To Do - Old

Buy a 5-gallon bucket toilet kit
Make a 5-gallon bucket air conditioner
Move/organize stones around shower area
Design and build frame and door for workshop
Research standalone ice maker
Get 2 more 5-gallon gas cans - need one extra to mix special fuel for the generator in
Get extra 5 gallon water jugs
Build a PVC rack for the water jugs
Research pricing on sandbags
~~Find new storm shutter company~~
~~Find cheap source of neoprene~~
~~Buy an air conditioner~~

Storm Shutters

I have one company coming out on the 20th and about a half dozen others that I either left messages for with no response or they begged of claiming they’re too busy. Business is really picking up in anticipation of hurricane season.

Evacuation Dry Run

We’re on vacation right now - on the west coast of Florida. This is our yearly family trip and it’s a bunch of fun. This time however, I got to have a dry run of our evacuation plan should a hurricane arrive. The west coast of Florida is a good bet to retreat to if a hurricane shows up on the east coast. If it’s not, we have to go north instead. We’ll have a dry run of that later this summer when we visit my sister in law in North Carolina.

What I wanted to dry run during this trip was packing our car using our various new storage options: a hitch-based cargo carrier and a roof bag. The roof bag is why I needed the neoprene: we use straps that run through the car to secure the bag and I needed the neoprene to protect the paint job on the car where the straps touch the car. For the record, they worked well, but they may be ruined after one use. Otherwise, the roof bag worked well and carried a fair bit of gear. We had rain on the way out but it was plenty waterproof. It didn’t make (many) funny noises this time - sometimes the straps buzz in the wind. There is a no-skid mat underneath the bag and that flaps plenty, but it’s no big deal.

The cargo carrier worked well as well. I managed to get the hitch onto my wife’s crossover by myself (well, with the help of my 3-year old daughter who ‘dressed’ the bolts with their washers for me and built things with my spare 2x4’s sitting around). My wife’s car isn’t a beast - it has a towing capacity of 1000lbs, so I chose a class 2 hitch with a towing capacity of 3500lb and a hitch weight of 350lb. The carrier will hold up to 500lb, so the hitch is the limiting factor here. It’s important to note that the 350lb and the 500lb capacities are static weights only: if the car hits a pothole and torques the hitch then that extra force counts toward the 350/500lb limit. That means you shouldn’t fill the cargo carrier too full.

The cargo carrier needs a 2” hitch where my wife’s car has a 1.25” hitch. Thus, I bought an adapter at Harbor Freight. Once I put everything together I tested the whole setup on my Honda Fit (which also has a 1.25” hitch on it). My main concern was noise, so I strapped my daughter into her seat and took it for a spin down to the next interstate exit south then back up to my house. There was no significant noise - and I made SURE to hit every pothole I could find. The experience on the road to the west coast with my wife’s car was similar: no annoying or terrifying sounds. I call it a success.

I bought a 5’x7’ tarp (well, free with coupon) at Harbor Freight to cover everything and protect it from rain. I then used bungee cords to fold it over as best I could and used tie-down straps to secure the whole thing to the carrier. This didn’t go as well as I planned: I laid the tarp down, packed the cargo carrier, then folded it up over the top and used the bungee cords to hold the folded tarp in place. The main problem was that I had a 5-gallon water jug back there and it was too tall to allow the tarp to be folded over without a gap. This gap only got worse with the wind when driving and some rain did get in there. Still, I made sure to pack only things that wouldn’t mind getting wet and the rain wasn’t too bad in the end. I do think that I shouldn’t pack that thing too heavy or even too large - small, low-profile things only. I’ve found I can fit a couple of cube coolers on there and my gas cans fit (but they don’t double up very well) and large rubbermaid containers fit okay one way, but not another. All in all, it will be a good way to store things I don’t want in the cabin (like gas) or things that need to be available easily outside the car. I might need a bigger tarp and I might need a better one than a free Harbor Freight one - it’s already ripping at the grommets after one use.

Air Conditioner

I bought an air conditioner I found on cragislist for $100. It’s an 8000 BTU unit - not too small, but not too large. I need to stick it in the window of my workshop and see what kind of power usage I get from it and how well it can cool a small space.

Refrigerator

I suspected that there was some sort of wiring issue in the outlet my garage refrigerator was plugged into so I got an extension cord and profiled the power usage from it on a different outlet. It was largely the same but a bit less: 190WH per hour of usage and ~3A current usage when the compressor was on. What this means in the end is that every hour, the refrigerator is on roughly 45 minutes. That’s only an average and not an actual measurement though. To determine how I need to power the refrigerator I need to know the profile of how it cools: when does it turn on, how long will it be on when it turns on, how much power will it use when it’s on, etc.

Temperature Sensor

I returned the temperature sensor that didn’t work well but I didn’t get another one. I need something that logs temperatures, not something that only gives me a max and min temp over a period. I need to see how long the refrigerator turns on, at what temperature it turns on and at what temperature it turns off. Then I need to be able to compare this profile at different temperature settings and over different periods when I schedule the refrigerator on and off using an outlet timer. To this end, I’m going to make a quick and dirty temperature logger with an Arduino. All I need is a thermistor, a bias resistor and a battery pack with a USB cable to power the thing. I’ll read the thermistor with the ADC and store the data in EEPROM for safety (I might get away with storing it in RAM but in case the thing turns off accidentally I don’t want to lose all my data). I’ll download the data over UART and plot it with Python when the time comes. I should get some nice ups and downs from this. I’ll use this opportunity to play around with power saving modes as well.

Power/Generator

I had the chance to talk with some old hands who have been through a hurricane or two about what they shoulda/woulda/coulda done during a hurricane. One thing that came out of the talk is that my 700/900W generator will probably not do the job well enough to keep us happy during a significant power outage. Even paired with some batteries and the 1KW inverter I will not be having a good time. I need a 3/4KW peak power source, but if this is a generator then it comes with its own issues. For example, the guy I talked to is more than willing to sell me his 5KW generator - never been used. Sounds great, right? The problem is gas usage. The reason his has never been used is:

He didn’t need nearly 5KW of power after the hurricane: his power usage profile was a lot like mine in that he wanted to run a refrigerator and an air conditioner.
The thing EATS gas. It has a 5 gallon gas tank that at ~50% load it will blow through in 8 hours. By comparison, the 700/900W generator I have consumes 1 gallon of gas in 5 hours at 50% load.
Generators are loud. Sure, someone may say ‘Oh it’s quiet’. What they mean is ‘Oh it’s quiet - for a generator.’ ‘Quiet for a generator’ is loud for anything else.

So, in a typical usage scenario with the 5KW generator and no battery backup I would need to run it all night to power the air conditioner and refrigerator. That eats 5 gallons of gas right there - and most of it is wasted since the refrigerator will hold its cold overnight fairly well (most old hands agree about this) and the same will probably go for the air conditioned space. So it might be worth it to not run the generator overnight, but then you’d definitely be running it during the day and that will eat at least 8 gallons of gas. You can’t sustain that usage for a week - it’s a couple of days at best. So we get into an issue: you need a large generator to handle the peak power usage needed for the compressor-based devices (refrigerator, AC) but large generators waste gas and limit the useful life of your gasoline supply.

So I’m in a bit of a catch-22 here. A large generator is going to do the job but will be noisy and expensive to run.

My feeling is that I don’t want a large generator. I can’t keep it running for any significant amount of time if I get one large enough to satisfy my needs. From a logistical standpoint I’d be better off with my initial combination of small generator + battery charger + large battery bank + large inverter. The main problem with this is cost - cost of the batteries. I’d need 3x 100AH batteries to sustain my load overnight at which point I’d run the generator for 10 hours during the day to charge the batteries. I’d need a 50A charger (600W - well within the capacity of the generator) but it would work. I’ve found a local craigslist ad for a bunch of old car batteries for cheap. That might be good - they should be at least 30AH each. If I got 10 of those it’d for sure be 300AH for about $200. Lots of space though. I’d have to make a nice big rack on my dolly for them so I could move them. I could add in a mount for the inverter as well.

Speaking of that, a 1KW inverter will not do the trick. I need a 2/4KW at least ($120 at Harbor Freight) or a 3K/6W ($280) or the biggest one, a 5/10KW ($390). I need to profile the air conditioner, but I think the 2/4KW will do the job.

The other problem with this approach is the need for a large battery charger (10A at least, 50A preferable) and possibly a desulfator to fix any old, cruddy batteries I buy.

Shelter

I’m beginning to back off using my workshop as our shelter. The bathroom issue is bad enough, but having to clear everything out and build a frame and a door is just a little too much. What I’ll have to do instead is find a way to use one of the sliding windows in our house to hold the air conditioner. We have one in the kitchen and one in the laundry room. The laundry room is too far away from any living space to be useful. Plus, the one in the kitchen is close to the refrigerator which I will also have to power, so it’s sort of a win-win. Plus, that refrigerator has an ice maker (which we may not want to use depending on the state of the water). I’ll have to close as many doors as possible around the kitchen area and hope for the best. The people who I bought the air conditioner from said it cooled their whole 1500 square foot house before they got their central A/C in, so that’s a good endorsement.

To Do

Move/organize stones around shower area
Get 2 more 5-gallon gas cans - need one extra to mix special fuel for the generator in
Get extra 5 gallon water jugs
Build a PVC rack for the water jugs
Research pricing on sandbags

Costs So Far

1KW Inverter - Harbor Freight: $60 (after 25% off coupon)

Generator - Harbor Freight: $89

Car Hitch - Amazon: $114

Cargo Carrier - Harbor Freight: $40

Tie-Down Protectors - Amazon: $13

8000BTU Window Air Conditioner - $100

Total: $416