Exploring the Tuzigoot National Monument and Jerome, AZ

 Thursday, May 9th 

After breakfast, we drove to the town of Cottonwood, where they had a Harbor Freight and I bought a second 100 watt solar panel. (more on this later in this post).

Afterwards, we drove over to the Tuzigoot National Monument to check things out:

View from lowest point of the path

Martha near the tower

Views from atop the tower:

A poster in the visitor center

View as we departed the monument

 More info about Tuzigoot on Wikipedia

Since we were close by, we also went over to the nearby town of Jerome, AZ to check things out as well. It had been over 10 years since we have been there. 

A town full of artists, Jerome is a tourist town known for its art scene and tours of Ghost/Haunted locations.

Many of the original buildings have burned down in fires since the late 1800s, they've either been rebuilt close to what they looked like or their facades used as fronts for newer stuff:

Front for Glass Blowing business

Many, if not all, of the buildings along main street have plaques describing the historical role/use of said building.

The stores, are full of knick-knacks, but I found they seem to prefer or specialize in metal origin art...sometimes of disparate mechanical bits from other things:

The above items were from a store called Nellie Bly, whose story I read and found interesting:

The town has no relation to Nellie Bly, I think the owner just liked the woman and story.

Some other things seen underneath what used to be a car dealership where restrooms for tourists are located:

Today's moto content

Another facade used now to display artwork:

Art?

The town was getting crowded by noon, and that's from Martha's perspective, so we escaped to the nearby town of Clarkdale.

We had a picnic lunch at the town park and then we drove home. Clarkdale was very quiet and very few people seen, I liked it!  The town was a mining/company town from when nearby mines produced large amounts of copper back in the day.

Once we got back to the campsite, I would spend several hours creating wiring connections for the new solar panel. 

That's when the trouble began, once I hooked everything up I was not seeing the results that I was expecting; in terms of amperage delivered by the solar panels. 

Cue frustration period:  I had to once again resort to my guru: RichardM.

He walked me through the troubleshooting process and it confirmed I had at least wired things up correctly.

In the process I discovered that my skill at using Anderson connectors was lacking.  Some of the problems encountered involved connectors not assembled correctly apparently.

To simplify things for now, I eliminated the new Anderson connectors and just used wire nuts to hook the two panels together to the extension wire that goes to the solar charge controller.

Since cell signal is sketchy here, I had been having difficulty maintaining a good telephone call with RichardM; so I turned on the Starlink for a better connection. 

Once the Starlink system was up, I noticed that the amp meter was registering the desired number of amps going into the system! What the hell! 

A phone call with RichardM cleared things up and demonstrated once again how little I understand concepts involved with electricity.  

Since the battery was almost fully charged when I first started doing the wiring for the new solar panel; the system was only drawing two amps or less as designed. 

I had been expecting to see 6+ amps being drawn from the two solar panels!  I had failed to realize, that since the battery at that time needed no more than two amps to complete its charging it was not going to draw more than two amps!

I monitored the amp draw using an amp meter and also the shunt meter in the RV and I could see that when Starlink was on, the system drew more amps from the solar panels and kept the house battery charging simultaneously.

Before, with just one solar panel, we were limiting the usage of Starlink to a max of 5 hours a day spread out through the day.  Such a usage would result in about the battery being at 85 to 90% by nightfall so enough to get through the night and more. 

Now, so as long as there's good sunlight hitting the solar panels, we can keep Starlink running with its 5 to 6 amp draw (50-75 watts) and still charge the house battery.  We'll see how it goes.