Spicewood Springs Trail, Colorado Bend State Park

It’s sunrise! Or at least it would be sunrise here at Colorado Bend State Park (Texas) if the clouds weren’t in the way.

But I’m not going to let a minor thing like that get in the way of the day! Especially since it’s been 6 months since I blew the hell out of my travel budget and had to mothball The Van while waiting for our finances to catch back up again. It’s also the first time since tramping around Illinois’ Little Grand Canyon last September that I have a chance to take a real hike. (I don’t count the one-mile laps around the property as real hikes)

The couple in the FEMA trailer were quiet last night, I slept well, most everybody’s still in bed, and I’m ready to go!!

Today’s pick is the Spicewood Springs Trail way down in the far southern tip of the state park. Not to be confused with the nearby Spicewood Canyon Trail which stays up on the rim of the canyon while the Springs trail stays down in the bottom.

To get to the trailhead I first have to walk south along the Colorado River. Fortunately I only need to cover about a mile and a half of its 862 mile length before reaching my intended trailhead.

Being the second day of April, it’s firmly into spring around here

but still pretty cool in the mornings and on this day of heavy mists tiny little, watery gems are sparkling all over the place.

And this guy was busily foraging. I first spotted him right at the edge of the trail where he was happily digging up an ant-nest. I could tell he was happy because his back legs were dancing while he jammed his bulldozer nose and front feet deep into the nest looking for any grubs the ants might have tucked away in there.

Armadillos can’t see worth crap so I was able to sneak up fairly close, but even so, it took a long time before I was able to get even this partial shot of his head since when foraging they tend to keep their flat-ended nose right down in the ground as they plow along.

Not doing any foraging yet this morning are these vultures roosting in a dead tree across the river. 

They like dead trees because vultures are big and clumsy so leafy branches just complicate things for them. Even from a dead tree, when they launch themselves you’ll typically hear several sharp crack - crack - cracks as their wings slap against branches and each other. This is usually accompanied by a whooeep – whooeep - whooeep as large amounts of air are forced through their flight-feathers as they work to generate the initial lift their heavy bodies need.

Here in Central Texas we mostly see Black Vultures, but this is still within the considerable range of the read-headed Turkey Vulture and here you can see at least two of them mixed in with the Black Vultures.

And yes, the difference extends beyond head-coloration. While Black Vultures are primarily scavengers and lack the maneuverability, speed and silent flight of most  hunting birds (When in flight you can hear a distinctive swish with every beat of their wings from quite a distance) they will in fact hunt some prey, while the Turkey Vulture is strictly a scavenger.

Despite the distractions along the way, including the sheer joy of being out on a trail again, I do eventually get to the Spicewood Springs Trail. As is typical in this limestone country, Spicewood Creek drops its way from pool to pool. The trail attempts to stick close to the creek down here in the bottom of the canyon

but that’s not always possible in the rugged terrain down here so once in a while the trail gets a little scrambley. The Spicewood Canyon trail, staying up there on the rim, is actually less scrambley and is suitable for intermediate mountain bikers, (Which does not include me!) whereas bikes aren’t even allowed on the Springs trail.

In addition to occasionally climbing onto ledges up above the creek,

the Springs trail weaves its way across the creek a half-dozen or so times.  (If you look just above and left of photo-center you can see the pale-yellow rectangle of the trail marker over there on the other side.) At the current water-flow none of these crossings really challenged my ankle-high, waterproof hiking boots, but in this hard country water tends to flow on top rather than soak in, and though it was only sporadically sprinkling on me (With the added bonus of the occasional tap of small hail later in the day) it might be raining harder upstream so I kept a close eye on the water-level.

The reward, as I worked my way up the canyon, was a series of small pools, each one unique and to be lingered over and savored.

This limestone country is riddled with caves and I have to wonder if this might be the opening to one of them. Not being much of a spelunker (as in not at all!) I’m content with just wondering.

Another feature of limestone county is that water tends to percolate slowly through all that porous rock and when it does come to the surface, though it may be loaded with minerals, it’s also crystal clear. This ‘grove’ of thick, fuzzy plants was growing in the bottom of one of the pools.

I spent a long time sitting at the edge of this pool watching 2 inch fish, probably Guadeloupe Bass, darting out of the grove in single file, sometimes just two but often three at a time, all playing follow-the-leader as the first fish, a harassed female, put her suiters to the test by darting around the obstacles in the clear water trying to see if she could shake them off. If she was successful the lagarts would circle aimlessly then eventually drift back into the grove.

Amongst all this frenetic activity floated 4 inch juggernauts, moving nothing more than the occasional fin until it became necessary to defend their patch of pool-bottom from the darting little upstarts.

There was one stretch of the creek, no more than a hundred feet long, with obvious sign of what appears to be beavers, both fresh sign

and old, but only along this one short stretch and I never did see a lodge or dam.

Eventually the creek crosses out of the park and onto private land so the Springs Trail climbs out of the canyon and joins the Canyon Trail, traversing a whole different terrain up here away from the creek.

But in addition to more uplandy type scenes such as this

the sprinkles/heavy mist still painted little wet mini-scenes such as this bowl-shaped web heavy with captured droplets

and these tiny little bedazzled blossoms.

And I think it’s a rule that when you pass by a blooming yucca you have to take a photo of the thick, waxy blossoms. I don’t know what the penalty is for not doing so, but I didn’t want to find out.

When I climbed up out of the canyon I could have turned riverward on the Canyon trail (the dashed black line) and returned to The Van after a little less than a 5 mile hike, but I chose to continue up the Canyon trail which, in another mile reaches the park road. Just across the road is the Lemons Ridge Pass trail which I followed back down to the river about a mile and a half upstream of The Van, extending the total hike out to about 6.5 miles.

Turned out to be a pretty dang good first day back out on the trails!

Oh, That Can’t Be Good!

 

Just what you don’t want to see pulling into the site next to you. A cheap-ass used FEMA trailer behind a $70,000 truck with a contractor’s generator in the bed!

Because of low standards, questionable materials, potential bio-hazards, little to no maintenance, and hard use FEMA has this rule about only using these two-bedroom temporary-housing units once before they sell them off. But not to the public because they don’t want to take on the liability, they will only sell them in bulk to ‘investors’ who then sell them on, as is, to uneducated buyers.  Sure, these discarded trailers can be picked up cheap, but there’s a good reason for that! They were cheap to begin with.

Notice that the manufactures are so embarrassed about how poorly these things are built they refuse to put their name on them. And since they are designed to be parked cheek-by-jowl with water, sewer, and electric hookups they have no tanks or 12V electrical systems which, along with very few windows (Windows cost money!) and a dormitory style fridge, makes them an exceedingly poor choice as a camping unit.

If you look close at the very right edge of the photo you can see that these particular people set up one of those Coleman ‘privacy rooms’ for toilet and shower function and they carried water from the campground’s single central spigot in open-topped 5 gallon buckets.

Just think of how comfortable and practical a tent-camp they could have put together for only a fraction of what they paid for that useless trailer!

Fortunately this couple only used the generator for about a half-hour twice a day, (to run a microwave maybe?) and left after a couple days.

Could have been a lot worse! Could have been one of those 45 foot, 4-slide, residential fridge-freezer, 400 watt outdoor entertainment center, roof bristling with three antennas and two different kinds of satellite dish coaches that have to run the generator constantly just to say alive.

Tag; You’re It!

As The Wife is heading back to the terminal after shepherding Elmer to the gate and onto his flight she pulls out her phone and calls sister Dale. “Tag; You’re it!”

There’s still a flurry of logistical shenanigans to come at the receiving end of the flight, involving two daughters, one granddaughter, two cars, and a mid-state hand-off, to get Elmer all the way to his destination for the day, but our part of the logistical labyrinth is almost over. All that’s left now is for me to make the white-knuckled journey from cell-phone lot to terminal, retrieve The Wife from the clutches of desperate travelers, over-smiling airline employees and grim-faced, blue-gloved TSA agents, then get ourselves out of this jittery city and back to the quietude of the property.

Oh yeah, tomorrow we also have to retrieve Elmer’s sick car from the hotel parking-lot where we left it, forlorn and sad looking with its coating of caliche dust and a handicap tag hanging crookedly from the mirror, and transfer it, with one operative headlight, completely inoperative windshield wipers, and a dash lit up like Christmas with brake, ABS and skid-control warning lights punctuated by a randomly flickering left-turn indicator, over to the second Ford dealer in a month in a last-ditch effort to see if it can be brought back from the brink. So I guess we aren’t quite as done yet as we’d like to pretend, but for tonight we’re going to pretend because it has been a hectic week.

It’s hard to say when this particular round of Move-Elmer actually started brewing.  (Hey! Maybe we can turn that into a game app and make a fortune off of it!!) It could have had its origins in those two weeks Elmer was without car while the first dealer unsuccessfully attempted to banish the out-of-season Christmas-lights special in the dash, forcing him to walk more than usual or sit in his recliner and brood about the injustice of age-related infirmaries. It could have started just after the car was returned to Elmer when he fell down between the bed and wall, a narrow space, as you would expect in a travel trailer, that had him trapped for a while as he figured out how to extract himself, all of which aggravated his bum leg which was already showing signs of compromised circulation. It could even have started way back before Christmas when Elmer fell into the highly questionable waters of the Bay and ended up with a case of foot-rot that took shelves full of drugstore products to bring under control. Not banish mind you, but at least get it under control enough that people weren’t horrified when Elmer pulled off his caked and yellowed sock to display the mess. (I don’t know if they had show-and-tell in second-grade back when Elmer was working through his 8 grades of school, but he sure seems to enjoy participating in it today. . .)

Whenever it started, Elmer, who tends towards either bouncing between floor-dragging lows or zipping around on soaring highs, started spending more time in the region of the lows, driven there, and into his recliner, by decreasing mobility and increasing pain. When he did finally agree that a visit to his long-time Missouri doctor was in order (Hey, I can’t fault him since I’m also of the walk-it-off school of medicine.) things kicked into high-gear. There was a flight to be booked, (Dale to Elmer, ‘No dad, I’m not flying down there to drive you and your broken car 1200 miles to Missouri!’ Elmer couldn’t see the issue and got into a bit of a snit over that. . .) suitcases to be bought, transportation to be arraigned, and since Elmer, not knowing just how much effort and cost goes into moving the trailer, insisted that he wasn’t going to pay to leave it at the RV park on the off chance he wanted to turn around and come back in a few weeks, there were tires to be bought, (by now both the spare and one of the tires on the ground were flat due to side-wall rot) fridge to be emptied, (Dad, you are NOT going to just leave that stuff in there to rot!) clothes to be bagged and carted off, (No Dad we can’t just leave that stuff here it because it will become mouse-nest material) a slide with a rotted floor to be very carefully nursed into the retracted position, a 400 lb. porch to be disassembled and stowed, and a permit to be bought. (Elmer, who by now in this process is feeling pretty useless, which made him persnickety, in an aside to The Wife, ‘greg’s the only person I know that would mess around with that goddamn permit crap just to move this goddamn trailer to a spot behind Danny’s barn just 8 miles away!!’ Dad, the permit costs $10, the fine is $400. . .’ But that’s OK, because I often got the same sort of comments about my obsessiveness with processes and procedures from my team-members when I was working so I’m used to it. And I’m not saying there’s any direct correlation by any means, but the electrical plant at the office didn't explode until some months after I retired and wasn’t there anymore to insist [OK, nag] that all the checks and balances were kept up with.  . .)

While I worked outside and The Wife worked inside, the two of us prepping the trailer for this move, we propped Elmer up against his car where he could greet the parade of visitors that were dropping in from all over town to say goodbye. While this helped distracted Elmer from his inability to help with the chores of prepping the trailer for its move and his frustration of not being in control, at this point he was feeling low enough that he was sure he’d never be healthy enough to come back again, (‘I’ll tell ya greg’, he says to me, ‘if I’da known I was going to live this long I’da waited until I was 13 to start smoking instead of starting at 5!’) so it was also pretty emotional, and guys raised in the 30’s and 40’s by tough, hardscrabble parents do not do emotional easily.

 On his own initiative Elmer had arraigned what day Ike would be coming to move the trailer over to Danny’s. Since his flight wasn’t until two days later this created a logistical hole that had to be filled. Originally – and repeatedly – Elmer insisted that he could just sleep in the trailer there behind Danny’s barn and he wasn’t at all happy when we kept pointing out the impracticality of that, (no water, no power, the recliner he’s been sleeping in unusable where it’s stowed in the retracted slideout and a whole porch-system taking up any available floor space) and even less happy when he found out The Wife had booked a motel room for him a hundred miles away where it would be much easier for us to entertain him the next day and collect him the day after that for the ride to the airport.

As we watched Ike ease the packaged trailer out of the RV park and on down the road, all the while hoping the slightly rotted old girl would make it in one piece, (it did) we were left standing in front of an empty campsite with three people, one cane, two suitcases plus a carry-on, and two cars. Personally I wouldn’t have minded leaving Elmer’s wounded car parked there beside the trailer behind Danny’s barn, but there were two issues with that. Even in his current basement state-of-mind Elmer wasn’t ready to give up on that damn car yet, (When checking in for his flight The Wife said ‘Dad, show the agent your driver’s license.’ The agent, unable to help himself despite hours of expensive customer-service training, blurted out ‘He still DRIVES?!!’) and with our car stuffed full of compressors, jacks, tools, and garbage bags of Elmer’s leftover personal belongings (You don’t throw Elmer’s stuff in your car unless it’s well bagged and sealed, even after it’s been washed [well doused in vinegar, double-dosed with soap, and on a 2-hour wash cycle] let alone dirty like it was, unless you want the interior to smell like the bottom of an old ashtray!) there was no room for Elmer and his two suitcases, one carry-on, cane and assorted leftovers in our car.

This is why I ended up driving Elmer’s car, along with Elmer and his luggage, on the two-hour trip from campground to hotel-room. For the first half hour I was struggling to reach the pedals. I’m not a tall person but I’m certainly taller than Elmer so I couldn’t figure out why the damn seat was so far back, nor could I find the seat-controls and for the first part of the trip Elmer was in a ‘mood’ so I didn’t want to ask. Eventually I managed to find the damn seat controls (For some reason on the Grand Marquis the 6-way electric seat controls are not on the side of the seat where everybody else puts them, nor are they under your left hand along with the lock and mirror controls. Instead they are on the door just behind your left elbow where you can’t see them when driving.)

Getting the seat moved forward helped with the reach-the-pedals issue but did nothing for the stink. I’ve never been a smoker, so I don’t have the excuse of the reformed smoker for my sensitivity to cigarette smoke but I can sniff out a lit cigarette from a 100 yards away and the residual stink of nicotine and old ashes is enough to make me feel like I’m choking. Elmer is good about not smoking in the car when there are non-smokers there, but, short of driving with my head out the window, I have to have the driver’s and rear-passenger window down to generate a fierce cross-breeze, yet I can still feel that residual poison oozing out of every surface in the car and creeping into my lungs. And the transfer isn’t limited to air-to-lung either. After hanging onto that steering-wheel I can’t wait to give my hands a surgeon-style scrubbing.

Fortunately it didn’t rain (Remember, in addition to needing the windows down there’s no windshield wipers) and both Elmer and I survived the trip. As we’re getting him settled into his room (During which The Wife hovered and fussed to the point where Elmer finally looked at me and said ‘greg, please take your wife home so I can get some rest.') The Wife took me aside and asked how he was during the trip.  She wasn’t actually asking after Elmer’s health or state-of-mind, she was asking if I was ready to choke him yet.

I have this theory that children of aging parents have this vestigial anger, or maybe frustration is a better word, no matter how far back in their sub-conscious it resides, this ‘how dare you devolve into something other than my parent’ or ‘how is it fair that I have to take care of you now’, that adds to the challenge of dealing with an aged parent that the in-laws, the wives or husbands that married into the family, don’t have to deal with. I think this is why I, definitely not a people-person, certainly not a nurturer by nature, can deal with Elmer without the stress levels The Wife experiences.

Anyway, by about the halfway point of the trip Elmer got over his ‘mood’ and was talking almost non-stop, which is normal for Elmer. True, I’ve already heard pretty much every story of his at least several times by now, but I don’t mind that so much. After all, life is not one continuous story, one constant movie-shoot. Most of our lives are – well just life, the mundane and the ordinary, it’s only once in a while, sometimes once in a great while, that our lives go from just loafing unremarkabley along to shooting forward, like a short-lived spark ejected from the fire, into something that will eventually become a ‘story’. The result is that each life creates a finite collection, a limited number, of stories, and since we measure our lives by our stories repetition is inevitable, so I don’t begrudge Elmer his stories, though sometimes I do tune him out because I already know the timing of the proper responses (Oh yeah? Hum. Wow!)  but on the whole, listening to them doesn’t bother me all that much. Hell, listening to them gives me a story of my own to add to my meager collection. Now I can tell the story of how many times I had to listen to Elmer’s story!

Anyway, the next day was taken up with driving him through the hills, (No hills down there on the coast where he's been since November.) lunch, naps, and the final packing. Then it was off to the airport first thing in the morning. We stopped along the way a couple of times to let Elmer get well stocked up on nicotine and coffee because, with all his other issues at the moment, he certainly didn’t need to add withdrawals to the list!

When we got to the airport Elmer had his door open before I could get stopped. (Was it something I said??) He heaved and huffed himself out one side with his carry-on case and cane and The Wife leapt out the other while I popped the rear hatch. Elmer insisted on getting in the way of the Wife trying to extract the luggage to the point where the lowering hatch hit her on the head while she was trying to sort out luggage and Elmer, (Fortunately she had pushed the lower-button herself so that couldn’t be blamed on me!) and then they were gone.

No goodbyes or nothing. I don’t know if Elmer will be back, if I will ever see him again. Based on how he looked and felt at the time, probably not, but then again I’ve seen him bounce back before so if he does recover enough to return it won’t be a huge surprise. (A lot of work getting that damn trailer back into its slot in the campground, but not a surprise.)

In the meantime I’m doing my part in this logistical mambo by waiting in the cellphone lot.

Sprung

First day of Spring here in Central Texas

Kicked back and reading a book in The Van

82 in the shade but as soon as the sun goes down we are quickly heading for the mid 40's

Dragging The Van Into The Twenty First Century

Inside this overhead cabinet

lurks this.

The coax-switcher and the 12 volt outlet (and the little grey tube in the bottom of the cabinet) used to service the TV that has long-since been removed.

Now I use the coax switcher for absolutely nothing and the 12 volt outlet as a charging station for my phone. That works out OK, as long as I use one of those 12 volt to USB converters, but maybe one day, if I ever pull the trigger and buy one, I’ll also have a Kindle to be charged as well.

So I started to look around for something with a couple USB ports that I could plug directly into.

Most the offerings out there either include a 12 volt outlet and/or a tiny voltage meter.

Since the last thing I need is a volt-meter shining out with that popular but sleep-depriving blue LED glow, especially right there next to the E-meter, I chose a fixture with two USB ports and a 12 volt socket.

I also grabbed a switch from my spares because these 12 V to 5.5 volt units like this use a couple milliamps of juice even when nothing is plugged into the USB ports. That’s not all that much juice but it also constantly lights that little green LED that, without the switch, I’d have to slap some tape over.

I also rounded up one female and one male spade connector, (Not sure why I have the second female connector in the photo. . .)  a little bit of heat-shrink, and my trusty conductive, anti-corrosion grease which will be used inside each crimp and on each male spade.

But first I had to get the panel that lines the back of the cabinets, and where all this stuff is to be mounted, out of there.

As always, the first step was to kill the 12 volt power with the disconnect switch. (The Van is not connected to shore-power so the 120 volt stuff is already ‘disconnected’)

I pulled the coax-switcher out and tossed it into my spares bin. The 12 volt receptacle was connected with spades so that was easy to disconnect and just leave on the panel for now,

but the 120 volt receptacle is hardwired so, to avoid the considerable hassle of completely disconnecting it, I removed the entire receptacle and left it behind.

This photo also shows how tight the space is that I have to work with behind the panel. Turns out that doesn’t give me much room for that switch I want to add. The 120 receptacle fits into that cutout in the plywood and the switch has to fit below that but above the wire-runs, and to the left of the steel pillar there in the center of the photo. Oh, and the new 12V/USB receptacle has to fit in pretty much that same space too.

Back at the bench, and with the old 12 volt receptacle removed, the first step was to turn the round hole for the old receptacle into a rectangular hole for the new receptacle.

Using a fine-tipped marker I traced around the new receptacle then used a blade to cut away the carpet since, from experience, I know it will snag, pull and run if I try to saw through it. Then it was a matter of sawing away the extra wood, then using a rasp to fine-tune the opening.

I had to be careful not to oversize this hole because the lip on the new receptacle is very small so any miss-cuts here will show.

Then, after a lot of measuring and trial-fitting, I marked the center of the hole for the switch and again cut the carpet away before actually drilling.

To get the switch to fit into the space available I actually had to cut a shallow rounded notch in the ear of the receptacle (not really visible in any of these photos) to get that extra 16th of an inch I needed and mount it a little above the centerline of the receptacle so that there was plenty of meat for the receptacle screw to bite into. (the wood used as a backer for the panel is not of the highest quality and I didn’t want to risk splitting it with a screw driven too close to the switch-hole.)

Now I could go ahead and mount the new receptacle and switch into the panel. On the hot side of the receptacle I crimped a female spade that connects to one side of the switch.

Rather than cut them off short and maybe end up in a jam sometime in the future, I also used a bit of electrician’s tape to tame the excess wire coming out of the receptacle.

Because I used up the last of my insulated spades with the new CO detector, I used a short bit of shrink-wrap to insulate the spade that goes to the switch. The male spade on the ground wire will be going into the insulated female spade already on the ground wire in The Van so it doesn’t need any shrink-wrap.

The next step was to finesse the panel back into the cabinet, get the 12 volt wires connected up, hot to switch, ground to ground, and wrestle the 120 volt receptacle back through the hole and get it firmly re-mounted.

Then I had to coax all the wires into the right place while slipping the backs of the two receptacles and one switch into the space left over without pinching or breaking anything. In concept, easy, in practice, well let’s just say it was an adventure!

But I eventually managed and got the panel screwed back into place.

Now I can plug my phone right into one of the USB ports, throw the switch, and I’m charging.

OK, now what can I get my itchy little fingers into??

Fan-Tastic verses Maxxfan Powered RV Vents

I doubt that I’m unique in having both a Fan-Tastic vent fan and a Maxxfan vent fan on top of The Van, but I’ll bet there aren’t all that many such setups out there. What follows, for those choosing between one or the other, is (literally) a side-by-side comparison of the two vents under real-world conditions.

The Players

The exact vents I’m comparing are:

Fan-Tastic Vent: Model 3350 Ceiling Controlled Fan; Three speed reversible fan; Power-lift cover with rain-sensor; Thermostatic control

verses

Maxxfan Deluxe: Model 7000K;Ten speed reversible fan; Power-lift rain-shield cover; Thermostatic control; Remote control

Handling

OK, this first section isn’t a comparison of the two vents but rather a comparison of how The Van handles with the Maxxfan compared to the roof-top air-conditioner it replaced.

Writing about his nearly yearlong stay in the International Space Station, Scott Kelly said; I’ve learned that grass smells great and wind feels amazing and rain is a miracle. I will try to remember how magical these things are for the rest of my life.  Well that, the remembering part, is easier said than done and I knew that the first time I drove The Van without the weight of that air-conditioner on the roof was going to make the biggest impression on me, after that I would get used to it and soon start to forget how she used to handle with that burden on top of her, and I was right.

With AC unit

With Maxxair

  

Of course I was hoping for some improvement in how The Van handled and the first time I drove her out the driveway without the AC unit up there I was paying particular attention, but didn’t really need to. The difference was noticeable enough that I would have perceived it anyway.

It was only 100 pounds taken off the roof, and a few of those added back when I installed the Maxxfan in its place, but the rebound from body-roll, such as when driving diagonally up the entrance to a shop or gas-station, or see-sawing through the washout at the bottom of our driveway, was almost gone entirely. With the AC unit there would be a heavy roll to one side that the suspension would eventually heave back over the other way, but just a little too much so she would roll a little bit to the other side, then back, and finally upright again. With the Maxxfan the initial roll is noticeably reduced, crisper with less wallowing, and she comes back to her feet without any of the extra rebound rolls. She’s also steadier on our often wavy and uneven county roads, staying solidly upright with fewer of the heavy side-to-side rolls she had with the AC up there. I expect the difference was pretty much the same as adding an oversized sway-bar, but for approximately the same price I not only got the improved handling but also the functionality of the Maxxfan.

So, even though I’m going to quickly forget what she was like before the Maxxfan, on the handling front this change has been a definite success.

Keeping the rain out

One highly important feature of roof vents, powered or not, is their ability to keep the rain out.  If they can’t do that then what was the sense in cutting a big frigging hole in the roof?!

With the Fan-Tastic vent keeping the rain out is pretty-much a no-brainer. When it’s closed no rain gets in. And since the rain sensor closes the vent at the first hint of moisture, it’s almost always closed when it rains.

I say almost always closed when it rains because I have experienced two situations where the vent stayed open in the rain. The first wasn’t my fault, the second was.

The first time was an equipment malfunction where the vent failed to notice that it was raining. The fix was relatively painless, with Atwood, who had recently acquired the formerly independent Fan-Tastic Vent Company, honoring the warranty and sending me a whole new vent.

The second time the cover stayed open in the rain, the one that was my fault, came about because the replacement Atwood sent me also came with a slightly different algorithm that decides when it’s time to close, and open, the vent.

After closing due to rain, the original vent would automatically try opening up again later. If the rain had passed the vent would stay open, just like I left it in the first place. The replacement doesn’t do that. Once it closes it stays closed until I come along and toggle the open/closed switch.

That is annoying enough, but the new algorithm, at least the one on my replacement vent, is very sensitive and things like a quick temperature change or a bit of evening dew wafting by will slam the lid closed and keep it that way. In the case of the latter, where the sensor keeps thinking it’s raining, the only way to open the vent again is to kill the power and force the lid open with the hand-knob.

Of course when I do that the vent isn’t able to close itself if any real rain comes along; which it inevitably will. . .

The Maxxfan cover is a little different. Like the Fan-Tastic, when closed no rain is going to get in, but as an added bonus, this is also true when the rain-shield style cover is open; almost always true anyway.

One more note on the Maxxair cover. In the left-hand photo above you can see that the cover extends beyond the rear of the vent but a good strong 6 inches. Because of this I could not put a Maxxair just forward of the solar panel because the cover would then come down right on the panel.

I say the Maxxair almost always keeps the rain out because, while the open cover is 100% effective in normal rains, a hard and/or driven rain can defeat the shielding properties of the open cover.

The photo above was taken after a quick but windy thunderstorm dropped nearly an inch of rain in about 20 minutes on top of the open vent cover. You can see the water droplets that managed to snake their way past the cover and settle on the fan blades. (For some reason droplets don’t seem to collect on the screen though)

So while it’s disappointing to have to remember to close the cover (No auto-close on the Maxxfan) during bad rains the ability to leave the vent open during normal rains makes up for it.

Fortunately, if I forget it’s a relatively small amount of splash-by that comes through and by the time it snakes its way through the cover it has no energy left so any excess falls straight down from the vent. In my case this means it lands on a floor covered with an indoor-outdoor runner over a marine-grade vinyl decking.

Effectiveness as an unpowered vent

The second-most important function of a vent is to – well, vent. Most of the time I use mine as unpowered vents, relying on convection to draw air in through the side window, which is a jalousie-type that I have never had to close in any sort of rain, then up and out the vent.

Because it has a more unrestricted airflow, the Fan-Tastic is better at this than the Maxxair. When the Fan-Tastic cover is open the air flows pretty-much straight up and out.

When the Maxxair cover is open the air flows vertically through the screen and fan, then has to make a 120 degree turn to the rear in order to exit the baffled rain-shield.

Cover color

I wasn’t offered a choice when it came to the color of the Fan-Tastic Vent cover but with the Maxxfan I had my pick of either smoke or white.

Maxxair to the left, Fan-Tastic to the right

During my research I came across reviews mentioning that the smoke cover let in a lot more light than white, the former being described as translucent while the later was more opaque. More light could be a good thing, especially towards the rear of The Van where there are no windows, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put a black vent-cover, which is what ‘smoke’ looks like from the outside, up there on the white roof. Part of that is looks, but it mostly has to do with living in a climate where black absorbs more of the often brutal sun’s heat. So I chose white.

It turns out that the white cover wasn’t as opaque as I expected from the reviews. As you can see in the photo above, which was taken with both covers closed, the white cover of the Maxxfan, there in the background, still lets in some light, though it’s definitely more subdued than what comes through the smoke cover of the Fan-Tastic Vent closest to you. The white cover also creates a much warmer light than the silver-blue that comes through the Fan-Tastic Vent.

So, while the Maxxfan’s white cover doesn’t let as much light through as the smoke might have, I do have more light in the back part of The Van than I did before and that’s a good thing.

One more thing to point out about the covers is that the Fan-Tastic cover (Photo above) uses a single arm on the right side to push the cover open and pull it closed. Under certain wind conditions, this uneven force can create a slight twist as the cover is closing, resulting in a bit of a snap as the cover is snugged down tight. Being supported on only one side, it’s also possible that the cover may be damaged if left up at highway speeds. (I don’t do this so have no first-hand experience to pass along.)

The Maxxair uses an arm on each side of the cover (Photo above) so opening and closing forces are evenly distributed side to side and I’ve never experienced anything other than smooth cover operation regardless of the outside winds. Supposedly the two arms also make it safe to leave the cover up at highway speeds. Again, I don’t do this so can’t say for sure.

By the way, not that it really matters much, but the Maxxair cover opens and closes in less than half the time it takes the Fan-Tastic cover.

Controls

Controls on the Fan-Tastic are located on the fan itself and are pretty straight forward. One knob to select off (0) or fan speeds 1, 2, or 3. (Off removes all power from the vent which is how I have managed to defeat the rain sensor a time or two.) Another knob to set the thermostat. (This is used to start the fan when the inside temp gets above the set-point and stop the fan when it drops below the set-point) A rocker switch to change the direction of the fan. ( to suck air out or blow air in) A smaller rocker switch to open or close the lid. And a four-pointed knob for manually opening or closing the lid.

The Maxxfan also has controls located on the vent itself. They call these ceiling controls. (Not shown is a knob in another corner of the vent for manually opening and closing the cover.)

These pressure-sensitive controls are not as intuitive as the ‘ceiling controls’ of the Fan-Tastic vent, so it’s a good thing the Maxxfan also comes with a remote.

From this thing all the capabilities of the Maxxair are easily understood and accessed.

Those capabilities are: cover open or closed; fan on or off; 10 fan speeds from 10% to 100%; fan direction in or out; adjust the ‘set temperature’ up or down; (This is the point where the fan is started or stopped based on interior temperature.) and ‘auto’ mode to use the thermostat set-point to start and stop the fan.

But not all is rose-water and turnips. (Wait. That’s not how the saying goes is it?)

Anyway – the remote comes with a wall-mount holster but I haven’t found the right place to put it yet so the remote actually lives in my drawer for now, and because of this I’m constantly reminded of how big this thing is, there’s more than enough of it to fill my hand. I used to have a camera that came with a remote that had nearly as many functions but was small enough to use as a key-fob. . . Just sayin’.

The remote operates off of infrared, which is line-of-sight, and one reason I haven’t found the right spot to mount the remote-holster is that the remote has to be pointed at the receiver up there on the vent (That shiny little bubble—thingy between the auto and in-out buttons on the ceiling controls two photos ago.) which means everywhere I’ve found to mount the holster requires removing the remote from the holster to point it at the vent anyway.

There are some operational quirks with the Maxxair too.

The Van is a small space and small spaces need plenty of ventilation in order to deal with stale banana-peels and fresh farts, so I tend to leave the vent open unless I’m moving down the road or it’s really cold outside, turning the fan on to assist with ventilation when required. This works just fine with the Fan-Tastic. The cover stays where I put it (within the limitations already mentioned elsewhere) as I turn the fan on and off as much as I like. But with the Maxxair, turning the fan off automatically closes the cover which I then have to re-open by pushing a second button. 

And with the Maxxair there’s no leaving the cover open when in auto mode (Operating off the interior temperature) When the temp rises above the setpoint the cover opens and the fan starts. When the temp drops below the setpoint the fan stops and the cover closes. End of story, no other option, no way Jose.

Personally I’d rather have the cover position and the fan on-off as separate functions.

And while we're on the subject of fans and covers, the Maxxair supposedly has a 'ceiling fan' function, where the cover is closed but the fan is on and blowing inward. I was curious as to how this was supposed to work since the fan is up inside the vent and with the cover closed there's nor real way for air to get up behind the fan to be blown downward. I tried it out and frankly I wasn't impressed. Basically it uses a lot of power, and accompanying noise, to create very little actual airflow. This is one feature I don't see myself using.

Cleaning the screens

Both the Maxxair and the Fan-Tastic have bug-screens that do a pretty good job, (the only defense against no-see-ums is to turn the fan on and blow the tiny little buggers right back out, but then you’re also sucking them in through the window screens at the same time. . .) but eventually both screens are going to need to be cleaned.

The Fan-Tastic screen seems to need cleaning more often than the Maxxair and I attribute this to the cover design, the Fan-Tastic cover allows stuff to fall out of the sky and onto the screen when the cover is open open, which is most the time for me, whereas the design of the Maxxair cover prevents this.

Removing the Fan-Tastic screen to clean it is a grit-chor-teeth-and-hold-yur-breath kind of operation. First you have to grip that little dimple in the photo above with the very tip of a finger and pry down. This, besides hurting your finger, creates a nasty chalk-board type squeal as the first two of eight fixed plastic tabs,

Maxxair screen on left, Fan-Tastic screen on right

some of which are visible on the right side of the photo above, reluctantly release their hold. Then you have to wrestle 6 more of these latches loose before the screen drops, all the while feeling like you are on the verge of breaking the little plastic ring around the screen.

Oh, and then, to reinstall the cleaned screen you have to bend and push and bang until the eight latches squeak and scrape back into place. It takes some force and I’m often half-convinced I’m going to break the ring before I get it back in place.

The ring around the Maxxair screen is not only much heftier, but is held in place with 4 of these turn-locks which makes it much easier to remove and re-install. Turn the four locks and the screen drops right out into my hands. Clean the screen, line up the scolops in the ring with the turn-locks, hold the ring in place with one hand and close the turnlocks with the other. Easy.

Performance:

The whole point of having a powered vent is to boost the airflow, but nothing in this life is free!

Both the Fan-Tastic and the Maxxair move air. As far as I can tell with just my ears and the backs of my hands (Now that I’m not working for ‘the man’ I no longer have access to the fancy DB meters for sound measurements and manometers with hoods for precise air-flow measurements.) they both move about the same amount of air with the same amount of noise at corosponding speed settings, though the Maxxair, with its 10 speeds as opposed to the Fan-Tastic with three speeds, can also move less air for a whole lot less power, and noise.

What I do have is a way to accurately measure the number of amps each fan uses at each of its speed settings.  Using my ears and the backs of my hands I have determined, as best I could, that Fan-Tastic speed setting 1 is equivalent to Maxxair speed setting 50%, 2 = 80%, and 3 = 100%.

The chart below shows the current-draw for the various speed settings of both fans.

Maxxair	Maxxair	Fan-Tastic	Fan-Tastic
Fan speed	Amps	Fan speed	Amps
100%	2.8	3	3.3
90%	2.0
80%	1.5	2	2.1
70%	1.2
60%	0.9
50%	0.7	1	1.5
40%	0.5
30%	0.3
20%	0.2
10%	0.1

Yep, when I first saw the results I thought I must be underestimating just how much air the Fan-Tastic fan was moving, so I went back and checked everything again, with the same results. With the inaccuracies of my ears and hands, it could be that the Fan-Tastic speed setting of 1 is more like a Maxxair speed setting of 60% rather than 50%, but I don’t think so. But I know for sure that the Maxxair speed setting of 80%, using the same amount of current as the Fan-Tastic speed setting of 1, is actually moving way more air than the Fan-Tastic fan at speed setting 1.

What this chart shows is that the Maxxair moves air more efficiently (Under power anyway) than the Fan-Tastic, using half the current to move about the same amount of air at speed settings 50% & 1 respectively.

Now I have to admit that when I was doing my research into the Maxxair I thought 10 speeds was a little excessive, and frankly, at 10% and even 20% the Maxxair isn’t moving enough air to make much of a difference so I don’t think these lower speeds are very useful. But at 30% the Maxxair is moving enough air to create a very gentle, but noticeable breeze at the window, which is right beside my bed, and does it with delightfully little noise as well as miserly current draw. I’ve never left the Fan-Tastic run all night on speed setting 1 because of the noise as well as current-draw, but I have no qualms about leaving the Maxxair run all night at 30%.

It’s also clear that the Maxxair efficiency (Volume of air to current-draw) starts to fall off rapidly at the higher speeds, making anything above 80% a losing proposition. But then again, before the Maxxair I very rarely ran the Fan-Tastic at its higher speed settings either.

So while the Maxxair has 10 speeds available, I think only the speeds from 30% to 80% are actually useful.

Conclusion:

Both the Fan-Tastic and the Maxxair have their own strengths and weaknesses. Fortunately I have one of each on The Van so where one falls short the other picks up the slack. But if I had to choose just one, (These dang things ain’t cheap so having two is a luxury.) it would be the Maxxair for the rain-shield style cover and the slow speed/low current capability.