Joutsen Camping is a very small site located in Pietarsaari. There are 50 pitches for caravans and only 18 have electricity. Joutsen is open from the 1st of June to the 20th of August. There is beach, mini golf, cafe, and boat and bike rental. Service building has toilets, showers and place to wash dishes.
Address:
Luodontie 50 (Larsmovägen 50)
Pietarsaari
I purchased a Nordic Power 300 Watts inverter, which is manufactured in Strömstad Sweden. The exact model number is WT-30SN-12, which means 300 W pure sine wave power as a maximum output. 350 W is available for 15 minutes. Maximum peak power for current surges is 500 W. The inverter looks and feels like a solid quality product.
The inverter draws 0.7 A current without the load. DC input voltage is 10.5 - 15.0 V. AC output voltage range is 230 V +/-3 %. Total Harmonic Distortion is less than 3 %. Efficiency is 85 %.
The inverter has a low battery alarm at 10.5 V level. Low battery shut-off happens at 10.0 V. There is also protection against input over voltage, over temperature, overload and short circuit. The function LED is green when power is on and it turns to orange if over temperature, over voltage or low voltage is detected.
Inverter to convert 12 V to 230 V
I have been planning to install an inverter to power up electrical equipments when mains voltage is not available. There are basically two types of inverters: modified sine wave and true sine wave. These are easy to distinguish when browsing the catalogs. True sine wave types are approximately 5 times more expensive than modified ones when the power ratings are the same.
Modified sine wave inverter gives out square wave voltage that resembles sine wave. This is good enough for most electrical equipments. However, all devices cannot operate with this type of low quality electricity. Modified sine wave also generates more interference than true sine wave, so it is not good for sensitive equipments like for example TV signal amplifiers.
True sine wave inverters give out clean sine waveform voltage and can thus power just about any electrical device. I decided to go with the true sine wave inverter to maximize the quality of the electricity
True sine wave inverters can be purchased with a reasonable price up to 600 Watt power rating. After that the price seems to increase rapidly. I decided that 300 Watts is enough for my needs. I can power up TV, laptop, TV signal amp, and charge mobile phone and camera batteries.
Inverters consume always power when they are turned on even if there is no load. The higher the power rating the higher the idle current consumption. 300 W inverters seem to consume around 0.7 - 1.0 Amps and 600 W inverters approx. 1.4 - 2.0 Amps when idle. Thus it is always good to turn off the inverter when not in use.
The efficiency of true sine wave inverters is around 85%. This means that if the inverter gives out 300 W it draws 352 W from the battery. This equals to 29 A current with 12 V voltage. One leisure battery cannot give out that kind of power for a long period time.
I will give out more details about the inverter that I have selected in my next post. Then I will describe the installation.
The German Caravaning site has published a five minute video about ESP systems for caravans. Alko has an ATC and BPW has an IDC system. Both systems have intelligent electronic systems that actuates the caravan breaks to stabilize the snake behaviour. The video shows very wild maneuvers and slides with caravans.
Link to the video. Our previous IDC introduction article.
There is a car projector watch available at the price USD32. It has a 12/24 hours display selection, ON/OFF switch and cable length of 158 cm. Double sided tape is used to fix it to a position, which means that it will only stay for awhile and then it will drop down. See: watch.brando.com.hk
Here are my observations about Carado’s fuel consumption on a road. As a summary the concumption is usually something between 8.5 l/100km and 9.4 l/100km. This equals to 27.6 to 25 mpg. The consumption depends a lot on travelling speed, hills and also wind has a little effect.
If the speed is in the range of 60 to 75 km/h (37 mph to 47 mph) and the road is quite flat then 8.5 l/100km can be achieved. If the speed is around 90 km/h (56 mph) or there are big hills and the speed is not constant the fuel consumption rises to approximately 9.4 l/100km. Strong wind can add the consumption by 0.2 l/100km.
Related: Carado’s fuel consumption on a highway
ABC Riihimäki is one of the newest ABC service stations and it shows. The parking area is huge, so there is plenty of room for large caravan and motor homes. The restaurant has 400 seats and it serves meals, pizzas, and hamburgers. There are also some specialty shops in the same building.
There are special caravan parking slots available, but unfortunately there is no electricity. The address is Kinturintie 2, 11120 Riihimäki
First reviews of the new Subaru Forester have been published and they seem quite positive. Especially the price is very competitive at least in Finland. The 2-litre 150 horsepower petrol engine is not too powerful for the tall four-wheel drive. The 5-speed manual gearbox offers also lower gearing for example towing situations. The automatic gearbox is an old 4-speed unit.
Subaru’s diesel-boxer engine is arriving Forester later. Subaru has also hinted that automatic gearbox might become available with the diesel. I hope that they will update the gearbox to a more modern unit before launch.
Would you like to have a bluetooth handsfree that can be attached to sun visor. Gadget4all sells a device that has a 1100 mAh lithium ion battery, which provides upto 15 hours talk time and 250 standby time. Charging takes 3 hours. The device uses USB charger from the cigarette lighter socket and takes in 5V / 350 mA. This means that the charger you have for your GPS navigator most probably works fine.
The hands free memorizes 4 mobile phones simultaneously and has noise suppression and echo cancellation. Check out the pictures from Gadget4all. Quoted price is US$ 99.
Petro Palace hotel is located in downtown of Saint Petersburg. The street addess is Malaya Morskaya 14. Hermitage is almost right behind the corner. The hotel is modern and western style. The hotel staff speak good English, which is not common in Russia.
The room for two was very large. I would say it was around 20 square meters. The equipment level was pretty basic. TV, iron, safety deposit box and air condition. The room was not very quiet. The road noise could be clearly heard. Still I managed to sleep very well, so the situation was not that bad after all. Here is a video clip from the simply decorated room.
The breakfast room was behind a small labyrinth, but the friendly receptionist guided the way. The breakfast was like any standard hotel breakfast. There were wide selection of sweets, sausages, drinks and bread. Approximately 70 - 80 % of locals drink tea, but coffee was served for guests by default. One night cost 168 euros.
In Finnish, Caravanuutiset.com
Latest Comments
RSS