fratermus

Kaylee may be best known for her ability to live very frugally in a van and experiments cooking with what is available. She documents it all for the benefit of others.

In this post she describes using one of Zatarain's cajun-style mixes as the base for a crockpot meal.

I usually keep a box of their Jambalaya mix in the pantry, waiting for the chance to pick up some smoked sausage on sale/closeout. The local grocery store had a sale on Andouille so I got 1lb of it for $3. Will cook it up today or tomorrow.

My kitchen situation is a bit different, because during the build I had sufficient salary and time to build a robust power system. This allows running a fridge and the smallest Instant Pot. In practice this means I typically cook in full batches and store the leftovers in the fridge for another meal.

I adapt the Zat for Instant Pot by reducing water from 2.5c to 1.25c and cook at pressure for 13 minutes instead of simmering for 25. If I'm at elevation (like 8k-10k') I will bump the time to 14-15 minutes. Natural release in all cases, mainly because it reduces foamy messes that requires lots of water to clean up.

Related RVwiki article: cooking with excess power

the Business Plan proposes to increase current fees from $180 to $600 per long-term permit, and from $40 to $200 per short-term permit. It would also modify the short-term permit length from 14 days to 30 days

There is a comment period for the public.

I subscribe to the RSS feeds of all the NF/BLM districts I boondock in while snowbirding. So I knew that a small section of NF land outside Santa Fe, NM where I was headed next was closed for a year.

I picked a spot at least a mile outside the "designated area" that was closed.

A friendly ranger pulled up this morning and asked how long I'd been here (4 days). He started to gently/professionally inform me the area was closed. I pointed out this spot was outside the designated area. He was skeptical and rechecked the map on his phone.

I think he was embarrassed (and thinking of others he might have punted) because he wanted to show me how hard the map was to read on his phone. He also said I was the first person he talked to that had actually read the closure notice. We commiserated a while about the misuse that caused the closure.

He was a good guy and I assume he will go back and clarify the situation for anyone else he misinformed.

#takeaways

• reading the district's announcements can be both directly and indirectly useful
• bringing up the NF's official language ("designated area", "dispersed camping") seems help establish rapport

Details are on reddit. Hopefully going back there won't give anyone PTSD. :-)

... in which I relate my first wild bear sighting (with crappy pic) & and double the size of my LiFePO4 house battery bank .

The domain name is up for purchase ($9999.99 according to my registrar), so it looks like it's lost rather than just temporarily parked for a slightly overdue bill.

Luckily the site was recently backed up by the Internet Archive and the archived All, gpx, and csv links seem to work.

a swamp cooler and humidifier of this design are doing the same thing: blowing air through a wetted, porous medium. The goals are different (humidification vs cooling) but the mechanism is the same.

TL:DR: I saw a set of cheap panels with weird specs at Home Depot. I bought some to experiment on and to use as portables to augment my mounted solar.

Home Depot is selling 200w of panel for $114. That's $0.57/Watt. Not amazing compared to used panels (typically $0.33/Watt) but HD is all over the place and has free ship-to-store.

It also comes with mounting brackets and one of those single-stage PWM controllers. I'm not bagging on that kind of controller, but it's not a great fit for this particular set of panels.

#THE CATCH

The panels are a weird design, apparently 24 cells in series. Normal "12v nominal" panels have 36 in series for ~18Vmp. These have a Vmp of 12.0v, so I think we would call them "8v nominal".

This makes them practically unusable in parallel for charging lead or LiFePO4.

You could run the panels in series on the PWM controller since it has a 50v input max and the series Voc would be 30v. But, due to the way PWM works the panels would be running at in the 14v range at the most. This is way, way off the 24.0Vmp of the series array. I'd expect a max harvest of ~120w with that kind of setup. If these were normal panels in parallel and on PWM I'd expect a max of ~160w. We can go into the math on that if anyone wants.

The best case scenario IMO would be to run the panels in series with an MPPT controller. This would get us closer to ~170w max harvest.

some other thoughts:

• The panels might work well enough in parallel for 3S Li-NMC because of that chemistry's lower voltage
• HD has a 10% discount program for veterans if you provide them with a bit of documentation.

... in which I camped in a spot infested by mule deer, picked up spent brass, and trusted the local forecast enough to do my cooking off solar....

in which I bumblefsck through figuring out why my solar setup no worky

I was outside the zone of totality, so was still making some power.

Notice that panel voltage did not decrease like many think, it does. Vpanel is stable above ~10%-15% insolation, depending on the panel