I took a day off the road to catch up on a whole bunch of years with Dale and Donna. The day started early as a band of severe thunderstorms rolled through. I was fine, but the heavy rain on the roof was quite loud despite the insulation and woke me up. I even had to close my roof vent because a little bit of rain was getting blown in, which almost never happens. After a second band blew through, the sky cleared, and we had a pleasant day with more moderate temperatures than the past week or so.
Lister wanted some outside time, but I can’t let him roam free as usual while parked on the street. So I took him to Tower Park a couple of blocks away and let him take me for a walk. He stuck to shady areas but we put down quite a bit of distance, for legs as short as his. He slept most of the afternoon.
While he slept, Donna showed me around Des Moines a bit. It turns out we both appreciate genuine Mexican food, between my time in the southwest and her time doing mission work in Tijuana. She took me to her favorite place in town for street tacos, and they made them perfectly. I haven’t had tacos that good since leaving Arizona.
Then she took me for a drive around Des Moines itself. One of my favorite experiences when traveling is to roll into somewhere I don’t know much about, don’t have high expectations of, or both, and being pleasantly surprised at just how nice the place is. I’ve had that experience in Des Moines. The capital city of Iowa feels more like a large town. For example, where my uncle and aunt live feels like a residential suburb, but it’s actually within the city, and not a heinous two-hour commute away like Boston was when I lived 30 miles away. There are numerous parks all over the place, and traffic is quite reasonable, even downtown most of the time. While I wouldn’t want to live here — the climate gets too hot, too cold, and is vulnerable to tornadoes — I appreciate why some people do, and rather enjoy it myself.
Lister seems to like it here, too. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get to jump out the door and roam around as usual, because I’m parked on a city street. He does enjoy the garden, though.
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As I was winding down for the night, my entire 12-volt electrical system shut down again. I grabbed my headlamp (always leave a headlamp where you can reach it), opened the electrical cabinet, and sure enough my charge controller was reacting to a short circuit that didn’t exist again. Same as before, no fuses were blown. After resetting it, it seemed to work with the lights on, but as soon as I added any more than 0.1 amps of load, it shut down again. There was no rhyme or reason to what circuits caused it to shut down.
So I gave up. I disconnected the fuse panel from the charge controller’s load output, and touched the wires to the battery terminals instead. Everything came back to life. I stuffed the wires into the terminals kind of loosely just to keep the fan and fridge going through the night. This morning, after saying a proper goodbye to my aunt and uncle, I returned to the park, let Lister roam, put some proper ring terminals on the ends of the fuse panel wires, and connected them directly to the batteries. Everything works just fine now.
I may revisit this problem in the future, when I’m parked for a while, but it’s good enough for now. The fuse panel has fuses, plus there’s an additional in-line fuse between the batteries and the fuse panel, so with double protection it’s safe to run straight off the batteries. I’m losing my ability to monitor power usage, but what good is that if the charge controller doesn’t let me actually use any power through its load output?
With that taken care of, I’m ready to settle into this morning’s work while Lister enjoys the grass and shade. Then we’re off on a non-highway route to our next overnight stop continuing west.
Smokey Da Van 