee made very clear), and will revisit it in some of my copious free time. But for now, it sure won't leak!