Sorry for no update but it’s been kind of hectic here.

The fridge arrived Monday and it is huge, I have been um’ing and ah’ing about whether to fit it or not.  More on this later.

The auction for the bus finished on Monday at 17:30 ish.  It went up to £720.   I am really frustrated with the winning bidder as I still don’t know if they are going to pay for it.  They want to take it for an MOT which is not possible.  They are now bringing a Mechanic tomorrow and I still don’t know if they will pay.  I clearly stated the bus is “Sold as seen” not “if you win the auction you can have a look then decide if you want to pay”.  I am seriously frustrated with the whole episode.  I wish I had scrapped it now at least I would have known it was gone.

On Tuesday I took the van in for the repairs.  I had budgeted around £250-£400 for the repairs.  As we took the wheels off more and more problems were discovered.  The final repair bill was £655.   That is a big dint in my budget but we have now pretty much stripped down all the drive/suspension/braking system and anything showing wear was replaced….

I still think I need the top strut bearing on the passenger side replacing but that will have to wait until next week as I am totally skint now.  However if the bus buyer pays up it will be on the list of things to get done.

I fitted the new fridge today.  I am happy with how quick it got down to temperature.  It’s very nice to have a large fridge again.  However it’s not so nice losing so much storage space and having to remake all the doors to the wardrobe and cupboards.

I also permanently wired in the charger last night and it has taken 20 hours for it to get the batteries back up to full charge.

I am sat here now wondering if the fridge was such a good idea.  It is pretty noisy and as you may or may not know I HATE man made noises when I am trying to relax.  Now when the fridge goes on the charger also goes into overdrive mode and powers up the fans at full belt and they are not quiet.  I can see I will be switching the charger off at night.  I will see how I get on once I have the Sterling B2B charger and solar panels installed.  If I am happy with the fridge but not happy with the loss of space I may go for a more compact compressor fridge.

I will be getting a NASA battery monitor soon so it will be interesting to see how much power the fridge uses.  This may be another factor in what I do going forward with regards to fridges.