It’s been a while….but most of 2020 and the first half at least of 2021 were not the best times to be camping, for what should be obvious reasons. Indeed for a large part of that time, leaving home to go away camping was illegal in the UK and even when it wasn’t (autumn 2020) most campsites were closed, heavily restricted in numbers or hard to book, so the van has sadly been sat outside my house since January 2020 gathering dirt and moss and probably annoying my neighbours.
However now that restrictions have largely been lifted in England and to a lesser extent, Wales, Sally and I decided to get away for a week in the van which on the whole, was quite a painless exercise involving some washing and cleaning etc.
However the leisure batteries did cause a few problems – they were dead as the proverbial dodo. The van has been sat without a solar panel or mains power supply for 18 months or so, so this didn’t come as a huge surprise. Having hooked up the 240v supply for a few days, hoping the onboard charger would magically bring them back to life, I gave up as they didn’t seem to want to take a charge at all. So I took them out to charge them one by one using another charger I have indoors. One seemed to take a charge after a few days, but the other just went straight to ‘error’ mode on the charger.
I’ve had this before with a starter battery (which was also on its way out) and managed to coax that into life by connecting it to the starter battery and ‘jumping’ it for a while, so I tried that. This seemed to at least allow the charger to try and charge it, but after a few days, it still wasn’t looking promising.
So this 2nd battery was definitely knackered which meant for this trip I was relying on 1 x 100Ah battery and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get a 240v hookup whilst away. However I expected that to be ok given that I would be connecting up the solar panel during the day and we were going to be driving from one place to another (and therefore charging the leisure battery off the B2B charger) every day or so. The solar panel isn’t fitted permanently, as I want to be able to park under shade and still use it so its on a long cable – for now I just push it up out through the roof hatch and rest it on the roof, with the cable coming in through the roof hatch and routed through to the solar controller/charger in the cab. I’ve attached some magnetic tape to the underside of the panel to try and help keep it in place but that isn’t working brilliantly.
The water system was generally ok, just needed a clean and disinfection but the filter (Doulton candle) had frozen or something over the winter and cracked its housing, leading to a rapid deployment of towels when I started to flush the system before the trip 😦
Unfortunately they don’t sell replacement housings and I wasn’t going to shell out over £100 for a whole new filtration system that I wouldn’t really need as tap water in the UK is fine, so that has been isolated from the rest of the system for the time being.
I also took the opportunity to fit some additional bed slats as the gap between the slats has always been too large and bugged me all the way round Africa with my backside inevitably finding the gaps between slats whenever I moved around in bed. Fortunately I had some flat pack pine shelving units sitting in the garage which I repurposed to fill in some of the gaps. Not perfect, but it did the job.
Oh and finally I fixed some issues with the roof and wall vinyl, which had peeled away in places as the glue had softened over time. Cheap and cheerful grab adhesive seemed to do the trick there.
The only problems during the trip really were leisure battery related. Despite driving for 4 hours to get to St Davids (west coast of Pembrokeshire, SW Wales) the battery alarm was going off in the early hours of the first morning. The fridge was about the only thing drawing power and as soon as I disconnected that, the alarm stopped. When I checked the voltage it was already down at 12v (from 13.5 ish) so I can only assume that the B2B charger wasn’t working (which couldn’t be the case as the leisure battery was getting 13+v) or more likely, it wasn’t holding the charge very well.
Once I had connected the solar panel and left it a few hours, the leisure battery was fully charged, but again, the next morning, the alarm was going off again and again, the only thing really drawing from the battery was the fridge (5A). I will be replacing both leisure batteries on my return from this trip, as I am planning to use the van a lot from October through to late December this year (more on that another time).
Anyway, here are some pictures of the van and the area as everyone likes a photo or two instead of an essay 🙂
First bunch of pics are rom a bike ride along the coast…
On our return we decided a bike ride wasn’t enough so went for a stroll along the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path (which ended up being 6 miles and over 2.5 hrs)
The next day was a mini road trip, up to Fishguard initially….
… then on to St Davids – the smallest cathedral city in the UK…
Then down to Dale:
…and finally on to a campsite just outside Pembroke, Lower Nash Farm (nice).
The next day we cycled across to Pembroke to have a look round the castle…
The weather forecast was pretty awful for the afternoon so we hunkered down and watched a film. Storm Evert hit the area in earnest around midnight but none of the tents etc in the field appeared damaged the next morning, After packing up we headed to nearby Carew Castle and Tidal Mill.
From here we drove down to Stackpole/Bosherton to have a look at some lily ponds:
From here we left Pembrokeshire and headed to the Brecon Beacons National Park, staying just south of Brecon itself. The next day we jumped on the bikes again and headed along the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal as far as Pencelli before looping back over a stupidly large hill.
And that, as they say, was that – a 2 hour return trip and the holiday was over. Time to clean everything again and buy new leisure batteries and see what breaks next time 🙂
Around the World in a Campervan 