Sadly I think that's the fate which befalls 99% of that sort of inverters - especially as more and more of our daily technology moves to USB power. I really don't *need* one on the van at all...I just want to actually find a useful home for this one as I like technology from this era and I want to use it!
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You remember me saying I wasn't planning to really do anything else with the van this week? Yeah...about that.
A question that you never want to end up asking yourself on any vehicle is "Wait...Where's that water coming from?" On a camper van though it brings double the feeling of dread as there's a whole extra plumbing system worth of potential trouble.
When I noticed a slow drip hitting the ground just behind the nearside rear wheel I had a horrible feeling that I was in for trouble.
Standing on my head the area it's coming from is pretty easy to see.
That's not a good answer. The precise area that drip is coming from is right under the shower tray. That is very thoroughly incorporated into the fabric of the bathroom now and cannot be removed without a huge amount of hassle.
A bit of thinking however suggested that something was odd about that as a location for a leak. There were only two pipes in this area: the suction line from the fresh water tank running to the pump (which lives pretty much directly above the wheel arch) and the pressure feed back to the kitchen (the bathroom one just goes straight through the wall from the service locker). I hadn't done any drilling or screwing of things anywhere vaguely near to this in the best part of a year and there are no connections there - it's all continuous hose. I had a nose around in the base of the service locker under the wardrobe where the water pump lives, bone dry. Unless something had rubbed through (unlikely, this hose is good quality stuff and seems pretty resilient) or I've got mice, it seems more likely that the water is running from somewhere else. Where though?
The only other thing in this neighbourhood is the toilet. It's not been used in months, but worth investigating. Cue much surprise when I pulled the cassette out I found the whole area beneath it swimming and mouldy. It was bone dry and spotlessly clean a couple of months ago when I last cleaned the cassette tank out. A few moments later I spotted a drip and my heart sank.
I was really hoping that the hose connection you can see would be responsible...however I'm not that lucky. The water is dripping down out of the moulding up at the top. There's only two possible sources for a leak up there occurring when the unit hasn't been used...Either the hose connection onto the solenoid valve for the flush button or the solenoid valve itself. These both however are buried deep within the moulding so can't be checked in situ. I'll need to remove this from the van to investigate. This is...Sub optimal as it will require me to remove a metric ton of silicone, about three million screws and a bunch of tiling. I guess that's the chance you take when you reuse 30 year old equipment though. That's a job for another day. In the meantime I will cap this line off to stop the leak so I can still use the sink, which given I regularly use the van to take the dogs out it really useful so I can wash my hands before driving home.
When I was looking for the source of the leak it did give me a good chance to look better at the drain line routing and assess how hard it will be to upgrade. I don't reckon it will be too difficult at all to get rigid lines run back all the way to the tank. There are a few awkward things I'll need to work around obviously and I'll probably take a different route to the original flexible lines, but I may well do this sooner than later as it would be nice to just have it ticked off. The original convolute still leaks in several places too despite me having patched a bunch of it up.
While crawling around under the back of the van I did find something which *really* annoyed me though.
Long time readers of this blog may recall that I was quite surprised when at the last MOT the garage proclaimed that the entire rear braking system was basically scrap. The drums were worn oval and had bevelled the wearing surface, both wheel cylinders were leaking, the handbrake wasn't working to a satisfactory level, and apparently one of the brake shoe linings had detached. This surprised me rather a lot as the brakes were fine, I'd never detected the slightest bit of vibration through them, the handbrake was quite capable of stopping the rotation of the planet and it had never used a drop of brake fluid. However I needed the van sorted for a trip in less than a week so just told them to get on with the work. Ended up with a bill for pocket change short of £600 which was mostly the brakes.
Since that work was done, the brakes have been noticeably worse. The pedal is far more spongy and the handbrake really needs a good tug now on a gradient whereas it used to have a really good bite at what felt a more reasonable level of force. When I got the van back the brake fluid was massively overfilled to the extent that it had flooded all over the bulkhead on the drive back home from the garage. It's taken me the best part of a year to get the oil stain out of the driver's seat cover too as they never used slip covers.
In addition to the brake issues, failed the MOT initially for things so trivial as missing rear reflectors (which weren't missing...the tester was just blind - including missing the *additional* ones I fitted to satisfy them when I went back for the retest, and sticking MORE on themselves (squint too!) which wound up pulling the paint off when I removed them), and pulled up advisories for a very slightly frayed seatbelt and a tarnished headlight which I've since had apart and have been able to find absolutely nothing wrong with. They mainly do PCV and HGV testing though, so I wasn't sure if I was just being unreasonable in my expectations for them to be picky.
...If that were the case though, I might have expected them to at the very least flag up these rear brake hose ferrules up as an advisory.
The top one there in particular really is quite crusty (there's no way my MOT tester back up north would have passed it)...I'm not thrilled by the state of the rigid line on it either in a couple of spots and the hoses are quite perished. It goes without saying that a full set has already been ordered.
I've crawled over the front of the van quite a few times (especially investigating an erroneous brake pad wear warning indicator) and things are fine up there...I'd never really looked in that much detail at the rear end though beyond changing the oil in the diff...which was done on a day when it was pouring with rain so I was rather mission focused at the time.
Absolutely a demonstration that an MOT should never be taken as a clear bill of health...you should always give your car a thorough check over yourself.
This discovery absolutely guarantees that I will never, ever be darkening the door of Egerton's Fleet Services ever again.
The realisation hit me this afternoon that I still had to finish up sealing up the the gas locker so I got that finished. It's not pretty, but it will do the job. I'll be installing some rubber floor matting and a proper gas bottle clamp in due course. I just want to leave the floor and the bottom of the rear wall open for the time being until I'm certain I've got to the bottom of a water ingress issue in that corner (down just above the bumper). For the time being I'm leaving it open so that any water that gets in can get back out again. I need to find a slightly smaller bracket for the waste pipe there too or pack it out a bit.
There was a small gap at the top (because I can't measure for toffee) so this was sealed up and then taped for good measure.
This foil tape sticks ridiculously well (it will remove your fingerprints if you're not careful) as it's basically intended for sealing joints on HVAC ductwork. It doesn't have much strength in terms of things poking through it, but it stick really well even to surfaces that aren't spotlessly clean - and can lay a really good foundation if you then layer something else over the top of it. I'll probably go over this lot with some good quality cloth tape just for belt and braces before throwing a bit of paint around in here. It's a bit "how ya doin'" but it will do the job. It's a cupboard at the end of the day rather than a Lamborghini showroom.
You can also spy one other thing I finally sorted today. I had been struggling ever since fitting the sink to get the hose running between the draining board and the sink drain itself to seal properly.
After what must have been ten attempts to get it to seal using three or four different pipes I lost patience with it today. I remembered that I had a bit of 19mm heater hose floating around in a box somewhere which according to my version 1.0 eyeball looked a close fit...turned out it was indeed a pretty much perfect snug fit.
Job done! It should actually be better anyway as the smooth hose shouldn't be prone to trapping water the same way the convolute was. I'm actually tempted to do the same in our kitchen as we have a really long overflow line due to the way the waste disposal unit is attached and it's always been prone to getting smelly, and having to take the whole lot to bits every quarter to clean it is really annoying. I might swap it for a smooth hose like this and see if that helps now I've realised it's the same size.
The job I had actually set out with the intention of getting done today was to wire up the recently fitted inverter. The more I thought about it the more it seemed daft to me to have gone to the lengths of fitting it but not wiring it up.
As I am never planning the inverter to be used regularly I want it to be tucked away and not look like it's part of the main power system. As such it will have its own little control panel and I'll probably use a red socket faceplate. I had planned to get that done today, but with the above nonsense going on I never got any further than cobbling together the switch faceplate I'll use, tracking down a relay I'll use to switch the supply and find some wiring (just scavenged from the random bits box, so I need to pull out the bits I'm actually going to use from the bundle yet - the bit in the photo is just for reference!).
I'll just use the originally removed mains socket for now. The switch panel has two indicators on it. The green one is a standard 12V automotive one which will show when the DC supply to the inverter is on, and the red one is a mains voltage neon to give visual confirmation that it's actually running. Figured this was a good idea as it can be a bit touchy about starting if there's no load (which is why I'm going to use an unswitched socket and have the procedure be to "insert plug, turn power on" to hopefully prevent that being a problem. The frequency meter...well...it's been rattling around for several years and I want to actually use it for something! The mains cable to run to the socket is just a random skinny one from a random bag of cables. It will be absolutely fine for this job bearing in mind that this inverter is only rated for a maximum load of 150W (so about 0.7A). There's no ground provision on the inverter so the socket will be labelled with a warning to that effect.
Hopefully time will allow me to actually screw this lot together tomorrow...Then we can report back once the new brake hose set arrives. I've ordered a full set for both front and rear axles as they're inexpensive and while they're not so visibly degraded as the rear ones the front ones are obviously still quite old and given she's not exactly a light vehicle it just makes sense to me to the the lot. Yes, I have made sure that I have rigid brake pipe in stock and will make double sure that I know where the flaring kit is before I start! I also hate doing brake work...so tend to work on the basis of "I hate it, so let's get as much as possible done in one shot" when I do need to tackle it. Will be a good opportunity to either fix or disable the brake pad wear warning light too as that playing up is really annoying.
An appointment with the most aggressive nozzle of my pressure washer, a few gallons of Vactan and the nation's entire stock of Dinitrol are also in the underbody's near future - though the underbody sealant isn't happening until AFTER I'm done crawling around under there sorting the brakes and routing plumbing lines. I did drown the underneath of the cab last year though as that was obviously in the most imminent danger of dissolving but the weather turned before I got to the rest of the chassis.
