If employee vehicles are in danger perhaps the employer (or property owner) could hire a security detail? Might present this as a benefit to them to keep customers from getting scared off by crime?

I worked at a place in a ratty part of time once. Literal crackheads and prostitutes wandering through our lot. After a couple break-ins the company put up a fence.

people are starting to catch onto my patterns and hover around my vehicle like vultures. Please tell me the best security system you know of.

A free first step would be to have no observable pattern. And/or leaving that general area if possible.

I would think about the actual threat model and what I could do about it. If someone steals your doodad with an airtag on it are you going to find it and take it back from them?

I picked up a solar garden light from walmart. I pop the hood and trap the light in the lid so the light is under the hood and the minipanel outside it. I haven’t had a problem since then, but it it could be coincidence, or my being more careful scouting for mouseholes before pitching camp.

I put it under a secondary cover and used it for my outside DC outlet, and replaced my external solar panel outlet with a CNLINKO LP-28 2-Pin IP67 Waterproof Connector rated up to 50A.

That connector looks interesting. It addresses one of my unstated concerns, the panel wires pulling down on the connector. This one looks like it has enough “neck” to relieve the strain. If I were doing the van again I’d mount all the inlets in one place under a secondary cover as you describe.

I have Visible (Verizon MVNO) for $25/month. I put the SIM in an LTE router I got off amazon (open box) for $42.

Is there a good online tool for calculating the cosign of solar Zenith

There are an online calculators like this one from NOAA. This fork adds the ability to update the time with a click rather than manually. There are others but I haven’t played with them much.

Since I travel constantly I’ve been on casual lookout for an app that does the calcs for us based on local time / position but I haven’t seen any. Several apps show the solar zenith angle and we can take the COS of that manually with a calculator with trig functions. The standard android calculator app will do it.

so I can know how much solar my my panels could be making in ideal conditions?

Yeah, it’s an imperfect tool for our purposes but better than nothing. Combining it with data from a solar irradiance meter would be great but right now I can’t justify ~$100 to devote to the cause. :-)

Agreed. I normally have cash but I knew this check was coming in so I delayed taking a distribution from my retirement account. Bit me in the butt… :-(

btw, the manual is hard to decipher (translation issues, one supposes). So I did a little write-up on its operation.

The display looks like this. I took some pics for the post but the exposure was way off because the display varies/pulses continually while charging.

I have updated that subsection of the blog post with the above pic from the product listing on amazon. They are a little cheaper on ebay (~$36 shipped) and a lot cheaper on aliexpress (~$23 shipped) but I’m traveling so an Amazon locker was more convenient.

“the cruelty is the point”

Hopefully won’t affect us. This language:

The term does not include lodging or residing overnight in a motor vehicle that is registered, insured, and located in a place where it may lawfully be

a couple times in the text

I intentionally “moved” to the highest cost of living state for 3 reasons:

A smart play.

This is the first time since embarking on this lifestyle I’ve absolutely had to get a real W-2 job that requires employees to have a permanent address in the state but I don’t want my employer to know that I don’t have a physical address.

Depending on the state there may be RV parks like escapees that have can offer residential address after a stay of some length. Examples: 30 days in TX, 1 day in south dakota!

If one were going to stay in a given state for a few years it might be worth it to rent a house or apt for month to get utils and such in one’s name, DL. All mail would go to a remailer and never to that address.

domicile, residency, and mail forwarding

I don’t want my new prospective employers to know that I live in a van

I know those feels. OTOH, at my last job before retirement I told everyone freely. There were zero issues, other than people constantly asking where I was boondocking on my days off so they could have a bit of adventure by proxy. A co-worker and my boss actually ended up buying Class C RVs and started traveling a bit during my tenture.

I tried to pick up some seasonal work last winter with the USPS; I gave my legal residence (family member’s house in another state) but put unhoused in the appropriate areas. They offered me the gig but the process was so slow the season was over before training would have begun.

Why they need so much information from their employees

Much of the egregiousness is fallout from the so-called Patriot Act, but federal paperwork and background checks typically require addresses. Example: the addresses help the background check ID the correct person, and tell the investigator which counties to sniff around in.

Thank you for your feedback.

as a person who randomly had this come up in their feed, I’m downvoting you because it’s extremely boring

I get around this problem by reading subscribed instead of local or all. As for me, I would not choose to see everything then downvote a niche community’s post because I thought it was boring. Related.

Why are you putting so much personal info on whatever this hellhole is that you linked to?

Because the hellhole in question is a personal blog. Perhaps it was a trick question.

I’m blocking the community so it doesn’t happen again

That seems entirely reasonable if one is commited to viewing the all feed. To make doubly sure, I’ll block you from the community. I don’t know if this will help keep it out of your feed but it’s worth a try.

Downvoters are encouraged to post reports of their own vanlife experience. In my case, I cooked a lasagna in the crockpot in the parking lot of a rec center.

the idea behind #VanLife is that we can “free” ourselves from the daily grind by finding jobs within the gig economy

I’ve heard people give that as their moderation motivation, but it’s hardly monolithic. Moving into a van allowed me to retire about 8 years earlier than I would have otherwise. For others it allows moving from full-time to part-time work, some are already retired, and some use it as a bulwark against what I might call classical homelessness (living on the street).

the #VanLife that is being promoted as such a liberating and empowering “lifestyle” or a “courageous” choice by young people to buck the system, is quickly becoming a forced and imposed reality for many workers across the US.

We could pay less attention to promoters and promotion, and make choices that serve our needs.

I don’t think vanlife is a hair shirt, or “less than”. It’s an option, like living in a tiny studio apartment somewhere.

Mod note: this community does not exist “to publicize and promote revolutionary theory and action”, but the article is topical according to the sidebar rule: “Anything that affects us as vehicle-dwellers is probably on topic.”

Hoping for the best, planning for the worst. :-/

It will be weird being pinned down to one place, unable to escape local conditions.

high voltages… prolonged high voltages… high temperatures… that does the mayor aging

agreed

fully discharging the battery does no harm

There is academic research suggesting deeper discharge is associated with accelerated capacity degradation in LiFePO4 cells.

digression

It’s interesting to see how Dragonfly (owner of Battle Born) dances around the topic:

Dragonfly Energy lithium-ion batteries have expected life cycle ratings between 3,000-5,000 cycles for a heavily used battery. Light use can well exceed this rating. (emphasis added)

Why would light use lead to exceeding the cycle rating? TBF, they could be talking about C-rates or other factors in addition to DoD. But DoD is the focus of the paragraph.

In most cases, lithium battery manufacturers limit the depth of discharge to 80%.

Why would they do that if going to 100% DoD would not affect cycle life?

However, some manufacturers, like Dragonfly Energy and our consumer brand Battle Born Batteries, rate their batteries with a 100% depth of discharge. This means that you can use 100% of the capacity without excessively damaging the battery. (emphasis added)

IMO this is a tacit admission that there is a negative effect associated with discharging to 100% DoD.

I also suspect a bit of wiggle room here in the wording. “100% of the [marketed] capacity” is not necessarily 0% SoC when the manufacturer underrates battery capacity. A 105Ah batt with 100Ah removed still has 5Ah remaining (actual 4.8% SoC).

conclusion

I suspect discharging to 0% SoC (4.8% actual) is harmful but

• BB has sufficient padding in the price to cover support and (non-transferable) warranty service
• BB bets that LFP cycle life is long enough that the original (warrantable) owners will not still have the battery by the time any degradation appears
• and that the owners would not be willing/interested in actual capacity testing even if degradation were apparent

I have limited funds so I treat my LFP as gently as practical.

Even if it doesn’t at least it’ll smell nice. :-)

A 60 amp charger would reduce the time I’d need to idle in order to get a decent charge.

I’ve seen Orions paralleled for 60A. Is that an option?

So glad to be out of the forest canopy. 110w harvest at 8am? Yes, please!