Watts, volts, ohms, amps - they may as well be Pidgin english to me. I can stick batteries in a remote control, fix a blown fuse, even wire up a house (not quite to legal standards!) but trying to work out how to make power for a pile of electronic devices while sitting in a kayak is another story..
Thanks to the generous assistance of my brother Rob and his Tech Aura® (the ability to make any gadget work instantly by little more than looking at it) we now have a fully functioning mobile communications centre and power plant that would make any of the first 20 Bond films look like an episode of Play School.
.
Despite my wishes, there are no monkeys on bicycles, just solar panels to generate the buzzing juice that keeps all these appliances whirring away. We have two 14W and one 4.5W Brunton SolarRoll flexible, water resistant, roll-up panels. I am looking to fix the small panel to one of the kayaks with a permanent cable to a battery in a hatch. The big panels will just be used when we are on land as they are too big to strap on the boats. I have whipped up tough storage tubes for the panels from 90mm PVC tube with a screw cap at one end.
.
Originally I considered taking a Brunton Impel, a fancy battery with all sorts of connection options. After purchasing this expensive little box from the States I realised that the main 'out' connection from the battery is a custom Brunton plug that even had the nerds at Jaycar scratching their heads. The thought of trying to find spare parts while sitting on a beach somewhere in PNG convinced me to keep it simple.
.
Enter the sealed Lead Acid 12V battery, and plenty of car charger outlets. Joining the solar panels to the battery there is a Brunton Solar Controller to regulate the charge. The beauty of these batteries is they are basic - even with my primary school understanding of electronics I can make sense of the whole "don't put the red wire on the black plug. We'll have three batteries (one for each panel) - two 9 amp hour (see I can speak Pidgin!) batteries and a smaller one for backup. Then the simple thing is to just make sure that all our gizmos can be charged from a 12 volt battery with a car charger plug. Easier said than done.
.
Our only computer for this expedition is a Macbook Air 11" - a wafer thin, feather-lite, low energy, über cool, yuppie accessory that has been designed for swanky city dwellers rather than the mangrove swamps of northern Iran Jaya. The computer is dwarfed by the smallest laptop case that Pelican make (1080), a cumbersome, heavy, but water tight case - in fact the Macbook Air fits into just the lid of the Pelican case! However, Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have decided not to produce a 12V power adapter - perhaps the monkeys were a better idea after all! Literally the only place to get such a device is from a slightly suspect "Mikeguyver" in the States (of course).
.
The satellite phone (Iridium 9555) has an unbearably expensive car charger, the GME VHF radio comes with one and I tracked down a 12V charger for my sparkly new camera (Olympus PEN PL1). The Garmin GPSs (78S & 78SC) run on AA batteries, as do the Black Diamond Icon headlamps and Apollo lantern for which I have raided Jaycar's shelves for two 12V AA rechargers (one is back-up). The iPhone and our two GoPro cameras are recharged from USB so we have several car chargers with a USB outlet (one to backup the backup one).
.
With all of this gear anybody would think we are heading to the moon! We are aiming to travel through some of the most remote areas we could find on Google Earth and I suppose that one challenge for us is to make sure that we are still connected to the world as we go. With all of these devices, chargers, batteries, solar panels and Pelican cases though, I am hoping there is still a little bit of room left for food and water.
.
I suppose if we run out of food I'll be able to connect to the internet and just order a pizza online!!
No comments:
Post a Comment