Project Erica: The continued frustrations of indecision

The forecast for rain for most of today proved to be accurate, so it was allocated as a planning and buying day.

I had great plans to order all of the electrical gubbins that I haven’t already bought, including connectors, cables, fuses, fuse board and the bits and pieces I’ll need to make a control panel (my current preference is to make my own control panel; this may yet change).

What I have actually achieved is hours and hours of failing to make a decision on the very first item on my ‘to buy’ list*.

We need a way to charge the leisure battery from the starter battery/alternator. We also need a solar controller. The options to achieve this are as follows:

1. A voltage sensitive relay (VSR), plus a solar controller.
2. A battery-to-battery (B2B) charger, plus a solar controller.
3. A combined B2B and solar controller.

I like Option 3, but my chosen unit comes in at £150-£170 more than Option 1* and whilst I wouldn’t hesitate in spending that if this was a van in which we were planning to use for extended trips, it’s difficult to justify in this context when a VSR + solar controller would do the job. I’ve pretty well ignored Option 2 as if going down the B2B route then it makes sense to go for Option 3.

So, I checked the specification of some VSRs and chose one. I was just about to come over all decisive and order it, when I spotted another that had better features and wasn’t much more expensive, so I thought we’d go for that one instead. I ran the options past Mick and it appeared that the decision was made.

Then I fell down a rabbit hole related to the appropriate cable to use with a VSR. The manufacturer’s instruction manual told me I needed to use cable rated to at least 120A for the 120A VSR, but surely, I thought, the fact that the VSR is rated to 120A doesn’t mean that’s what we’ll be putting through it, so surely we didn’t need such enormously large cable? Some (where ‘some’ = ‘a lot of’) Googling ensued and that question was answered to my satisfaction. However, what I read during that diversion also alerted me to potential problems using a VSR when you also have solar installed.

What to do next? Spend at least another half a day researching the best way to make Option 1 work, or go for the easy (and technically better) option of spending the extra on Option 3 (after I’ve read the unit’s manual again, to be sure that it does meet all of our needs)? 

Whilst I was tearing my hair out over things electrical, Mick was having his own frustrations (and making equally little forward progress) with specifying the materials for the sofa/bed – an issue that is not being helped by both Wickes and B&Q apparently having a timber shortage just now (at least around here, if not nationally) and with minimum order values for delivery being prohibitive. Once we finally settle on the specification, I think we’ll be getting in touch with some local independent timber merchants.

__We have various sizes of timber lying around, which resulted in some highly scientific strength tests__

Both the electrics and the timber will have to wait another while now before our attention returns to them, as it’s forecast to be dry tomorrow and thus a suitable day for drilling holes in Erica’s roof.  

 

*Worse, on top of not managing to order so much as a single fuse, I received confirmation that the order for the toilet, that I would have sworn I placed last week, didn’t go through and the supplier is now out of stock.