Car Camping Dangerous???

I have met black bears on the trail and not felt threatened, but they are certainly quite strong as I observed them pound ice chests to pieces in campgrounds to get at the food, and they do kill people. Grizzlies feel more unpredictable and are larger and thus feel more theatening IMO. I found a pic of a grizzly getting its nails into the gap between the door and the frame in preparation to ripping the door skin off, and apparently once warped the door will spring open rather readily. Who knew? Ok, I will be preemptive about using bear spray more quickly in future Prius camping. Thanks for info.
Two afterthoughts:
1. In most climates insect netting for any open windows is necessary and can the sewn to fit he window frames.
2. Given the inward slant of the rear window on the passenger’s side, be very careful not to have that particular window open during a rainstorm unless you have carefully covered the HV battery air intake that sits below the rear of that window as water infiltration could easily occur.

 

Good leads ... here are the specs on the LL6070 and specs (well, the manual) on the NSI 3000. Kidde also has a horse in that race.

Those units claim to give you an accurate digital display down to 10 or 5 ppm, in contrast to the much less pricey Kidde unit that states 30 ppm as its lower display limit, and is comparable to the one I've got.

I can confirm that the one I've got was effective enough to detect carpet cleaning being done in the house across the street (when all my windows were closed), and to detect misadjustment of a kitchen oven burner.

While it's clear the more expensive ones will read to lower levels, I can also imagine that there are more people who will buy a $30 detector than a $170 one, and there might be more benefit in more people having and using one. Some people may want to buy and try out an ultrasensitive one, and that's valuable too.

I'm a pretty risk-averse person ... I'm very much in favor of giving any risk its due consideration. I'm also a great fan of measuring things (so that also the risk of overthinking a risk can be given its due consideration).

It would be a great contribution to PriusChat for some Prius-camping folks (or even Prius-camping-naysaying folks) to do some overnights with these detectors in different conditions and post the results here (along with what the conditions were at the time).

All these units (even the $30ish Kidde one) seem to have peak-recording features, so that even a camping naysayer could set up a Prius as if for camping, sleep somewhere else and just let the detector do the camping, and come back and read the peak level in the morning.

 

For $20, as seen on TV, at Walgreen's you can get a net screen door with magnetic sides that can be re purposed as insect netting for the side windows in an almost ready-to-go package.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

What is the battery life of these very sensitive detectors? If you place one in your Prius, where a wide range of heat & cold can happen, for how long would you safely expect the detector to last? Thank you.

 

I put links in #42. The units are different. One comes with non-replaceable lithium batteries and a three-year expected life; the others have longer expected lives, and use common replaceable batteries. They all have operating temperature ranges similar to those of humans; the temperatures reached in a vacant car with the climate control off would be outside the recommended ranges, with whatever effects that might have on the units. When I'm not camping in the car, my CO detector isn't in the car, it's in the climate-controlled house.

For my part, believing the risk to be minimal, I suggest a detector chiefly to people more concerned about it than I am, or to people who are interested in gathering data and reporting it back (which is always valuable). Such a person might decide to have the detector always in the car forever when camping, or might look at the results from a few camping sessions and then feel less concerned. People approach things differently.

 

Or register as a sex pretender.

 

That is what finger pointing with hysterical laughter is for.

 

I am camping in the Prius and was just wondering if we could turn on the fans to have some fresh outside air overnight. I can’t crack windows due to the insane amount of mosquitoes right now.

I have an OBD2 and Dr Prius - how often does the ICE run if the circulating fan is on without AC?

 

Sure you can. Tons of people especially like the Prius because you can leave it in READY all night and run the air conditioner. It might take you a night or two to not wake up when the ICE starts up to charge the traction battery.

If you're only running the vent fans rather than the air conditioner, those ICE starts should be very infrequent.

 

There is also an article by hobbit about a little circuit he built to interface with the car's blower controller and run just the blower at a low (less than one amp) rate for sleeping ventilation with the rest of the car off.



His article is about a Gen 2, but the Gen 3 blower speed is similarly controlled by a duty-cycle input you can generate. The photos from hobbit show the Gen 2 blower motor controller, which was a separate box mounted in the air duct (and people would sometimes call it the "resistor", because in older cars with blower motor resistors, they'd be mounted that way too).

Gen 3 just uses a blower motor that has that controller built into it and no separate box, but the idea is completely the same.

Gen 3 cars with the solar ventilation option come with a brushless version of the blower motor, others got a version with brushes. As far as I know, they're interchangeable, have the same pinouts, and work the same way, but the brushless one will last longer, for expecting lots of extra hours of runtime.

 

Depends on the condition of your hv battery. It is conceivable to run about an hour in Ready with just the ac blower and no compressor or lights. However the subsequent cycles might be half the first full battery time. That is because the hybrid controller does not fully recharge the hv battery under these conditions. Usually just barely into the green on the bar graph. I know with the ac running the subsequent engine restarts occur about every ten minutes. The engine does cause a small shutter and some startup noise that would certainly wake me. The ventilation blower alone might subsequently cycle the engine maybe every thirty minutes.

 

I generally find that whatever part of my brain is in charge of sleeping manages to get used to anything as long as it's regular enough.

When I first moved into this house, it had a 20+ year old natural draft furnace where the gas valve opened with a loud metallic clang, followed by a big exaggerated ignition whoosh and then the fan spooling up with some sci-fi industrial movie sound.

About two nights and I was sleeping right through it.

 

We used to live about 50-75 yards from a railroad crossing. It took about a week to adapt and not wake up thinking a train was going to come through the bedroom.

 

I camp regularly in old pinkie in SoCal and Arizona. In the Ready mode, with the Arizona temps over 100 F all night, the car will cycle about every hour for less than 2 minutes keeping me at 70 degrees in the sleeper.

 

I've done it for about a month traveling from NYC to the southern states to the pacific northwest and Canada. My gen3 is an incredible machine for 'camping' / dwelling while doing long-term travel.