Electric Avenue

Tuesday April 23, 7:28pm, Nellysford VA

"We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue, and then we'll take it higher"

- Eddie Grant

We've done lots of maintenance and upgrades to Koko the Airstream over the last month including uninstalling the bathroom sink, re-plumming the kitchen, installing a new water pump, replacing no less than 60 of the rivets that Airstreams are famous for, cleaning and flushing the 52 gallon fresh water tank, and repainting the bathroom. By far the biggest project was an upgrade to the solar/electrical system. When I tested the existing battery bank of 5 AGM deep cell batteries and realized that 4 of them were at the end of their lives, the logical but daunting move was to not just replace but upgrade. Thank the gods for my buddy Jason Judy and his willingness to put in two long evenings inside Koko as the mastermind of the install.

What we had previously - 5 AGM batteries that weighed over 500 lbs and gave us effectively 320 amp hours of energy. They were solely charged by the sun and ran a 12 volt system inside the airstream that runs our 1) lights 2) fans 3) fridge 4) USB and 12v plugs.

What we now have - 2 Lithium batteries that weigh a total of 146 lbs and give us 560 amp hours. We also installed a charger/inverter so that we can 1) run 110v appliances like laptops and our new Starlink internet , all while boondocking off the grid 2) top off our batteries by plugging them into shore power if/when the sun is being slow.

Mastermind of the power bank and German beer afficionado, Jason Judy