October 06, 2015 at 02:56PM by advodna_dave

Yesterday afternoon, we headed up Hwy 16 as it climbed steeply into the Bighorn National Forest. The last time we checked, we were at 8,500 ft and still had several miles to go before reaching Powder River pass at the ominous elevation of 9,666 ft, so we pulled into the first National Forest CG we saw. "Closed for the Season" with a locked gate. Fortunately, the next one we tried was was just "Closed for the Season" without a gate so we made ourselves at home! Some solar/generator notes: The last several days have been pretty overcast and cold, a bad recipe for solar and power usage. We've found that if we tweak the Max Charge Rate on our charge controller (our 50 amp inverter/charger, not the solar one) to limit itself to requesting only 38 amps, we can run our 1000W generator without overloading it and still get a decent charge rate. On average, we've been finding time to run it about 90 mins a day, yielding something like 60 amp hours. That's a little less than we use in cold/rainy weather, particularly when we're inside a lot, so yesterday morning found ourselves down 118 amp hours, close to our 50% mark and voltage at 11.9. Not a good way to start the day, tho we were seeing a little bit of sun peaking thru. While driving, we usually see about 8 amps coming in from the tow vehicle and that day, we were actually moving about 3 hours (24 ah collected). But when we arrived, our monitor showed us only down 46 ah, meaning we'd gathered another 48 ah in our 7 hrs on the road (lunch, naps, potty breaks, etc). Another big benefit to having roof mounted solar... #airstream #liveriveted #myrivetedlife #solar #rvsolar #wyoming #bighornnationalforest