NEW BUS !! David is on the way home .

[davidbrady]

Hi Al,

That's the perennial question: with 3 kids and two in elementary school, will we use it? Time will tell... This summer I hope to take the kids to Durango, Co to see the trains and possibly further. We always make a couple trips a year to Harrisburg, Pa to see my family, and I can usually count on a trip or two to Florida. All I know is I went without a bus for three months and I started to get the shakes! Hahahahaha

The LXi is a very good bus. I miss the instrumentation and especially the altimeter. I'll definitely be adding Silverleaf VMSpc to SpongeBob as well as an altimeter. I also miss not being able to hang my head out the driver's window; this makes backing up more challenging. Sitting lower hasn't been an issue so far. If anything it gives a more connected feel to the road. With my family up two stairs I may get lonely down there, but that remains to be seen. Visibility is still very good. The overall height of SpongeBob is also a challenge. To the top of the Girard awnings it measures 12' 4", the TracVision satellite dish adds another foot. In 9 years of LXi ownership we never used the TracVision. I may remove it or I may see about a lower profile unit. If removed, then the bus would be no taller than an LXi. Anyone have any ideas on lower profile in-motion dishes?

The transmission retarder has 6 positions. It'll pull the coach down to a full stop, and it will progressively feed in stopping power as the service brakes are applied. This makes stop and go city driving very easy. On long grades I can't descend as fast as I could with jake brakes. I have to arrow down the transmission to find an equilibrium point where heat generated is the same as heat sunk by the cooling system. The transmission will start logging temperature at 250 deg. I like to keep it well below this temperature. I may install a jake too. It'd be great to have both, each has it's advantages, but I'm very surprised at the effectiveness and usefulness of the retarder. The transmission cooler is massive and is plumbed downstream from the S60 water pump. At around 225 deg F the retarder turns on the S60 cooling fan.

The bus has 2 4KW Xantrex pure sine wave inverters. Everything is wired thru the inverters which means if I'm running everything and I disconnect shore power requiring the inverters to pick up the load, then I need to do manual pruning to remove loads. It's simple and gives me the opportunity to run anything I want on the inverters. A neat feature of these inverters is that they'll sync their 120VAC and 60Hz with the genny or shorepower. For instance, I camped at CG with only a 30A hookup. I wanted to run one CruiseAir and my refrigerator and assorted lights, but I also had some transient loads like the microwave. Ordinarily it'd be easy for these transients to throw the 30A breaker, instead SpongeBob's inverters pull power from the battery bank and push 120VAC power into the loads to augment the 30A shore hookup. When the loads go away the inverters go back to charging the batteries.