Well here I am sitting on the top of Exmoor at Dunkery Beacon on day one of the great alternative camper van office experiment. Tomorrow who knows where? A different location to work each day!
The moorland outside is looking very green and beautiful but I am on a slight slope as I sit in my campervan which is making typing a little bit difficult. However, the yellow catkins are hanging down from the trees as I climb from Timberscombe to Wheddon Cross and there is not a person in sight now in this lonely rural location so I reckon I couldn’t find a more tranquil place to work.
Today is all about finding how long I can use my laptop before my 60 amp hour leisure battery packs up. The laptop uses 19 volts, 6 amps and 120 watts. I’ve worked out that this should give me a days laptop usage but theory is just theory and I will be relieved to prove it.
So what is this great alternative camper van / motorhome mobile office experiment?
Quite simply, after many years of working online on the Internet, creating content for web sites, I’m going stir crazy. If I have to look at the same four walls for very much longer, I’m likely to start screaming and jibbering like an idiot. Now, in my family, there is so much noise and yelling that this would probably go unnoticed but it would matter to me.
So, for a long time, I’ve been saying to my nearest and dearest, that it would be very nice if I had a campervan and could go and write in a different beautiful location each day.
Since I enjoy walking at lunch time, which usually involves a short drive, pollution of the environment needn’t be more than if I was working from my tiny, dark, north facing spare bedroom.
Of course, ideas are always very easy to conceive, especially for a creative author type person, but implementation reveals substantial logistical problems.
First I had to get a campervan. Well! Have you seen the prices of them? They are hugely expensive, typically priced at anything up to £60,000 or even more. To put this sort of money into an experiment simply wasn’t possible for an impecunious, slightly ancient online web author, but, after a lot of research and considerable time (months), I’ve finally found an old Ford Transit convertion that satisfies the basics of the alternative writing existence.
I can stand up in it, drive it reasonably easily (short wheel base) and it has a little toilet room to cater to my middle aged natural needs, should the need arise. It looks quite smart being white with blue flashes but is old enough not to have dented my miniscule pocket too much.
The next challenge was to get power to my laptop. Fortunately, the camper van / motor home has a leisure battery but, unfortunately, it didn’t have anything my laptop could plug into. There was a spare lighter socker in the dashboard of the van but I eventually established that this worked from the main vehicle battery and the thought of me working all day on the computer, only to find that my starter motor wouldn’t work because I’d drained it during the day, didn’t seem a good idea.
The answer was reasonably simple, when I discovered fused lighter sockets were available from a car spares retailer local to my brother in Bournemouth. He’s much more handy than I am and helped me to fit the two wires to the leisure battery and very soon I was the proud owner of pluggable campervan power! Yippee!
The next problem was to make the power feed the laptop. This required something called an inverter which could convert the 12 volts DC from the leisure battery to the normal UK power supply of 230 (approx) volts AC. The inverter had a lighter plug option so I was in business. The 230 volts AC output from the inverter was available through an onboard 13 amp socket which I could plug the laptop into, just as if I was plugging into a normal power supply.
It works like a dream 
which made me ‘a very happy camper’!
The next step was to find out how long the leisure battery would supply sufficient power to the laptop before it died which of course is the subject of todays experiment from the sunny slopes of Dunkery Beacon in the rural English county of Somerset.
Time for some lunch. I’ve other articles to write this afternoon, so I will continue this journal about my experiences of my alternative working online experiment from a motor home / camper van office tomorrow.
Bye for now
Rob
(Rob Hopcott)
Postscript: The battery lasted beautifully for the 5 hours I was working with no signs of imminent power out.
