Depsite our best intentions to have an early start, we didn’t get out to the car until noon. We switched brekkie up a little, having toasted bagels with cream cheese and a pair of real nice smoothies. We were both pissed because we’d ordered three things from Amazon: a pair of fuses, fuse holders and a battery cable switch. They’d all been labelled as “guaranteed delivery” by Saturday and we were well past that and only received the fuses. Whatever.

Before installing the table, I routed some wires behind the sidewall to reach to the inverter we planned to mount to the end of the table. While I was doing that, Dan put a big hole in the table for his stove, a similar design to mine. We finished at the same time and with fresh eyes and minds, we had the table attached to the van within twenty minutes. A strengthening member in the centre of the table and she was right to go. Another success! We mucked around decided where we wanted the inverter a while, then settled on attaching it to the table leg. That was pretty much all we could do without the parts we needed so we retired to the house for a late lunch (another Caesar salad, this time with grilled chicken). After lunch, we hung out watching Motocross races that had been on yesterday. This is Dan’s sport like F1 is mine and it was the start of the season so it was good racing to watch. We killed most of the afternoon this way. Two races in, we couldn’t watch anymore so we played a bit of cards before we went back out to the car to do a bit more. I was nervous that we hadn’t tested the electrical system yet and wasnted to do so, even though we didn’t have the switch.

I connected all the wires and did a few voltage checks. The main battery had a good 12.8 V, but the second battery was only reading 7.5 V and hadn’t been used in a long time. I feared that it wouldn’t come back to life, but there wasn’t much we could do about that now. All things connected, I started the car and probed around with the multimeter. The second battery seemed fine but the inverter didn’t turn on. This was a huge 1100 W unit that Dan had picked up with his old van and it had worked when he got it but since then it had sat outside in the sun for weeks. When we’d first retrieved it to install it, it was too hot to even touch. I feared this fried or melted the electronics inside. We prodded around with it a while before deciding it was kaput. Disappointing, but not the ened of the world. At 1100 W, it was overkill anyway for what we needed. I salvaged the tiny inverter from my car instead.

I made a mistake when I took it out because I didn’t take note of which wire was positive and which was negative. I’d cut the cigarette lighter plug off way back when I was sick of the fridge cutting in and out and I remember being very careful to make sure I knew the polarity of the wires, but when I removed the inverter from the regulator, I didn’t look to see which was which. I knew I was in trouble if I connected the inverter backwards, so I did my best to find out which was positive out of the blue and brown wires. I went back through my photos but didn’t find anything. After a bit of googling around, everything lead to the blue wire being ground, so we went with that and tested it with my regulator. Sparks flew and I thought I’d got it wrong so I tried the other way. The sparks were much bigger when we got it wrong. That was one way to find out!

I marked the blue wire with black tape so this wouldn’t happen again and we wired it up temporarily so we could do a test. This time, all systems were go. The inverter lit up and when we grabbed my fridge from the garage, it powered it beautifully. Even better, after I disconnected the two batteries, the second battery was reading near 12V so it was charging well. With that success, we were happy to go inside the house and socialise with the family.

In the kitchen, we found everyone. Debbie, Peter, Eva and Emmi were all in the kitchen. It was to be Eva’s first sleep over with the grandparents as a test for when the parents went away later in the year. Peter’s Dad had cooked up a storm yet again, this time a huge batch of Bolognese. We dug in gratefully while talking with the family. It was already late so we didn’t stay out long, eating ourselves happy then going to bed.