Since we have been backpacking people, camping people, and boat people, I’ve pretty much tried every way to make coffee that I know of.  My current non-electric favorite is pour-over coffee because it’s easy and I honestly actually like the taste of drip coffee to french press.  However, we actually have a really badass battery bank and electrical setup in the camper, so I was wondering if I could just forego the complexity of boiling water in favor of just pushing a button instead. (if you overcook water, it burns. Lessons learned. I don’t cook anymore). I found a little 4 pot unit that advertised a fairly low watt rating.  It also had a stainless steel carafe instead of glass.  I figured that would probably be a safer bet in a moving vehicle.

Jason, who has known to be fairly stingy with system usage, gave me the green light to get a small electric coffee pot and see what happened.  We bought the 750 watt power inverter and installed that last week.  Today while Jason was out golfing I wanted some coffee and decided to give it a shot.  The final verdict was: 4.2% battery life drop, and 5.7 amp hours used at 585 Watts.  Overall not bad at all! Especially since we can charge the battery back up with the truck or the solar panels.

So now, no matter how the rest of our trip goes, I will at least have coffee available! 🙂

Now, making coffee and golfing weren’t the only things Jason and I accomplished today.  We really like not dying of carbon monoxide poisoning and were having concerns about the pickup for the heater being located in the same place the exhaust is routed.  The solution was to run the main air pickup from inside the cabin itself instead of from the cabinet.  We also added a vent to the shell for fresh combustion air to the engine.

I swear our camper has more teak wood in it than most new production yachts.  It’s a bit ridiculous.  We’ve just had this stuff left over for so long in the shed that we might as well use it for something and enjoy it than just let it sit there.

We also finally unboxed our mattress! It’s 5″ thick memory foam straight from Amazon.

The directions say to let it lay on the ground and fluff back up for a few days before sleeping in it, so it’s currently taking up all of the living room floor.  Mom might be annoyed, but the cats are in heaven! So far it’s firm, but not unreasonable. I think it’s going to be super comfortable once it breaks in a bit.  It’s thick enough that we can sleep on our sides and not feel the floor on the other side.

The last thing that I did today was run a bead of clear sealant around the bottom perimeter of the canvas and the aluminum rail.  When we opened the camper this morning we realized we had a bunch of water in the corner of the galley.  Troubleshooting ensued.  Luckily it wasn’t the window like we thought! 😮 The leak was from water that pooled up along the seam of the canvas and then right up and over the aluminum through the velcro that I sewed on. Mystery solved, I suppose!  I started with the outside sealant and then on the inside I’m going to open a new tube of sealant with the small tip on the end and seal from the inside down.  We built this thing so we wouldn’t have to be wet when we camped and I’m going to be very annoyed if it leaks now after all this work!