shooftie

In this post I described installing some led strip lighting and dimmer switches. During the install I smoked one of the dimmer switches so I wired both strips to the one controller and lived with it until I ordered another switch. Those dimmer switches were inline units and I spent some time milling out a kind of mounting plate for them. The more I looked at this kludge the less I liked it. It didn’t help that a couple of friends were less than enthusiastic about it, despite my glee at actually being able to make the thing. Looking around superbrightleds.com I found a better solution, this dimmer switch. All it does (capacitance touch method) is turn light on and off and dim them. The previous switches had additional flashing and flicker settings which really are useless in this application ( I thought perhaps the flicker setting would mimic candle light – ha! was I wrong).

The new switches come with 5.5 mm barrel connectors so I also ordered up some adapters so that I could attach wire pairs. I installed the switches today and I have to say they are a big improvement over the other ones. One touch turns the light on or off (and the light ramps up and down with the on and off touch – a small feature but very cool), and holding your finger on the switch dims down then back up. No moving parts, its all to do with capacitance (David B. needs to explain this to me).

No points for guessing where the makers got their design influence from.

The male and female 5.5 mm barrel to wire adapters.

The wires go here 🙂

Adapters on the switch leads.

The switches come with a small square of 3M adhesive backed Velcro. Makes them dead easy to mount, but not dead easy to get two of them perfectly aligned.

Addendum: I just measured the current draw of the new switches. When turned off my Do Wattson shows 0.00 A. When both main cabin strips turned on the meter shows 670 mA. This is better than the old switches that did consume a little power when off (somewhere under 10 mA) and when switched on the system drew 750 mA.

Yeah, I know, I know, these heaters are not the best solution for the van. I got this one back in ’93 and never did install it in my ’82 westy. But over the last couple of years I’ve dragged it out to use in the syncro for winter camping, and last week I finally cobbled together a more secure mounting system for it.

BTW, apart from the risk of oxygen depletion, and the possibility of CO production (although if the heater is working properly little CO is created, well except if the oxygen level is low then more CO is produced) the big drawback of an unvented propane heater is the production of water vapour. Here’s the logic, using a 1 lb propane bottle as fuel source:

combustion equation:

C3H8 + 5 O2 —–> 3 CO2 + 4 H2O

so for every mole of propane burned, we get 4 moles of water.
the molecular weight of propane is 44 g/mol, and therefore a 1 lb (454 g) bottle contains 10.3 moles (454/44)

So burning the entire bottle would produce 4(10.3) = 41.2 moles of water

The molecular weight of water is 18 g/mole, therefore  741.6 g of water produced.

A respectable amount, almost 3 cups, of water is liberated into the van when you burn a one lb bottle of propane.

So the lesson learned is either buy a vented heater or make sure you vent the van well. I like to have the pop top vent partially open and one window open about an inch when I use my unvented heater.

OK, enough. The point of the post was to show my quick and dirty mount. I used scrap 1/4″ aluminum (5052 if you’re asking) and instead of welding  (my skill at welding inside corners, especially on tubing is still at the crap level) I bolted it together.

The heater.

The unpainted aluminum shape is bolted to the heater to stiffen things up. The painted “wing” is the bolted to that stiffener. The bent tube is actually bolted to the wing – bolt through wing into a tapped hole drilled crosswise in a bit of steel rod which is running crosswise in the tube. Oh yeah, that’s great descriptive prose. One unexpected bonus is that the heater now can be placed on floor, if desired.

Unpainted end of tube fits into front table arm of the van. It can be adjusted to a range of positions and is high enough to mostly avoid being hit by the dogs.

I’ve been using a 20 lb propane bottle sitting in the driver’s footwell. No, not the most elegant solution.

Addendum – it just occurred to me that it might strike some as strange that I don’t simply attach the tubing directly to the stiffener piece and get rid of that black wing. The truth is I made the tube and wing first and mounted it directly to the top two bolts on the heater. But I found that not steady enough so I made a backing plate. I liked how I could coil the propane line around the wing, so I kept it, for now.

It’s not hard to guess that I am enamoured by led strip lighting, but my latest project using the strips is a (qualified?) fail. I’m posting it just to make it clear that I often go down wrong paths.

I had some led strip left over from the step protector project, and I wanted to get some light back at the hatch area. Sometimes we sleep with “heads at the hatch” (more of a summer rather than winter position, but what the heck do you care? :)) and It would be nice to have a reading light back there. A light also could be useful for finding stuff in the dark etc. So how to mount a strip of led lights back there? Well of course a bit of aluminum channel screwed to the back edge of the ceiling – in place of the T moulding – would be the way to go. But I decided I was smarter than that.

I took the T moulding off and went about hacking it up to install the leds actually in it.

The Westy T moulding.

The led strip, looks like it will fit behind moulding if T was removed.

After some false starts, I found that my die grinder with a ball end bit cut the T off nicely.

Ok then, done.

The next part was to drill holes for the leds to peek through. Now I don’t know what system the makers were using to space the led elements, certainly they weren’t thinking about me laying out for drilling. And, every so often the spacing changes as strips are factory joined together. Grrr, I had to drill holes larger than I wanted too. But I kept on going down this path and I glued the led strip face down onto the T moulding.

Right then, after the glue had set I took the strip out to fix it up on where it used to be. I have no pictures of the shambles that followed, but imagine the floppy strip, Sikaflex, no real locating mechanism to keep strip from sliding sideways, spring poles that kept falling…

But up it stuck.

It looks much worse in real life. Here is side view.

So what are those aluminum bits at either end? My attempt at hiding areas where the laminate had chipped off the plywood (nothing to do with this project) and to securely hold down the ends of the modified moulding. During the project I had glossed over the question of what kind of switch to use and where to mount it. I tried but came up with nothing better than this switch mounted on a little but of angle glued to side of upper cabinet.

It is not great I know, but there you go. And switching on…

Bloody hell, 3 leds out. I’m sure that when I tested the strip before gluing it on to the cabinet all of the leds worked. I’ve resolved to rip this out and re-do using aluminum channel and new led strips. Will the night time shot make me feel better?

Couldn’t wait until full dark, pics taken at dusk. First one, light off.

And light on.

The pics don’t do it justice, there is certainly enough light to read by. And enough to really show up the dirty marks on the fabric attached to the hatch (it is about 12 years old now). All in all I’m pleased with the light, I will redo the mounting, but damn those failed leds!

Just over a week ago, Psyncro aka Syncronoid posted a clever mod on this Samba thread. I slapped my forehead, doh, why didn’t I think of that? So blithely I set about making my own version. I have an abundance of scrap aluminum left over from various projects/jobs so I figured I could knock one out in a trice.

Ha!

I cut some 2″, (3/16″ thick) angle to size, angling the ends to match the rubber mat I have over the carpet in the walk through between the front seats. BenT suggested I do something to make the top surface more interesting, so I clamped up the angle in my lathe’s little milling head and cut some 3/8″ wide grooves. The milling head does not have enough travel to do the cuts in one go, so the angle has to be repositioned during the cut. That, and my rushing, produced a sloppy effect.

So I decided to paint it with satin black Krylon. What was I thinking? I forgot to prime (zinc chromate is common primer for aluminum, strontium chromate is the better primer but hard to get). No primer meant the paint scraped off easily, not a good thing for something that would be trodden upon.

Then I had the idea of filling the grooves with some 2 part polyurethane. Do you get the idea that I am spending too much time on this simple project?

I mixed up a batch and poured it on.

Then squeegee’d off most of the excess. BTW, it is sitting on a plug-in battery warmer blanket to help the polyU cure. I was getting sloppy, the stuff got everywhere.

And whaddya know? The polyU did not go off, no curing. Expiry date on package is for later this year, bugger it, so I wiped the mess off. On the Samba thread Doug suggested LED lights, seemed like a good idea. I had bought some LED strip lighting (warm white, 30 LEDs/meter) from Lee Valley and at the time was a little disappointed that the strip did not have a clean silicone-like cover like the strips I bought for the interior lighting and glove box lighting job. But the strips with their exposed and projecting LEDs would work great on the step. I drilled a bunch O’holes, same spacing as the LEDs on the strip along the bottom edge of the vertical face of the angle. I also drilled 3 holes for mounting screws then painted the angle with some Dupli-Color bed liner. Then I painted it again to get rid of the thumb prints when I grabbed as it fell off the painting block I had it balanced on.

After the bed liner dried,  stuck on the LED strip using some of that foam type double sided tape (with holes in it too, of course). You can see the 3M name on the backing tape of the LED strip, I left this on.

I used some big-ass 1/4″ stainless sheet metal screws. Pan head, as I did not counter-sink into the angle. Why you ask? Well when you countersink you have to get things lined up pretty exactly and as I was match drilling through the angle to make holes in the van, and as the angle is sitting on a rubber mat over carpet over insulation, I did not think I could push down on the angle firmly enough as I was drilling to get a good tight fit. Using pan head screws and oversized holes on the angle allows me to push down on angle after holes drilled to get a tight fit of angle to floor. Man, that was a wordy and awkward description.

I have to blacken those screw heads.

And the LED feature? I don’t have it wired into the door switch yet (I’m thinking about adding an additional switch so I can turn it on independently), but I hooked the leads up to the battery and…

All the trials and tribulations of this job vanished at the speed of light when I saw this. It is better than I thought it would be.

I bought some material a week of so ago with the idea to try making an insulated window blanket. At the fabric store I found some brownish-red microsuede material that was deeply discounted, and some “Insulbrite”  sorry, “insulshine”. foil faced polyester batting material (about 1/8″ thick). I also bought some 1/2″ diameter, 1/10″ thick rare earth magnets. Today my wife sewed things up (and very nicely too) and I think it works out well.

The idea was to be able to have the shiny side in for winter camping – keep the heat in, and the shiny side out for summer camping – keep the solar gain down. I had thought about using snaps to fix the blanket in place but magnets seemed more versatile. I think it turned out well.

I’ll post a bit more on the construction later.

I was in an unsettled mood today, my plans to help good friend Simon add some shims to his syncro were scuttled by unforeseen events. Spent some time with my falling apart dash cluster, trying out a new UV led, but that made me feel worse – the cluster foil is in such bad state that I fear the next time I go in there I’ll really be forced to do a hardwire. So I looked around for an outlet for my angst and I fell upon the 10″ bit of led strip left over from the interior light install shown in last post (on the kitchen side the 2m strip had to be trimmed to fit).

I had this idea to wire it in parallel with the small light above the glove compartment and placed so it would light up said compartment. And I didn’t want to dick around and fuss with the install, so what follows could have been done better.

Look up the Wikipedia entry for glove compartment. I draw your attention to the last paragraph, more proof that the Vanagon was a car ahead of its time.

Most led strips can be cut on the indicated lines (drawn on face of strip), at the cut area there are soldering points. I soldered a couple of wires to those points (nice tinned, teflon insulated wires).

Then some heat shrink.

Polarity is important, that’s why I have both wires the same colour . There are tiny +/- markings on strip, but you can confirm with 12 V power source (I’m fortunate to have an adjustable DC power supply. It is very handy for this sort of dicking around). The positive wire was soldered to the long contact strip on the little light that mounts above glove compartment (what the heck is that light called anyway – Courtesy light? Vanity light?  it’s a Map light according to BenT). The negative wire was soldered to the other contact strip. Yes, soldered to the strips. As I said, I wasn’t feeling like doing it kosher.

The strip and wires were fed through the light opening and the light popped in after. The strip has self adhesive backing, and I stuck the strip up under here (sorry about focus).

And how does it work? Some daylight pics to show.

Light off.

Light on.

Well what did you expect? Fireworks?

🙂

Just to be clear, the led strip is now switched on and off via the “courtesy light” or whatever you call that little light above the glove compartment. (BenT: It’s a  map light,  you dolt)

I’ve been wanting to have some led strip lighting in the van for a while but never got around to ordering any online. But a few weeks ago I found some led strips at local hardware store and even being on sale they were pricey ($43 each), but I fell for them. You can do much better price-wise online.

The strips are 2 m long each, with 60 smd leds per strip. That’s a good led density for this application. Calling leds “warm white” is so subjective, a little better descriptor is colour temperature, and these were listed as 3500 K correction, 3000 K. The strips came with a small inline transformer to change 110V AC to 12 V DC. We don’t need that for the van, but we do need some sort of switch. I decided on an inline dimmer/controller from Superbrightleds.com, this one. I ordered 2, one for each strip. When they arrived I realized that perhaps an inline dimmer is not the best way to go, would be better to have a wall mount. Time for some metal butchery. The same old thing with me, going the long way around.

A bit of 1/2″ aluminum.

I really just eyeballed the milling (used the wee milling head for my lathe).

Then a half hearted clean up. I need to get a better countersinks, see the chatter marks in the holes, especially the mounting screws?

And the dimmers added.

The milled slots use now clear. Can I draw your attention to the black heatshrink on the ends of 2 pairs of wires? I forgot to remove one of them, grr.

I secured the wires to some extent with some Goop. The heat shrink job was redone a couple of times after this, you’ll find out why.

And installed on top front inside corner of the wardrobe. I figured I could reach the dimmers when lying in the lower bunk.

The leds strips were installed in two places: one on the underside of the kitchen trough so that it pointed straight down. The other on the angles face of the slider door valence. The latter shines in and down. So I wired the strips to the dimmer and during the process forgot about one of the heat shrunk wire ends, and I shorted one dimmer which let out a little magic smoke. Stupid mistake eh? I left the broken dimmer in place and re-rewired things so that the remaining dimmer controlled both strips. Troubleshooting this screw up resulted in re-doing a lot of connections, sigh.

This pic makes the slider door side strip seem brighter  and more glaring than it actually is.

The kitchen side strip has no real glare, I’m guessing the beam angle of the leds is about 120 degrees.

I’m very happy with the amount and quality of the light these strips make. I’d like to add more, and maybe even some RGB strips and a colour mixer.

Addendum : I forgot to mention how much power the lights draw – if I recall correctly it is around 4.8 W per strip. I know nothing of how PMW controllers work, ie how much power is used by controller and strip when light is dimmed down low.

Another addendum:

I did some measurements with my installed Doc Wattson. Measuring current flowing from my aux battery.

first, van as is:
leds off, 1W, 85mA
leds full on, 9W, 750mA
leds dimmed lowest setting, 1.7W, 140mA

Radio face plate off:
led lights off, <0.1W, <10mA

For interesting comparison, kitchen water level/battery meter panel on, led lights off, between 0.2 and 0.3W, between 20 and 30mA.
So the led dimmer control draws a little power even when off, but it is less than the “switched on”  kitchen indicator panel.

So the led strips, both sides combined, only draw 140mA power at lowest brightness. And that low setting is pretty good for a standby/casual use light.

Those of you that have the little light above the glove compartment know how easy it is to ground the hot part of the light against the dashboard metal when you remove the light. I have lost count of the number of fuses I have lost that way. Oh sure I hear you say, why not disconnect the battery before removing the light? Well, yes, of course.

But, you can do something else. Slip a bit of heat shrink tubing over the flat metal inside the light. Shrink it up and your good to go. Here is a pic (I have a LED festoon replacement light in there). The light green is the heat shrink over the metal strip.

Good friend Stephen gave me this for a Xmas present and I got around to installing it. Made in Germany of all places, I didn’t think the Germans encouraged drinking and driving.

I didn’t have the guts to try it with a liquid that would be a pain to clean up, so water it was, in a short trip around the farm.

I installed a Doc Wattson into the house battery circuit of my van last weekend. I must emphasize that I have very light electrical demands when camping. Interior lights are LEDs, one fluorescent light under the trough, the fresh water pump, kitchen unit indicator lights, and the stereo and cig. lighter is the total draw on my 31 Ahr AGM aux. battery. The Doc Wattson acts as a (only one way unfortunately) power meter showing and recording battery voltage, battery lowest voltage,  current draw, peak current draw, watts used, and kWh. The connections made are all via short pigtails of 14 g, fine stranded and silicone insulated wires. This small wire would be a concern if the unit was used to measure larger currents (say above 20 A). The black wires on the unit carries the current, and in my install they connected the neg battery post of aux. battery to chassis ground. Any one of the 2 red wires is connected to the positive terminal of the battery. Keeping the wire runs as short as possible the meter ended up just in front of the front table support bracket.

That was a very brief outline of the install, more info from the source here. So what did I find out about things electrical these past couple of days? Well I took some pics to show. I reset the gauge before these pics, so kWh and Ahr will be showing zero.

Here we are, engine off, stereo has been on but now off, stereo head unit still attached. 80 mA draw eh? That drops to zero when face plate off (or as close to reading zero as the meter resolution allows) BTW, I noticed the kitchen panel indicator draws somewhere between 10 and 20 mA when switched on.

Stereo on and playing (have external amp too), volume at camping level. See the peak Amp (Ap) reading?

Engine on, both the house and starting batteries have been combined via my Blue Sea System ACR. I have an adjustable voltage reg. on my alternator and it is adjusted a tad high I think. When the 2 batteries are combined the ammeter portion of the meter does not work (the starting batter neg to chassis connection by-passes the meter). But once the ACR separates the batteries when the ign key is off then the stored current and power values are displayed.

So what do I think? Some pros and cons:

Pros – inexpensive, easy to install, handy at a glance indication of how much electrical power you are using.

Cons – measures current via neg ground path. That means, in a car with the chassis as return path, you can’t (as far as I can tell) measure a particular circuit. One way measurement – would be neat if when the engine is running and the battery was being charged, the meter would run backwards and show the elimination of the electrical debt you got into. No back light.

I’ve got more to say about this meter, and would like to show the install wiring. But I need to get my wiring runs neater before then.