geoffbeaumont
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Posts posted by geoffbeaumont
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2 minutes ago, Ed Poore said:
Double stack or quadruple stack some spacers
Like a sort of go-faster forest rover? 😄
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1 hour ago, miketomcat said:
Yeah I know, the theory's good though.
Mike
Question is...do you ever get one rebuilt before you have to buy another on to tide you over? 😄
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2 hours ago, Nonimouse said:
Where did you live in Somerset
Wellington
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1 minute ago, Bowie69 said:
Don't own anything German either then....
£140 is definitely not top whack for a main dealer these days.
The Fabia is just a VW Polo with worse suspension...so at least on this specific issue not so bad! Never had it near a dealer, though.
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11 minutes ago, Nonimouse said:
Suzuki are very protective of their software. I can get the dealer to do the re-set, but that's £140 per hour
Eek... 😲 That certainly puts me off ever owning a Suzuki!
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7 minutes ago, Nonimouse said:
I have TPMS sensors on my Vitara. Really good, but you can't swap wheels around or it gets upset
Can you get the diagnostic tool for reassigning them? Don't know about Suzukis, but the tool for our Zafira was about £15 off eBay and allows you to re-calibrate and reassign the sensors (there's a menu function in the car that asks you to go round holding the tool against the sensors in turn while it records them). That said, if you don't do this all it means is that the car thinks the wheels are in different places and reports the pressures for the wrong corners (does mean if you've swapped front to back you're almost certainly going to get warnings). The Fabia doesn't even need this - just set the tyres up right and reset the sensors from the menu - but then it doesn't bother to differentiate between wheels, just tells you you've got low tyre pressure and leaves you to figure it out. The Zafira will tell you which tyre, and exactly what the pressure is in each one.
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Was indeed a good trip. Doubt that part of the valley will ever be tarmacked, everyone is having to move away as it dries out 🙁
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3 hours ago, Snagger said:
Probably. The trouble is, you need a certain level of knowledge of electronics or software just to be able to learn more or ask the right questions, and many of us don’t have even that foundation.
The same applied to the spanner work before you got started!
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A few photo's from Morocco last week - we were mostly on foot (or camel for those that wanted), but 4x4 from M'Hamid about an hour out into the desert and two hours back afterwards. With a few stops on the way back to nurse one of the 110s which had decided to persistently overheat. Five nights in between, but most of my photo's have other people's kids in (it was an organised home education trip) so nothing of camp and not much of the trekking that I can post on here.
Three 110s and a Land Cruise Prado - one of the 110s stayed nearby while we were trekking and appeared at camp and lunch breaks to comply with insurance. Sadly I didn't get to drive. Most of these were taken from the back seat of a moving 110, so don't expect amazing photography!
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Promised an update, so here goes.
Solar panels mounted on a simple OSB/roofing batten frame. Not an ideal location as it'll be shaded part of the day by a kids den which is off to the right - I'll likely move them once the raised area to the right of the compost bins has been cleared and tidied up.
Mounted the controller on a bit of OSB, trip on the left doubles as a switch for isolating the solar panels. The
take away tubclassy waterproof enclosure on the right contains the under-voltage protection circuit and load fuse (which doesn't need to be in the tub, but it was tidier that way):
The intake duct at this end takes in hot (very much ish at this time of year) hot air at the top of the greenhouse and passes it into the heat sink under the paving slabs. Ducted fan to the left of the louvre:
The air is vented low down at the other end so that it circulates around the greenhouse:
And before @FridgeFreezer calls me out for it, yes I did go round and crop the cable ties after I took the photos!
Took a little fiddling with the under-voltage protector to get it running nicely (it's got a couple of potentiometers to adjust the voltage it cuts out and back in at). To start with it was just sitting rattling it's relay as the fan kicked in and out. Don't know if I've got it set sensibly yet - it would have been a good idea to set it up on the lab power pack first. Seems like it might not cut out very cleanly, time will tell.
So, tweaking aside it's working nicely - only real problem is that the fan may be a tad OTT. It's shifting air nicely, but it's not quiet... Think I may need to step the voltage down and run it slower. If I do that right I should be able to reduce the current too - my electronics is rusty, but I'm pretty sure I remember at least one reasonably efficient way of dropping voltage...
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17 hours ago, JeffR said:
Thought it was a good idea if, like me, one cannot (space is a premium and I think the wife may well damage large parts of my anatomy in painful ways if I tried to hide one in the house) justify a cabinet for a small job.
Can't you hide it behind the seats?
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1 hour ago, elbekko said:
Every OEM has their own build of Android, with anything from very few to many, many changes. Samsung does quite a lot of changes. Honestly I haven't even ever heard of Doogee
Chinese brand. Make mostly pretty decent phones, known for their rugged phones. They like to describe their distributed OS as completely stock Android (which is more or less true so far as I can tell - the only non-standard software I could find on mine was an app to control some rather tasteless indicator lights on the back of the phone).
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I'd be scared to fit that to the truck and risk it getting all scratched up...that's a work of art!
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2 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:
Not that I've been bored at work
but I made an online calculator thing that lets you work out likely panel & battery specs / performance:
https://fuddymuckers.co.uk/tools/solarcalc.html
Something like this:
Have a play and let me know!
Handy tool - could use a little CSS tweaking do make it more mobile friendly (happy to have a crack at that if you don't want to).
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39 minutes ago, elbekko said:
Make sure your phone is set to use actual GPS, and not just cell towers.
It is.
38 minutes ago, Bowie69 said:Try running navigation in the background/as an overlay, it fixes it for me....
Makes no difference, and affects all apps the same. It's just very bad at holding a GPS lock.
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9 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:
a GPS speedo is not a bad thing to have especially if you're switching between tyre sizes on the regular
Provided the GPS is decent - no way I could rely on the one in my phone for this, it wanders all over the place. Confuses the satnav and has my speed fluctuating wildly (apparently my car is capable of impressive speeds and truly amazing acceleration....).
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So, 200W of panels (overkill? We'll see!), brackets, wires and an IP65 controller* ordered. I'll report back once we've
cocked upcompleted the installation.* This one, used from the original seller. Bit more than I'd reckoned on spending but near enough half list price.
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Sounds like we really need to implement temperate based switching, if only to reduce the time the fan is running...
Running mains to the greenhouse would involve trenching an armoured cable in. At present the nearest power is about 50m away, so not a trivial undertaking. I'm going to run power to the shed when I rebuild it this year, which is closer. But would probably still involve a 20m+ trench. Not hugely appealing! There's another lean-to greenhouse attached to the shed, which once replaced will likely get a similar setup, but as there'll be mains in the building already I'm planning to use that there.
Angling the panel isn't a problem, and the fan is needed less on overcast days so it's not a showstopper if it stops then.
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The fan is 3 Amps, so if I remember my physics correctly, 36 Watts.
As far as I can see pretty much any controller will handle that. How much headroom do I need to allow on the solar panel rating? I'm guessing a 40W panel likely won't deliver 36W (never mind charge the battery at the same time) in our weather?
Is MPPT overkill for this? Looks like at the budget end of the market I could get IP65 (probably a good idea) or MPPT but not both. Then again, sounds like it's a bit of a gamble whether cheaper controllers really are MPPT...
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Grossly off topic (the battery didn't even come out of a land rover), but there are a few members on here who've got some experience with solar setups, so I'm hoping I can pick your brains...
We have a partly installed heat sink system in our greenhouse. Fairly simple idea, a 3" pipe runs from up near the apex of the roof into a well under the paving slabs down the centre of the floor, where it splits into smaller pipes packed along rocks and stones. At the other end of the week another 3" pipe vents low down. There's a fan in the intake pipe to circulate air. During the day the rocks are warmed and it helps avoid excessively high temperatures, then during the night the heat is released back to keep the greenhouse warmer. As a bonus it circulates air reducing humidity.
Or at least it would if I finished it off...
The fan is a 12V inline boat bilge vent one, and I have just had to change the battery on my car so I have a 75AH lead acid battery which was getting dubious for starting but should still be happy enough running this fan.
The missing bit is a means of charging the battery. We're planning on a small solar panel, which even for this simple rig is I guess going to need some kind of controller/battery protection. If it incorporates the ability to switch the load on and off (above and below fixed temperature) that would be useful, but could easily be added later separately.
So... There's lots of small solar panels and controllers on the market. Most of them making grand and probably overblown claims as to what they're capable of... How do we figure out what we'll actually need to run this?
Don't want to spend a fortune - but also want to do this once and finish up with something reliable.
As an aside, this is what self-directed home education looks like in our house. One of my son's projects!
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On 1/4/2024 at 8:35 PM, TD5toV8110 said:
Chain mail tyres?
Well within Stephans capabilities...
Cheers
Dave
Looks like they'd work well on hard surfaces, but zero floatation and I'd hate to have to clear them after driving in clay... 😀
Still, Stephen can likely cook up some canny modifications to make them work anywhere!
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Merry Christmas everyone!
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That would be @FridgeFreezer's site, I believe?
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Good for another 2000 miles?
in International Forum
Posted
And house prices have been deliberately driven higher relative to income over decades in order to use houses as investments. I'm not aware that's ever been the case for cars.