Carol said that this was a “redneck air conditioner” if she ever saw one. I had to add the fans to get the cool air where it was needed. The hat is my “redneck sun visor” – a PO forcefully removed the original visors so I use a hat – better anyway.
Today we started out at about 70 degrees and drove through Mojave, Barstow, and Needles, CA. It gradually worked its way up to about 100 to 105 degrees by the time we got to our camp site at Lake Havasu State Park. We started out trying our now stripped down air conditioner to see how it would do. Well, I am pretty sure it needs to be recharged because while it is blowing cold air, it is not “icicles” like it should be and the air is just blowing straight out instead of at us. When it got hotter we fired up the generator and ran both roof air units all day. It was nice and comfortable in the living area but not so much in the driving area. For tomorrow we have two solutions to try. One is my “redneck air conditioner” in the photo – I took the fans from the now removed console and wired them to the dash so that we can direct the cool air at ourselves. The second thing to do is to use tape to aim the forward roof air conditioner’s output straight out instead of down. That is a low-end Coleman and it is so bad it has soured me on buying any more Coleman products. It also does not work very well and the air direction vanes were so fragile that you literally could not touch them or they would break – like they were made of sugar or something as fragile. We may stop at a hardware store and buy a fan to blow air forward from the living area
It looks nice and innocent enough but it was still well over 100 degrees and humid. Beautiful though – this is the new white sand beach at the far end of the park.
Just as we were coming to the I-40 exit onto AZ-95 and Lake Havasu I felt the engine starting to “stutter” and lose power a little so I expected more trouble as I was slowing down. Sure enough, I could not keep the engine running and it stalled twice in traffic making the turn. Fortunately, it pretty quickly restarted both times and I got to the gas station that is just off the exit on the right. We fueled up and drove the remaining 20 miles to the camp ground with no more trouble.
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