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Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle

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Click through for the full gallery of the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle!

Holy cat snacks!  I bought an RV!!  To be otherwise known as the Mobile Cat House, Traveling Cat Camper, Cat-Assisted Adventure Van, Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle?  The idea here is to be able to take extended road trips and bring the cats along so that I don’t always have to make arrangements for a cat sitter.

I wanted something small enough to be able to take most anywhere (cities, state/national parks, even dirt roads) and yet large enough that the cats won’t go stir crazy and hate it.  Darlene and I intend to use it mostly, if not always, “dry camping” (or “boondocking” without hookups for water or electricity); in other words, our intention isn’t to travel to RV “resorts” or campgrounds.  We’ll prefer being able to camp out on open national park, forest service or BLM lands.

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Now if this wasn’t mostly about being able to bring the cats along, I’d definitely go for a compact 4×4 Sprinter van conversion that would allow us to go anywhere we would have previously gone and still easily fit in city parking spaces. However, to better accommodate the cats (it is the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle after all), I eventually settled on the somewhat wider and longer Leisure Travel Vans “Unity 24TB” (Twin Bed) model, built on the Mercedes Sprinter diesel-powered chassis.  It’s a little wider and longer than a normal Sprinter van and thus a “class B+ or C” but it should still be reasonably manageable both in the city and in the wild.  Unfortunately, there aren’t yet options for electric drivetrains on campervans and motorhomes, but they’re coming.  Mercedes-Benz may well have an all-electric option for its Sprinter chassis in a few more years.

While the Leisure Travel Vans build lacks somewhat in some of the technical features I wanted, many of those aspects can be upgraded after the fact.  The rest of the craftsmanship, aesthetics and build quality are fantastic.  (I’ve posted my shopping/comparison notes here from my RV/campervan selection process as a sort of a review of what’s available that might be helpful to others.)

Anyway, I found and bought this only very slightly used 2016 Unity from a previous owner in Montana, with just 3100 miles on it, before I drove it the 1250 miles back home.  It was great to find a relatively new used one, to avoid the immediate depreciation hit of buying new and also to skip the 6-8 month long backlog for new orders.  Leisure Travel Vans are hard to come by and dealer’s orders seem to sell immediately.  I wasn’t even able to look at one in person anywhere in California.

It remains to be seen if Pan and Hera will adapt to taking extended road trips in their new Traveling Cat House.  If it doesn’t work out with the cats, I’m sure it’ll still be a fun adventure and it should be easy enough to sell again if I find it’s not something I want to keep.  In the meantime, there’s a number of changes and upgrades I’ll be making to the Traveling Cat House which I’ll document here, to hopefully help out others like myself:  RV Tips, Upgrades and Customizations

Update:  The cats are doing great and have adapted well to traveling in the RV.  Follow this tag (“RV Travels”) to see and read about Pan and Hera’s traveling adventures!

Suspects in the Yard

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Somebody’s been eating my newly planted flowers in my front yard. I was pretty sure I knew who the culprit was, but for fun I moved my motion-activated camera to the front yard, near the house, to see what I might find.  Well, it took only a couple of nights to catch a whole range of suspects prowling my yard.

I knew there were a couple of rabbits that have taken up residence beneath some of the tall grasses near the house since I sometimes see them out and about in the mornings.  And not surprising to see the coyotes trying to find the rabbits.  But it was a surprise to see a bobcat has been trying to catch the bunnies in the yard too.  And of course I also caught the true culprits who’ve been eating my flowers!  I’ve now installed a motion-activated light and noise-maker now so perhaps the flowers will recover.

Cordless Garden Tool Stress Test

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I recently researched the available cordless power gardening tools (string trimmers, blowers, mowers, etc) to see what might be worth buying.  Many companies are now offering 40V and 56V lithium battery systems and Greenworks now has even an 80V system (though higher voltage doesn’t necessarily mean more power is provided in the tool). There were a few reviews here and there and a few video demos but nothing that showed how well these newer, more powerful tools could handle more challenging tasks in the yard, like cutting down yards of tall, thick thistles.

I eventually decided to try both the string trimmer and blower from Ego Power+, based on their 56V battery system.  And so I’ve put together a little video demonstration of a more serious test of their capabilities that might be useful to anyone else considering upgrading or switching over to cordless:

So I read a lot of reviews and settled on trying the Ego Power+ 56V system.  From someone’s takeapart video, they seem to have designed their battery layout well, and they have a very good rapid charger that keeps the batteries cool while charging.  I was going to try the Greenworks 40V system but I came across a number of complaints about build and design issues.  For what it’s worth, I’m definitely happy with the Ego Power+ system so far and I recommend checking it out!

Home Theater Upgrade: Serious Bass

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It’s rare that I go out to movie theaters, preferring to have friends over to enjoy my home theater, but sometimes I do for special movie events, like the release of the first new Star Wars movie in a long time: The Force Awakens.  Well, we happened to go to a theater with an impressive sound system and I was startled by a number of instances in the movie where you could seriously feel the sound pressure of something big happening on screen or the impact of an explosion, not just *hear* it.   In other words, some serious pressure waves in that theater.  That experience left me wanting to find out how to get that at home!

I’ve long been pretty content with my Acoustic Research S12HO subwoofer (a 12″ inch down-firing driver), particularly in my old condo’s home theater.  It filled out the bass response well, without being overbearing and without bothering the neighbors.  I’ve had it since 1999.  However, in my home now in the hills above Santa Cruz, I have a much larger room with a huge vaulted ceiling and my old subwoofer can’t really fill the room.  (Plus I don’t have close neighbors to worry about bothering.)

So I did my usual many days of research and ended up settling on getting two (yes, two!) highly-rated V1800 subwoofers from Power Sound Audio.  The V1800 subwoofer features a 725 watt amplifier and a huge, vented 18″ driver capable of getting down below 16 Hz.  It’s capable of delivering up over 120 dB of sound.  (Here’s a list of comparative decibel levels.)  I bought two of them because a single subwoofer can potentially fill a room in such a way that you get large peaks of output in some locations in the room and large dips, even dead spots, in other locations.  Adding a second subwoofer in a different location allows it to interact with the room in such a way that its peaks and valleys will tend to cancel out the other subwoofer so you get a more even response throughout the room.  It also has the side effect of increasing the output overall by quite a bit (about 6 db).

Here’s a great set of tips on how to go about optimizing both subwoofer placement and crossover settings.  For me, the only really practical location was up front on either side of my equipment cabinet:

  

Even with the large vaulted space of my home theater, I found that the appropriate gain setting needed for both subwoofers was only about 20%.  It was amusing to turn them both up to 50% gain though just to see what would happen.  The room shakes so hard at that level that I’m afraid of turning it up any further for fear of breaking something like a window.

Anyway, set an appropriately balanced level, their impact (literally and figuratively) is still quite dramatic.  These guys fill out the bass end of music wonderfully, nice and tight, without being overbearing at all. And for low frequency effects (LFE) in movies, the experience is fantastic.  The rumble from a passing train in a movie makes you believe there really is a train passing by.  A rocket launch shakes the whole room (and much of the house) – you feel it in the floor, the walls, the chairs.  And most amazing of all, you feel sharp explosive impacts on your chest.  No need to strap subwoofers to your chairs!  “Tron Legacy” makes for a great bass demonstration throughout.  I particularly love how you literally feel a jolt to your chest when Sam is struck by the laser digitizer and transported into the digital world.