Back to Brazo Del Este, travelling is not easy and some vehicle modifications.
4th and 5th of March 2023
We head back to first Deresa de Abajo for the White Storks, and then to Brazo Del Este where we could stay for a few days in the same location to work better. Moving all the time doesn’t help when you have to focus and work on the laptop, so having a fixed location helps. We’ve been travelling a lot in the past weeks, which took a toll also on our health, Axel had been having constant headaches, Ario a bit less but he felt he couldn’t focus well enough. We’re in a good place now, with Ospreys fishing close to us.
Axel’s been struggling with the electrical power for a bit. In short, the majority of his appliances use a big portable power bank, and this is charged either via solar panels or by an inverter which is fed by a leisure battery fit under the bonnet which recharges automatically when driving around. The issue is that the water pump and UV filtration system were connected to this leisure battery which runs out of juice pretty quickly, we weren’t sure why. We decided to move all the appliances, including the water system, to the main fuse box, and add a switch to choose if power the fuse box either with the big power bank or the leisure battery. Neat solution!
Detail of Daphne's 12v fuse box. overall a mess, but it works!
We figured out why the leisure battery would die so quickly, the UV filter was always on and we thought it didn’t require much power, but it actually does! So we made sure it switches on only when the water pump is activated. We’ll have to see if this is safe for filtration, we don’t want to find ourselves in Africa with a water filtration system which doesn’t work.
A big shout out to Dan Greg from The Road Chose Me and his tutorial on how to build a water filtration system, he’s such a legend!
Also, Axel had to fix his 100m long ethernet cable to record sounds away from the car, below is a picture of the nightmare he had to go through, soldering on the go!
