I invited mom over today, Kasey went to pick her up. Mom has been sick with Kidney issues, has been through some rounds of antibiotics.
She had been on no sleep and started crying her eyes out when she got here, I held her for a while. But then she started to get on this weird kick of.. well I can’t explain it. She wasn’t making much sense and was repeating herself and quite confused.
I laid her down in my bed and she slept for a few hours, she seemed better by the time she woke. I made her creamy chicken noodle soup and ensured she had water. But things went off the side of a mountain. She kept getting stuck again and not making sense.
This went on until I got concerned enough to call an ambulance. They showed up, as did the police. Something was very wrong. I called Mike over and let my sisters know that something was wrong.
At first I thought it was anxiety related, feeling a little unreal, which I get. But no. By the time Mike got here, Kasey and I were in tears, or close to. Kasey had to leave the room as she was starting to feel crazy herself. She kept repeating that she’s never felt so unreal, then wildly vacillating between that was a lie, she’s never felt better in her life, and kept asking us to ask her questions. It went on for another three hours, she’d get agitated from time to time.
I called the police again as there was no way for us to get her in the car, she didn’t know where she was or how she got here. The police eventually had to handcuff her and take her to the hospital, not that she got violent, but we had no other choice. It was that bad and getting worse. It had been going on in various ways from 10am to 7pm, not counting when she was asleep.
She seemed normal for a brief time right after she woke up.
We considered that it could be a UTI as when you get older, it can cause cognitive issues, hospital originally agreed and started fishing for sepsis of the brain, which made sense and didn’t seem overly scary as bacterial stuff can be treated.
But then I got word that they found a mass in her kidney leading to her uterus and that it’s cancer. Of course, or at least I’m told by friends, they can’t be sure without a biopsy, but from what I know, it wouldn’t be the first time she’s had a cancer scare in her life.
Now, this may sound selfish, well or maybe not.. as our fears and worries are sometimes. Well, no, it’s empathy. I feel for her. I’m putting myself in her shoes and I’m scared. I’m scared I’m going to loose my mom. I’m scared about the same happening to me. And I’m scared for her because I know that all of this for her, as much as she can understand what is going on right now is her worst fears. Hospitals, doctors, and she’s going to need a lot of it from here on out I think.
I’m exhausted. I’m going to numb out and watch YouTube now until I sleep.
I’m working on getting back to creating VR180 content and have a more solid plan for an exposure therapy app. Storyboard:
The most challenging aspect, and why I’ve never quite done more than some test shots:
“Affordable” cameras kinda suck. That was taken on an Insta360 X3. I just got done with the Insta360 X4 at “8k” and can’t stand the sensor noise. You can clean up in post, Neat Video or Topaz AI, but even on a 7950X3D/4090 rig, 4 minutes of video takes 4+ hours to process as the video frame is so high res!
So screw it, I found a refurb/used Canon R5 C that is full frame 8k60p, but I’m NOT going with the Canon RF5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye, at least not yet as what’s the point of stereoscopy as human stereo vision breaks down quickly.
Close Distances (up to 20 feet/6 meters): Stereoscopic vision is very effective. Depth perception is highly accurate.
Intermediate Distances (20-100 feet/6-30 meters): Stereoscopic vision still functions well, but depth perception becomes less precise as distance increases.
Far Distances (beyond 100-200 feet/30-60 meters): Stereoscopic vision begins to break down, and the brain relies more on other depth cues, such as size, perspective, and motion, to perceive depth.
vs.
City Driving (25-35 mph / 40-55 km/h): Drivers usually look about 1-2 blocks ahead, which translates to roughly 200-400 feet (60-120 meters).
Highway Driving (55-70 mph / 90-110 km/h): Drivers often look 12-15 seconds ahead, which at these speeds is approximately 1000-1500 feet (300-450 meters).
Rural or Open Road Driving: In more open areas with higher speeds and fewer visual obstructions, drivers might look even further ahead, up to 20 seconds, which can be around 1500-2000 feet (450-600 meters) or more.
I can thank openpilot for understanding of that and years of people wanting dual cameras for “depth” when it’s moot, thanks… George Hotz, you prick, haha
I just think V180 is kinda a novelty, like, view VR180 adult content and notice you go crosseyed when the performer gets too close to the camera and generally, the chromatic aberration, etc.
You end up using less than half the full frame sensor per eye, which ends up being less than 4k per eye.
I want to do mono vr180 as we don’t need stereo outside the car as nothing will be stereoscopic outside of the car anyway due to how human eyes work. Like sure, the car inside will be 3D, but starring inside of a car isn’t usually good for motion sickness, even in real life and could be distracting.
This is a TTARTISAN 7.5mm F2.0 APS-C on a full frame, I think E-mount, the green lines are imaginary ASP-C sensor size.
Here’s the Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye which can be adapted to the R5 C as well.
The only “issue” with the 7.5mm F2.0 is that it’s not exactly a circular 180 on the sensor and I’m gonna have to calibrate it to know exactly what the horz/vertical FOV is for metadata so it projects properly. It does seem to be the best for my use case as we retain left/right head movement and don’t quite need the full up/down head movement while in car as it would just be floorboard/roof of the car, maximizing sensor area for what we care about.
Camera lenses, stereo, VR180, etc is kind of a bitch to understand and think about, then you have aperture, ISO, focus, etc to contend to. Like f5.6 and f8 should be the sharpest for this lens:
It’s all going to boil down to ensuring I have the correct ffmpeg v360 fov mappings, but once it’s dialed in, it’s dialed in. It’s also handy the R5 C doesn’t have IBIS so we don’t have to worry about the sensor shifting and introducing judder/vibration into the image in car.
Still, 8k60p files are gonna be a pain to deal with just due to sheer size. Thankfully I can copy what the adult VR180 industry is doing and it seems they use h265 at 20Mbps for 8k stereo content, 8000×4000 dual eye.
General Complete name : /Users/Downloads/SLR_SLR Labs_Apple Vision Pro 8k demo_4000p_42338_FISHEYE190.mp4 Format : MPEG-4 Format profile : Base Media Codec ID : isom (isom/iso2/mp41) File size : 225 MiB Duration : 1 min 0 s Overall bit rate mode : Variable Overall bit rate : 31.4 Mb/s Frame rate : 59.940 FPS Writing application : Lavf61.0.100
Video ID : 1 Format : HEVC Format/Info : High Efficiency Video Coding Format profile : Main@L6.1@High Codec ID : hvc1 Codec ID/Info : High Efficiency Video Coding Duration : 1 min 0 s Bit rate : 31.2 Mb/s Width : 8 000 pixels Height : 4 000 pixels Display aspect ratio : 2.000 Frame rate mode : Constant Frame rate : 59.940 (60000/1001) FPS Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 (Type 0) Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.016 Stream size : 223 MiB (99%) Writing library : x265 3.2.1+1-
I’ll be focusing on VR180 Mono so I can half the horz and do like 4096×2048 or something and do square equiangular so we don’t have black boarders in the output video.
Although many 360 videos are a minimum of 4K, content can often still look very blurry. I’ll explain why. When viewing 360 video content, the viewer is only seeing a small slice of the 360 footage at a given time within their field of view. This means that a 3840×1920 360 video is actually only displaying about 1280×720 in the viewing portal at a given time. This is why VR video content sometimes looks like television from the 1990s. For this reason, every pixel counts!
Anyway! My Vision Pro arrives today so I’ll get lost in that for a bit and see if it sucks, or is magical. I really don’t want to fuck with Quest 3, even though I own one as I loathe Android development and the AVP has the most magical feature of them all, high quality screens and foveated rendering so you can display higher quality videos than anything else right now. Let’s home Apple keeps the spatial computing going
It’s been some time. It’s 6AM on a Sunday, a strange dream draws me back to this place but like most dreams. and most things it’s up to us to assign value, meaning to them.
I’ve had a shift in mental state since moving here, the anxiety and stress I once experienced constantly, pacing the hallway in that shitty house on Arlington hitting the walls with my hand to focus on that pain seem.. well now that I think about it and re-experience it a bit, not that long ago but my sentiment going into it was something that doesn’t flash into my consciousness much anymore.
Trauma and PTSD is a bitch, I was certainly in a state of both, and yeah fuck it, back then. It’s 2024 now. Back then, that feels good. Not that I have to put in a ton of effort convincing myself of that, literary word flow and storytelling.
I think most generally I stay busy. Current project is perfecting the home office and getting a setup that works well for me. So many options and ways I could go about it and you know me when it comes to my tech, I’m highly opinionated.
I play D&D now, I’m officially a nerd. We’ve been meeting up weekly with our quad and playing, it’s been nice. We had a spit of Poly Drama for a little bit there, some growing pains and resetting expectations, but I’m very glad to have been a little patient and reapproach things with more patience. I know it’s certainly good for Kasey to have that outlet and connection.
She wants to learn how to 3D print! I should get her started today on that, we have the definition of an easy to use printer after all and I’ve loved buying her a Mac for her to use. She just bought a whole mess of D20 stickers and is going to stickerbomb her laptop. God, she’s such a nerd, haha.
It’s been good things being stable, safe most generally and why I wanted to move here. New people are certainly hard to come by for sure, but that’s fine.
Hey! I have healthy and delicious meals to start today! I’ve reupped my subscription to one of those prepared meal places. I had a mediterranean fish dinner thing the other night, kale and olives and such, it was delicious. I think 5 days of meals a week is a good balance and it’s less likely go to waste as I think that was the primary challenge last time around.
Anyway, I think it’s time to start my day, and/or I’m tired of writing haha.
Went to Peru yesterday, helped fix our friend’s plumbing and swung by and checked out our new place! It’s still not open, yet, and is looking like February or so before it’s open from what we can tell. Little cute rows of houses with garages. I am so looking forward to it.
I very nearly headed to Kokomo on the way back, if I only had the Tesla back I would have to check out the supercharger station. They should be done with that come Monday.
Overall, I’m in a good place! Cabin fever continues and we can’t sell these RVs fast enough.
I’m starting to get feelings about driving more, going to Indianapolis for date night. I felt my old friend, anxiety, when driving to Peru and was just fine. I’m getting to the point where I know it isn’t so much the drive or being away from “home”, it’s just a bit of tummy upset and a bit of disorientation due to adrenaline. I think once we get moved, I get my car charger installed in the garage it’s going to be on like Donkey Kong as they say.
Mother Nature wanted to give us one last hurrah before we left. I kept bitching about it not being like winter, and bygolley, I got it. Woke up to freezing my ass off, the heat pump is in perma-defrost, diesel heaters quit due to gelling. Have a bit of propane left over so switched the big furnace on. I did have to go outside and swap around tanks.
It’s so cold and windy it’s hard to breathe outside. The temp is dropping another 5 degrees by 8am.
Movers came yesterday, we officially are 100% moved out of Indianapolis. It was a clusterfuck. The storage place’s gates were frozen and there was no emergency number or way of contacting the owner/manager. The rear gate kinda opened, but not really.
Manager refused a refund for the remainder of the month, ended up paying movers another $175 due to sitting around. Owners owns DQ next door, thankfully he came over and was able to take the gate off.
2 Men and a Truck forged my signature on all pre and post move paperwork. I tipped the movers well and let them know I guess I have full rights if anything is broken or stolen.
Lastly, dude at O’Rileys ended up scratching my windshield on the Tesla when we swapped wiper blades. It was a bitch as the mechanism was frozen and they made it unnecessary complicated for no reason. Kinda miffed at that, but it’s alright, the scratches are superficial and I have some oxide stuff coming to buff/polish the scratch out. I went to the Car Wash, the manual one as all others were closed, and used the wand to unfreeze the wiper blades. It worked, but was weird seeing the ice build up on the car as I was washing it.
We’ve yet to hear back on timeline to move in to our townhome, it’s still going to be a bit longer, hopefully we get in no later than February.
It’s 4am now and I’m kinda venting a bit, but there’s still a lot to be grateful for, and I am. My shit is out of Indy even if it didn’t go very smoothly. The heat is out, but now it’s warming up due to the propane furnace working. The water is frozen, but the tank and pipe heaters I installed last summer should keep the shit and water tanks unfrozen.
I think that’s why the Texas grid failure was so extreme in 2021. I’m sitting in this RV bedroom right now and the wind is loud, and has been for two days now. You can feel the cold off the walls, in the air. In a house, you wouldn’t really know until you lost electricity then SMACK, right in the face.
It’s going to be so nice having a warm and comfortable home. No more frozen water, longer than 5 minute showers on demand, no more RV rocking due to wind and loud wind noise or the chill of the walls and floor radiating to chill you while trying to sleep. And space. We’ll be going from about 250 square feet to 980.
First off, GOODBYE JEEP! I will never, ever own one or a Chrysler product again unless it’s free or damn near dirt cheap. To be fair, we did get it at the absolutely worst possible time, during the pandemic. Everyone and their mom was jacking up car pricing and things were stupid. I’ve been flipping cars and buying, driving, and trading in or selling shit since I was a teen; it’s the first time I got a bad deal.
In fact, I sold a 2019 Tesla Model 3 a month after picking it up for MORE than I paid for it! That $50,000 car is worth $28,000 today, hardly two years later, and it was already two years old by when it sold! Brand new Model 3s cost around $37k now and Model Y was… $70,000 during the pandemic and is $34,000-$37,000 now.
I really wanted to try Full Self Driving Beta, the thing that takes you from point A to B. The issue is that it was invite only and locked down and I wasn’t going to play the safety score game. Also, I was very unimpressed by Autopilot, it felt robotic, unreliable and phantom braking was awful. The Open Source alternative, Openpilot, had better quality of autonomy back in 2018.
Now days FSD Beta is basically free game now and from what I can tell (open invite), is pretty damn good from what ride along videos I can find by real life users. Not that you can take a nap, and there will be situations where it’ll be more stressful as it can screw up and you MUST be paying attention. But the promise of your car driving you across town, through stoplights, weaving around tight corners and handling stop signs, stoplights, unprotected turns, etc seems much more realistic than it ever has been.
They are working on what’s called “end to end” and I’ll explain. Right now, they have a self driving stack of around 300,000 lines of code. They hard program policy for the car to drive and as expected, it can often feel pretty robotic. The driving task isn’t a binary thing to solve, there are unlimited edge cases and trying to hard code real life can be just about impossible.
End to end is a method, basically, where you show a machine learning agent what a human does. Shove in camera images/videos of a human driving and where the steering wheel was pointed, gas, brakes. Shove in enough videos and data and by the end of it you get a model that can just kinda magically replicate what a human can do. Instead of being like “Hey, this is a stoplight, stop while red, etc”, the model just inherently learns that the human stops when the light is red, without even knowing what a stoplight is.
It’s kinda like… imagine two setups to fling poo. You can sit down and explicitly program a robotic arm with every single movement needed to pickup the poo, how hard to fling it, etc. Then, you can show a monkey how to. You squat over, shit in your hand, then throw it at the wall. You don’t have to say a word, and they get a banana if they do well. The monkey is likely going to learn how to do it and it’s motivated by a banana. Show the monkey over and over again. Show it at night, in rain, if someone is standing in the way, if the monkey is male or female and has those body parts, if they are tall or short. The monkey more organically learns and if you teach it a million different use cases and situations on how to throw poo, it’s generally going to learn how to do it.
End to end is the monkey. Right now, and why Tesla Autopilot requires lane lines and kinda sucks, especially compared to Openpilot, is that Openpilot has been using what is called a “laneless” model, which uses end to end. They have showed their monkey how to throw poo. Not how to move their arm or every single little millimeter of which joint to exactly move, but example after example of throwing poo and it just figured it out.
Same with speed bumps, stop signs, stop lights, cars pulling in front of you, etc. It just kinda figures it out.
And that’s why we’ve been told self driving is coming every year for a decade now. Well, first off because Elon is a twat, but also because it’s really, really hard. Let’s say that when it’s dark, it’s raining, and the monkey can’t see to the left that it flings poo at children and you don’t want it to do that. You can’t simply tell the monkey what a child is and not to fling poo at it. Instead, you just have to show the monkey that in those situations you don’t fling poo at children by showing it what to do in close enough of those specific situations again, and again, and again so it just learns. Maybe that sounds complex and ambiguous, and that’s my point, and why it’s hard. It’s a round about way of doing things, but closer to how humans actually learn.
And that’s what Tesla is doing come FSD v12, or such is the goal. Of course, you can throw manual policy on top of it like override the monkey when we know for sure it needs to stop, like when we are about to run into a car or something, or it’s clear that we need to turn left. We can manually grab the monkey’s hand when needed.
Anyway, I’m excited to try it out! I think it’s going to capture my wonder and awe that I first had with Openpilot and what led to driving around the neighborhood for 10,000 miles tinkering with things back when Openpilot needed tinkering to work well, I was pretty much completely over my driving anxiety then. This gets me driving, this helps me work on my agoraphobia, this gives me something to think about when doing the hard, scary work of exposure therapy and there’s something comforting about knowing I can let the car take over to some extent. Anxiety is one of those funny things. Anxious drivers are statistically very safe drivers as they are hypervigilant and when I say I can let the car take over, this doesn’t mean I’m not ready to take over at anytime or that I’m not paying attention, that would be very unsafe. More of, it’s just comforting to know that I can delegate some of the driving task when panicking in the car and chill out for a moment while still being in total control, if that makes sense.
Don’t think for a second that I like Elon Musk, however. It’s the most painful thing for me to own a Tesla and I think it’s why Teslas have become cheap enough for me to afford right now. It’s the major reason why I got rid of the Model 3, it was downright embarrassing to be associated with him and the fanboys are even worse.
I have an Anti Elon Tesla Club sticker coming which I will proudly display on the car:
Not that it’ll prevent me from getting keyed. I guess, just like playing the new Harry Potter game, I had to realize that thousands of other people worked to bring it together and just because the leader is a douchebag, doesn’t mean that it has to completely ruin the end result. Harry Potter has a trans character, you can have a trans character. I’m sure there are plenty of people who worked on the game that hate Rowling. It’s still a shame though on some level. I also think that Hybrid cars are more practical and if we actually cared about the environment, we’d have diesel hybrids with 200+ MPG. Alas, instead we have douchebags buying Rivians to virtue signal and greenwash and I suppose I’m a bit of a douche at the end of a day for considering a Tesla, even if I found one cheap.
Anyway.
We received approval for an apartment!!! I’M SO EXCITED! No more having to empty our poo every two weeks! No more 5 minute showers and water pipes freezing up! MORE SPACE! A GARAGE!
We are getting our shit from storage this weekend and honestly, I don’t remember the majority of what’s in there! It’s gonna be like Christmas from my past self.
I’m also feeling about 30% better, I’ve been sick these last two weeks. What started as an ear infection due to sleeping with Airpods in turned into bad vertigo. Now I have the sore throat and sinus headache going around. I’m thinking, honestly, it may just be COVID. My sleep the last few days has been pretty awful, just hard to get to sleep and stay asleep. I also had a breakdown yesterday between lack of sleep, not feeling well, and the stress of so much going on. Our lead is leaving at work and we’ll be down to two people from six in support, which is insane. I literally just hit a point where I caught up my queue.
Life is good. It’s 6am, Mike’s surprise birthday party was last night. I’m sitting in the RV out back and it’s pitch black outside. Another week or so will mark one year since leaving Indianapolis and I can’t believe it’s “only” been a year, it feels so much longer.
Lately the theme has been downsizing and getting finances in order, coming to terms that I can be an emotional spender and making better decisions post pandemic as I finally feel generally good in life again, stable, safe. Motorcycle? Sold. Bunch of other shit? Sold. The Ford truck was traded in two days ago, but hear me out, the APR was so bad on it, which I knew going into it. We needed to be able to pull the trailer somehow.
No more worries there, went with a slightly used 41MPG Rav4 Hybrid with a better interest rate. Our 6 year Total Cost of Ownership massively dropped and 14MPG vs 41MPG with all of the driving I want to do in the tail end of what’s becoming what used to be my driving paralysis, and the exposure work needed to get there. Fill up from half tank? $15. 528 miles per tank. I tried the aimlessly drive the truck around on the daily, refilling the tank is a hundredaire affair.
But how do we pull the RV? With the other RV, of course and the Jeep in a pinch. We hope to sell the travel trailer and Jeep by next spring to further drop our monthly expenses. It’s the meantime, it’s paying off a few credit cards, building up savings again, working in the tail end of my driving anxiety. That is, if the Jeep isn’t totaled out come Monday.
Dead mice dying in air vents and their goo getting on the thing deep in the dash that gets hot… doesn’t smell well. The Jeep has been underivable for about two weeks now and I finally gave up trying to fix it, for now.
See the black box lower center? That’s the blend door/heater core/airbox assembly. Also see the metal frame around it? It’s impossible to get to without removing the whole ass dash, depressurizing refrigerant, draining coolant, dropping steering shaft. I’ve dumped disinfectant down it, I’ve ran ozone (and ruined some of the interior, ozone did not work regardless of how many people told me to try it on Reddit). I found another nest in back. I’m done dealing with it, hope the insurance claim adjuster brings a mask Monday.
If they don’t cover it… I’m going to get creative and try vinegar and some other things, the airbox has a drain at the bottom due to aircon condensate so dumping shit down the airbox.. anyway I’m not going to think about it right now. Worse case we’ll trade it in come spring, which we want to do anyway but I’m secretly hoping they total it due to biohazard. Good riddance. It’ll easily be a $6,000-$8,000 fix to do properly at dealership prices as you can’t get mouse goo out, you replace parts and start over.
But anyway.
No, we seriously sat down and talked about moving south and what we would need to do to get there. The simple facts of the matter is, I still have a bit more driving and exposure to do (the biggest thing) and I simply own too much shit and need to downsize (my call). We don’t need an electric bike, motorcycle, cars, RVs, a storage unit full of electronic parts and other shit, we need paid down credit cards, a fuel efficient car, money in savings again. I’ve needed to give myself an allowance for the longest time and get my spending under control which I don’t think I’ve done since living in Lafayette.
Feels weird talking about it, but admitting shit is the first step I suppose. I’ve just never really talked about money and thought of life as transient, so who cares? But it matters and no amount of random shit, or otherwise, fills that void we all have within.
Speaking of the void and general anxiety levels, I’m up at 6pm as I went to bed earlier, and have been for a while. The colder days and getting dark around 5-6pm does tend to do that. I’m finding my general anxiety levels are lower than they have been for a very long time. I still get bouts here and there, of course, like when I eat a bunch of things that don’t go together and I get a tummy ache or if I choose to go get breakfast early in the morning and I’m still groggy and a bit disoriented.
Even the Amanda dreams that my brain like to queue up from time to time are softer, it’s actually what led to writing this morning instead of just going back to sleep, which I will here soon. Yeah, the tail end of the bulk of healing, a reconciliation in my mind. It’s that threshold where memories fade a bit and the trauma and bad juju wanes off and a bit of nostalgia takes hold. It’s those last bits of healing in the subconscious. The dreams are basically just sitting and talking to understand each other, with a slight bit of want, and a slight bit of sadness, but overall positive.
Things happened and went off the rails so quickly that things just fell apart overnight and regardless of comparably how short the relationship was, or even knowing her, it’s what made healing and closure so difficult, as there was no closure and we were both quite uniquely cruel to each other, inflicted that trauma really deep in each other.
It’s crazy to think how much that impacted my life by the end of it, not only how deep it cut, for whatever reason, but how much I’ve learned about myself and the other things I’ve worked on in my life since then that I may have otherwise wouldn’t. I don’t know, it’s weird.
I don’t talk much about Kasey on my blog and I think it’s due to knowing, inherently, that she’s a private person, and also, I have to work hard to blog about positive, good things. Not because I don’t want to share them, but more, my blog is the place I go to process, to think, when it spills out and when things are good I don’t feel the need to write about it, I feel the need to experience them.
But still, I enjoy writing and I like that I’ve been in a better place. The lack of content on my blog and what content is here evidences that pretty well I think. I usually write more when traveling, also, gives my mind something to do.
Kasey and I are good. There’s been some recent upheaval due to a death in her family and some awkwardness with how to approach someone she has strong boundaries with as the person who died was married to said person. There’s also some awkwardness due to another family member being passive aggressive about things. As for I, we lost our oldest surviving relative the other day, my Great Aunt.
December has also been weird in general, it’s been in the 40s, 50s and the weather and wild clouds were strange yesterday. I guess snow just isn’t a thing Indiana does anymore and it kinda sucks. I can’t remember the last time we had a good snowy winter and things were white for more than a weekend or so.
We also have some friends locally that live just on the edge of my driving comfort zone, it’s nice! I’ve been to their house and look forward to going over more often. Then it’s just another 10 min to Kokomo, then wherever else. Openpilot/self driving arrives, again, Monday. it’ll get me out driving and will be fun to fuck around with.
I’ve always had a bone to pick with propane. With costs hovering around $7 a gallon (considering a 15lb tank exchange priced at $25/bottle), its energy density only reaches 60% of what diesel offers. As an added note, I’ve also installed a heat pump.
Energy Content & Efficiency:
Propane: Roughly 91,500 BTU/gallon
Diesel: Around 137,380 BTU/gallon
Heat Pump:
Capacity: 12,000 BTU/hr
Efficiency: HSPF of 9.0
Cost Breakdown:
Propane: $7.05/gallon (based on the 15lb bottle exchange rate of $25~ locally)
Diesel: $4/gallon (or less if you find off road diesel)
Heat Pump: Runs on electricity priced at $0.13/kWh
Given a daily heating requirement of 60,000 BTUs for an RV, we can factor in different operational times based on external temperatures:
Warmest 8 hours (around 50°F): 25% operation
Transitional 8 hours: 50% operation
Coldest 8 hours (close to 30°F): 75% operation
This culminates in a monthly requirement of roughly 1,800,000 BTUs.
Efficiency of Various Heaters:
RV Propane Furnace: 85%
5kW Hydronic Diesel Heater: 90%
Monthly Costs:
Propane (Using an RV Propane Furnace):
Consumption: 25.69 gallons
Cost: $181.12
Diesel (With a 5kW Hydronic Heater):
Consumption: 14.56 gallons
Cost: $58.23
Heat Pump:
Energy Consumption: 480.00 kWh
Cost: $62.40
Drawing Conclusions: When evaluating the monthly heating costs for an RV under varying temperatures (peaking at 50°F and plummeting to 30°F), diesel, especially with a hydronic heater, stands out as the most economical choice. The heat pump is a close runner-up. Propane, however, especially when used in a standard RV furnace, proves to be a pricier alternative.
From personal experience, propane has its challenges. Fixed tank systems can be cumbersome, and the quest for a refill location can be taxing. More frustratingly, propane refills often become impossible during peak winter months—just when you need them the most—because the equipment freezes.
Then there’s the matter of safety. Propane’s flammability and the idea of storing it in pressurized tanks on vehicles unsettle me. Even though these tanks meet DOT standards, in case of a mishap, I’d much prefer a diesel spill over a potential tank explosion.
When it comes to sheer convenience (and if electricity access isn’t an issue), heat pumps are a winner. They’re efficient, especially in summer, and can function even in freezing temperatures. However, be wary of defrost cycles at temperatures around 20°F, as they can compromise comfort, especially in poorly insulated RVs. Speaking from an unforgettable experience during the bomb cyclone—with its chilling -50°F wind and fierce 50MPH gusts—this is a vital consideration.
A word of advice for those considering installing a heat pump in their RV: steer clear of placing a 12,000 BTU unit in a confined space like an RV bedroom. The unit, when cycling, can cause significant temperature swings, leading to discomfort. If I were to redo my setup, I’d opt for a 9,000 BTU unit in the bedroom and reserve the larger unit for more spacious areas like the living room.
On the horizon for me is a DIY Hydronic heating system for my RV. This project will encompass a diesel coolant heater, car heater cores, ESP32-controlled fans, and a heat exchanger for warm water. Additionally, I’ll be able to use the stock hot water heater to warm the coolant loop when electricity is available, thanks to the two-way operation of heat exchangers.
The easiest install is a typical air exchanger diesel parking heater and I have one in the old RV that went through the bomb cyclone. You could literally feel the air drafts in the RV during the bomb cyclone and the little 5kW unit kept us alive (not that we didn’t have a house to go into if needed). It ran constantly and kept the RV around 65F at full blast. We did experience diesel gelling and had to switch to Kerosene, however, and I also experienced a metering pump failure due to running it dry (I had setup an auto-retry loop to force the heater to re-ignite after a flame out when the fuel was gelling).
The reason I wish to go with the more complicated setup of the hydronic heater is hot water without propane and multi-zone heating as this Travel Trailer has a discrete closing door bedroom and I also wish to heat the enclosed underbelly to help prevent pipes freezing. Not running the stock propane furnace leads to frozen pipes as a duct is ran to the underbelly.
I could also just install two 2kW air exchange parking heaters, well, three considering the underbelly. One for the bedroom, one for the living, one in the underbelly space (and I may end up needing to put one in the underbelly anyway if the hydronic can’t cut it). I found that running a 5kW unit is overkill most of the time and it’ll run at idle more often than not, encouraging soot fouling. Heck, I may even just install my spare 5kW I already have in the living as a backup period.
First off, had such wonderful dreams, thank you for that brain, universe, wherever dreams come from.
Currently writing from the old RV’s bed, Bottlecap is nestled to my left within petting distance of my left hand, within distance for pinkie pets with my index finger on Q. Stayed at France Park last week, stayed inside mostly and didn’t do much when there, which is fine. It had been raining and the back drive turns into mud on the farm, the farmer’s tractor is out for harvest by the gran bin. Long story short, I got stressed out trying to back the trailer without possibly making a mud pit on either the farmer’s or the rent’s land.
This led to an unplanned RV swap as it’s smaller and much more maneuverable. I thought I may have a momentary adjustment period of being back in here, but honestly, it’s been good. I’ve actually been in a really good mood being in here, so many good memories and the bed is even more comfy. Less storage space and separation, however. There’s some additional organization and such that needs to occur as I had been using this as a temporary storage unit, and some essentials like plates, cookware, etc need to happen.
So the plan is to get the RV in top top shape, sparkling and fully set up and spend time driving and being out as much as possible. Same plan as before. Just much easier regarding logistics as you jump in the driver seat and go in the Class C. It’s also more flexible as driving somewhere random, pulling over, and taking some time to chill is possible in here. With the trailer a slide needs to be pulled out and getting to the bathroom requires planning ahead of time which makes things more cumbersome, not to mention hitching, unhitching, reversing, etc.
On some other good news, I finally got the truck, trailer weighed and worked out my tongue weight and everything I needed on that front. Truck and trailer together weighs 14,700 lbs, which is 7.35 tons. Tongue weight for 10-15% ideal distribution needs to be 850-1000 lbs or so, current tongue weight is 780. My current weight distribution bars are overrated at 1,500 lbs. Now I know why the trailer is prone to sway without a doubt and previously, having even more weight rearward was really causing a problem. It was reassuring for all other specs to be good, however. We have 1,986 lbs of possessions in the RV, well, minus water, so more like 1,436 lbs of stuff. Trailer weight is 8,480 lbs with a full tank of water, max weight is 9,000.
The primary spec is the tongue weight empty is 752 lb, while the loaded TW is 780 lb. If you don’t distribute weight in a trailer correctly and the TW is too light, it will lead to increased sway as the trailer is unstable and…. porpoising! Porpoising is a bobbing up and down motion on the trailer’s axis which contributes to poor ride quality, increased tow vehicle and equipment wear, and general instability. If possible, it’s better to go higher than lower on the tongue weight percentages for a less sway-prone, planted feel.
The kicker is.. I already put the heavy generator on the tongue and loaded up the front compartment with some stuff. I also moved the heavy solar batteries already from the extreme rear to the center over the axles. I couldn’t imagine what the TW would have been before 😅 The over spec torsion bars for the weight distribution hitch really doesn’t help either as they are over spec, directly leading to more porpoising.
Soooo. Shit in the rear of the RV needs to be moved forward and I need properly spec’d bars. It makes me wonder if my old travel trailer was also improperly loaded and my bars were over spec also. Who knows. It also explains why the Class C pulls the trailer better as it’s heavier and much less prone to porpoising as it’s a heavier rig with a longer wheelbase, and a dually.
Anyway, I enjoy being in the old RV again. I got my work cut out for me today. Cleaning, sweeping, mopping, deciding what shit to get rid of. It never ends, eh? But the biggest benefit of swapping RVs is that it forces us to dogfood and get this rig up to snuff also.
It’s about 8am now, might as well just get started with the day
Gosh darn I’ve been busy. Picked up a used, well loved truck cap yesterday for cheap, came off a 07 with a born on date of 2009, 24 years old! Thankfully it fit my 2 generation newer truck with some modifications to the rear glass. In fact, I had to disassemble the frame and rebuild the rear glass panel as the hinge, rivets have eventually fatigued and sagged.
I’ve always wanted to use a rivet gun, and now I have! It’s handy how the pop rivets draw the material together as tightened, that feature tightened up the hinge half to the frame considerably. The window glass itself was sagging on the top frame aluminum and the whole structure was slack, so I used some high quality caulking in place of the tired rubber seal and some clamps to bring the frame itself back together, using the glass itself as a bit of structure. I think I’ll run a strip of black matching scrap down the middle vertically and rivet it in to further support the sag right in the middle, make it look nice and not only rely on the caulk that’ll fatigue over time.
There was the cutest little field mouse that somehow made it into the bed of the truck and was hanging out with me. I should have left the game down so it could have gotten out overnight.. whoops.
Work cleaning, organizing continues and I’m up at 6:30am after had gone to bed early. I’d do well to go back to sleep and repair more of these sore muscles.
Really proud of myself for yesterday. Went into town and ran several errands alone, even went into the dealership and had my faulty tire stem replaced as I’ve been on the spare for the past week or two.
I also have a folding motorcycle carrier arriving that shouldn’t drag on the ground , which is helpful. Also, a 3rd party modem for my home internet as service has been kinda shitty lately as the provided modem has been overheating. I’ll be able to fall back to AT&T from T-Mobile as it’s dual SIM, very handy.
Anyway, enough writing for today. Waiting for the sun to come up, should make some decaf.
