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Thread: New owner of Vintage Bus 1980

  1. #101
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Location
    Beverly Hills
    Posts
    4,652

    Default

    After you get this perfected I guess you'll have to package a system for others ;-)


    Gil and Durlene
    2003 H-3 Hoffman Conversion

  2. #102
    Join Date
    Aug 2019
    Location
    Bothell
    Posts
    196

    Default

    I am really liking my Alexa voice control of the inverter; with the idle timeout and voice notification of it powering down.

    So assuming you have a voice commanded "Bus Butler" what would everyone like it to do?

  3. #103

    Default

    Hey Gil, I went to the link on your post and did not see a date for 1980. 1981 was the oldest I saw, did I miss something.
    Reason I am asking is could the title the gentleman has is a salvage title. The state id # throws me. Just curious about something that far back.
    Maybe the state assigns a title ID along with the actual VIN #. Didn't manufacturing start using 17 digit VIN # in the 60's of so.
    Sorry about your tire, that could have been a real problem.

  4. #104
    Join Date
    Aug 2019
    Location
    Bothell
    Posts
    196

    Default First load dump test

    My hydronic heat storage consists of two ten gallon RV water heater tanks.



    The hydronic storage can be heated by:

    1. External diesel boiler at the rear of the bus.
    2. Engine coolant while driving.
    3. Diesel Generator coolant (not yet hooked up).
    4. Electric heat.

    My current project is working on the charging control logic for when I am on shore power; so, I needed too dump some capacity out of the house battery; as the house battery pack was full up from solar charging.

    So I remotely fired up the inverter and turned on power to the first tank, for my first test run of a load dump situation.

    Currently I have 600 watts of solar panels just leaned up against the bus, but the goal is for 3KW of solar to be mounted on the roof; so dumping excess power to hot water should be a frequent occurrence.

    In a driveway surfing situation with a 120V extension cord feed; I would say after three hours you could take a shower from a dead cold bus. OK in this graphic the start point was about 65 degrees and then was around 120 after three hours. The power draw for my selected RV water heater is about 1400 watts.




    At 5PM I got tired of waiting and powered up the second tank to see where it would plateau at; which turned out to be 140 degrees for my tanks. I had noticed as I was wiring these heaters up; that there was no adjustment set point for the temperature.

    So anyway you can see the effect of turning on the second tank heater; as a steeper slope at the end of graph.

  5. #105
    Join Date
    Aug 2019
    Location
    Bothell
    Posts
    196

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Buddy Brown View Post
    Hey Gil, I went to the link on your post and did not see a date for 1980. 1981 was the oldest I saw, did I miss something.
    Reason I am asking is could the title the gentleman has is a salvage title. The state id # throws me. Just curious about something that far back.
    Maybe the state assigns a title ID along with the actual VIN #. Didn't manufacturing start using 17 digit VIN # in the 60's of so.
    Sorry about your tire, that could have been a real problem.
    I was also curious about the state ID and did some research on this and found a web site that has listing for when buses were produced that may of be of interest for various manufactures:

    It is: http://www.angelfire.com/ca/TORONTO/manufacturers.html Note you more and likely will have to use the internet history site to view this content.

    In my case I was interested in Prevost buses produced in 1980 and got the following list of the motor homes:

    [Private] Recker, O.E.S. JA80 Motor Home M104-2749-80
    [Dealer] Liberty Coach Inc. MR80 Motor Home M104-2755-80
    [Private] Beckley, G.W. MR80 Motor Home M104-2786-80
    [Private] Miller, William & Elizabeth MY80 Motor Home M104-2796-80 35' Champion motor home
    [Private] Custer, C.L. MY80 Motor Home M502-2806-80
    [Private] Mandrell, Barbara MY80 Motor Home M104-2818-80 TN
    [Private] Allavesen, Donald 1980 Motor Home M104-2826-80

    I did find a data plate that matched up with this detail.



    So no I don't think that I have a salvage title, probably just some weirdness of when it was registered in Oregon where I purchased it.

  6. #106

    Default

    Thanks for the info. I did not know this was the way it used to be.
    Congrats on the bus and good luck with the updates you want to do.

  7. #107
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Location
    Beverly Hills
    Posts
    4,652

    Default

    I've never seen anyone use the generator coolant loop for their domestic hot water. I would discourage the thought. If the generator is running you have AC power. Use the electric heating elements. The complexity and risk seem far too great for the very limited value of using the generator's coolant loop.

    Quote Originally Posted by freds View Post
    My hydronic heat storage consists of two ten gallon RV water heater tanks.



    The hydronic storage can be heated by:

    1. External diesel boiler at the rear of the bus.
    2. Engine coolant while driving.
    3. Diesel Generator coolant (not yet hooked up).
    4. Electric heat.

    My current project is working on the charging control logic for when I am on shore power; so, I needed too dump some capacity out of the house battery; as the house battery pack was full up from solar charging.

    So I remotely fired up the inverter and turned on power to the first tank, for my first test run of a load dump situation.

    Currently I have 600 watts of solar panels just leaned up against the bus, but the goal is for 3KW of solar to be mounted on the roof; so dumping excess power to hot water should be a frequent occurrence.

    In a driveway surfing situation with a 120V extension cord feed; I would say after three hours you could take a shower from a dead cold bus. OK in this graphic the start point was about 65 degrees and then was around 120 after three hours. The power draw for my selected RV water heater is about 1400 watts.




    At 5PM I got tired of waiting and powered up the second tank to see where it would plateau at; which turned out to be 140 degrees for my tanks. I had noticed as I was wiring these heaters up; that there was no adjustment set point for the temperature.

    So anyway you can see the effect of turning on the second tank heater; as a steeper slope at the end of graph.


    Gil and Durlene
    2003 H-3 Hoffman Conversion

  8. #108
    Join Date
    Aug 2019
    Location
    Bothell
    Posts
    196

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Gil_J View Post
    I've never seen anyone use the generator coolant loop for their domestic hot water. I would discourage the thought. If the generator is running you have AC power. Use the electric heating elements. The complexity and risk seem far too great for the very limited value of using the generator's coolant loop.
    Well I already have the second water heater that can handle the coolant flow which is about four feet away. Secondary use in my design is preheating the generator before starting.

    The bus has an old 12.5 KW Koler generator with a Perkins diesel engine with a remote radiator in the rear of the bus. The Perkins engines are used a lot on small sailboats for auxiliary propulsion .

    The idea is that when I do have to run the generator is to get maximum utilization for the shortest run period, so more and likely will load it up to do:

    1. Coolant heat recovery
    2. Electric heat to hydronic storage
    3. Aux heat out of the air conditioner units
    4. Top off the house battery storage.

    But hey I don't need it right now, so it will be something I do further down the road.

  9. #109
    Join Date
    Aug 2019
    Location
    Bothell
    Posts
    196

    Default DIY Hydronic system Engine Preheat

    It's starting to get colder here in the northwest, so the bus is doesn't immediately start when you crank it.

    So I am starting to test the preheating side of my DIY hydronic system. Here's a run from this morning.

    It was 34 degrees out and I was thinking definitely time for a preheat. However I have been also working on solar panel installs so have been running the bus twice a day as I have reposition it in the storage yard to get access to both sides of the bus.




    The engine coolant value is only accurate while the preheating pump is running as the temperature sensor is in the pumping bay and from it's location it also sees a bit of eddie current heat transfer from the glycol tank. So anyway the coolant temperature started at 50 degrees and rose by 18 degrees in 30 minutes.

  10. #110
    Join Date
    Aug 2019
    Location
    Bothell
    Posts
    196

    Default Electric Preheating Vs Diesel

    Did another baseline run this morning with electric vs diesel boiler preheating.

    I have just about finished my solar install project with seven out of ten solar panels hooked up and it was forecasted to be sunny today (no evidence of it yet LOL!).

    So anyway I needed to apply a dump load to drain the house batteries to make room for the solar power input.

    It turned out to be a colder morning, forecasted to hit freezing tomorrow.

    So anyway I turned on the electric heaters in both of the glycol storage tanks and was drawing about 3.4KW of power from the house battery bank for a bit over an hour.

    At that point I turned them off and fired up the diesel boiler, which you can see from the red line that I drew on the chart.



    The initial dip in hydronic output temperature is due to diverting glycol back to the diesel boiler at the rear of the bus.

    As you can see both curves steepened as the Diesel boiler is a 10KW unit.

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