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I departed in March for what was to be a couple of weeks on the road... Well, it ended up to be eight weeks and 6300 miles. It was a good first run as temperatures in the 90's were encountered as well as quite a bit of hill climbing as I made my way down I-5 and across I-10 to Dallas and return. The AV10 performed flawlessly and helped to make the trip more enjoyable and in effect safer as less time had to be spent monitoring gauges. I started out with alarms set fairly close to normal temps for transmission, water, final drive, etc. and as I went over the hills I adjusted them upwards. Unfortunately I didn't have oil temperature monitored as I used that probe for the Final Drive. I'm hoping to add the oil temp before next trip, either as a new probe or a shared probe. I captured data at the 2 second rate pretty well well throughout the whole trip and we've built a program to convert the data into a csv file that can be loaded into Excel. The program will be expanded so that any readout can be monitored in real-time on a computer as well as capturing the data into a file. A sample of such capture/output ( in alpha test ) is located here. The only negative encountered was a too sensitive oil pressure alarm. Not a problem, just a nuisance. When coming to a stop the pressure would drop enough to set off the alarm. Perhaps it was the rate it dropped at. The mechanical gauge I use for backup and calibration was not sensitive enough to the change to cause the same dip. I'm sure we'll be able to tweak that some so that it's be less of a nuisance yet still effective. The unit performed very well even when several alarms were triggered at the same time. As I was using this trip as a learning curve I left alarm threshold settings so that would trigger sufficiently to assure future comfort. I have to figure out better audio integration. I currently use a Radio Shack external little cheapie amp. Doesn't sound the greatest, but it works. Ultimately I hope to run it through the audio system of the on-board computer.
The eventual installation place fit extremely well. Velcro and molded plexiglass was used as mounting hardware. No holes had to be drilled and no bounce or vibration was experienced throughout the trip. 12 Volt power is supplied via a DPDT switch from the coach battery bank or via the ignition circuit from the engine battery. Using this scheme I can use the AV10 to monitor coach battery voltage when parked so as to be reminded when the auxiliary generator has to be started. I have tons of data to plow through and to eventually use as a baseline. I had hoped to get the EGT's closer in temperature reported but ended up with a definite difference between left and right cylinders. I'm assuming that is due to the probes being mounted from the top on one side and the bottom on the other. I still haven't been able to get sufficient information as to how lean to run the cylinders so for this trip I did not do any "by cylinder" fuel adjustment. I'm going to leave that for the next trip. Was the AV10 a good investment? Yes indeed.
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