… all day and so I missed the glorious weather.
142.2 amp-hours in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the surplus electrical energy that I create, meaning that the water temperature rose from 44°C to off the scale (over 70°C) during the day.
And it was still over 70°C when I came back at 22:00. That must have been hot.
But today I was at Liz and Terry’s finishing off Liz’s car.
And we reassembled it and much to everyone’s surprise, it fired up straight away and ran (so Liz says) better than it has run for a while.
We took it for a test-drive and it seemed to be fine, although the brakes are a little “hit and miss”, so we ordered new brakes all round and we’ll fit those when they arrive.
We also changed the dampers on the back as they were rather soft and there was a pair hanging around.
And here’s a surprise!
Too much slack in the 19mm socket, and yet an 18mm was too small. This led to a rummage around in the old toolbox and a 3/4″ AF socket was produced – and that fitted perfectly.
Imperial bolts on a 2000 FIAT – who would ever have thought that!
Anyway, Liz reckons that the ride has stiffened up considerably and that is good news too. As a reward, she cooked a good dinner and made some vegan chocolate brownies for me.
The car had better run alright after all of this.
Sounds like you need to make that dump load a LOT bigger. You’re running the risk of boiling the water and causing the container to melt as well as potentially burning out the element. You might consider a second/third dump load water tank.
The long term aim is to not have any at all – to have the water heated by solar vacuum tubes in summer and off the back boiler in winter. The dump load will be used to charge up an electric motor-scooter for going out and about. The aim of the set-up is simply to measure the amount of excess current by having a place to dump it in, not for any practical purpose (although the hot water is nice of course).
When I’m here during the day, I can swap the water around – 10 litres of hot water into the cold water tank outside and replace it with 10 litres of cold water to drop the temperature down. It’s only summer days when I’m out all day that it becomes an issue.
You’re getting an electric golf cart?
http://evworld.com/news.cfm?newsid=27435