Camping At Work: 9/21/2009 Day 9

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

9/21/2009 Day 9

Slept in today. I woke up around 11:40am after shifting away from the heat/sun for a while. I suspect that with some curtains on the side windows, the interior will stay cooler much longer.

A few updates. Mom finished the back curtains, which worked fairly well. They do hang away from the window enough that my feet end up slipping behind the curtain. Between the curtain and the door get much warmer than elsewhere. For the back, magnets can be used to clip the curtain to the door itself.

Instead of firing up the air conditioner, I instead fired up the Vornado fan. Where the fan was blowing across me, I felt cooled down. However, my legs were getting warm from sunlight hitting the bed. I also felt slightly disappointed in the fan's performance. I was expecting air to be bouncing off of walls and circulating around. So around 12:30, I fired up the air conditioner. When I turned the A/C on, the generator hummmed a little louder and the Vornado roared to life. Apparently, the generator provides power in levels. The fan wasn't pulling enough power to kick the generator into higher gear, but once the air conditioner did, the fan received that extra power.

It's hard to tell how comfortable the Vornado makes things when the air conditioner is running. However, unless the air conditioner is running, the Vornado doesn't receive enough power to operate as designed. I could possibly place a large load across the generator to get the fan working, but that seems rather silly. Ultimately though, I plan to run the fan off of a battery/inverter combo that I recharge. Hopefully this will bypass the issue.

My battery plans will be to start out putting a battery on the cargo carrier. This battery will be attached to the generator outputs and to the Cobra inverter. This way, I can run something like the fan off of the battery. Once the battery goes dead, I can start the generator to charge it. Ideally, I would have a bank of batteries to power things inside the van and charge them with the generator. If that scenario works, replacing the gas generator with high-wattage solar panels would be the next step. Slowly, slowly working things out.

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About

I keep track of my equipment costs here.

Photos are here.

I work about 117 miles from where I live. My work schedule is fairly interesting. I work night's – 12 hour shifts. It alternates between 3 and 4 shifts each week. Factoring in a 1 hour lunch break, I work 33 and 44 hours. I then end up with really long weekends. The drive takes 2 hours and 15 minutes each way, so on a 12 hour shift, a round-trip is 16.5 hours. That leaves 7.5 hours to sleep, hygiene, and eat. For the last two years, I have been either renting an apartment or staying on a coworker's couch for the 2-3 days (and it is daytime that I sleep) that I'm at work. Rent in the DC area for a single bedroom apartment is very comparable to my mortgage payment on a 5 bedroom house at home.

For a permanent solution, I have decided to use a conversion van as my apartment during the work week and hope to sleep in the work parking lot during the day. I checked with the both the county sheriff's office and the county attorney's office. While there are rules against sleeping on a public sidewalk or park during the night (which might apply to someone inside a van) there are no issues with me sleeping at those same places during the day. Private parking lots require permission of the owner, otherwise I could wake up with a $100 fine on the van. The sheriff's office advised me that I should be prepared to be woken up a few times if someone called in a suspicious vehicle. Otherwise, there are no legal issues with me camping out in the area on a semi-regular basis.

My quest for cheap living begins.