Today felt like a bit of a mess. I didn’t have any specific project in mind so I bounced between a bunch of little things. I primarily worked on the electrical system on the passenger side. The passenger side has a 6-circuit fuse box to control the water pump, the forward lights, the toilet fan, and a 12V outlet back by the bed. Everything needed a little work.
On the lights I changed up some of the wiring and added a couple sections of split loom as conduit. Then I ran that to the fuse box.* The water pump line needed a wire to run from the fuse box to the pump so I added that in and set it up to run back down the wall and over to the galley cabinet with the water lines. The toilet fan wires had to be moved slightly and wired up to the fuse box. And, the 12V socket had to be wired.
The fuse box sits right above the toilet cabinet and, of course, I ended up taking out and putting the cabinet back in a couple times. Finally I just left it out until I’m sure I’m done (e.g., see * below).
During this process I also realized I had done something quite dumb. Early in the build I knew we would want to get a DC and an AC wire to the passenger side so I put a couple wires in the floor. The AC wire was 14/3 (three 14 ga. wires together in insulation). As I have been working on the electrical design I realized that 14/3 was not really heavy enough – I should use 12/3. Fortunately I left an empty conduit over the ceiling so I went and bought some new wire and strung it up there.
Today as I was messing with the old wire I put through the floor I though to myself, “this seems kind of heavy.” I look at the wire and sure enough, it was 12/3. I had done the right thing originally by running 12/3, but for some reason I was convinced I had used 14/3. The time and effort to run the new wire was wasted. It was only about $20 so not a big deal, but thinking I had the wrong wire in there has caused some angst and unnecessary frustration when I’ve been working on the rest of the design. Now I obviously have an extra 12/3 wire sitting there. I guess I will add another outlet somewhere on that side – probably in the back of the galley cabinet so there is a outlet handy in the summer when the door is open. Of course, that means getting another circuit breaker and eventually dealing with a little more wiring on the other side in the electrical cabinet. Sigh.
Sara spent the day working on the cabinet pieces we built over the last few days. The microwave cabinet was getting its first coat of poly because she stained it yesterday. The galley cabinet is also getting poly – its second coat. Some of the drawers have already had at least two coats of poly so Sara was buffing those. For us today was decidedly parallel play as we didn’t overlap or interact with our projects at all.
Tonight I was also working on the cord for shore power. It goes out through a hole I drilled in the floor near the driver’s door. It will just essentially hang there under the van unless we have an opportunity to plug in somewhere. It was dark so no good pictures.
All this electrical futzing really makes a mess.
*As I wrote this, I realized I screwed it up. The lights should go to the switch and then the switch goes to the fuse box. ARGHHHHHH! Shouldn’t really be a big deal to fix tomorrow, but it is definitely going to annoy me tonight.