Tag Archives: 12 volt DC hour meters

Tuesday 5th June 2012 – I’VE MADE FURTHER STRIDES …

… in the garden today.

after another late start and breakfast I carried on with my notes from my recent trip to Canada and the USA and they are now all up-to-date.

Following that I had a huge pile of stuff to pack and prepare for shipping – and it was then that I realised that the UK is closed today.

Bearing in mind the catalogue of disasters that occurred while I was away, after lunch I started the repair programme.

A few batteries needed recharging and replacing and it didn’t take long to do all of that

new fuse 12 volt immersion heater les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe new fuse is now fitted to the overcharge circuit that powers the home-made 12-volt electric immersion heater and so I have hot water again at last.

But the largest strip fuse that I have seems to be 50-amp and that’s nothing like enough, but it’s all that I have for now. It will have to do.

I’ll have to pay a discreet visit to the local car breaker’s, or else buy some … “Buy? Are you feeling alright?” – ed … when i’m next in the UK. The type that I want actually range from 40 amps to 250 amps so I shouldn’t have too many problems getting what I want.

Not so good news in the barn though. As you fix one problem, another problem rears its ugly head. It seems that one of the charge controllers, the oldest one, has ceased to function.

10 years old so I can’t complain too much but it is rather annoying.

It’s something internal that has gone wrong with it. I can tell this because the voltmeter is registering the voltage on the battery so that side is fine, and the hourmeter wired to the input side is working too, so that bit is okay. it’s all of the bits in the middle where we have a problem.

What I’ve done for now is to connect the two terminals together with an old jump lead – not ideal but at least current is reaching the batteries and so they will charge up.

But there’s no cut-off when they are fully-charged so I will just have to keep my eye on them, and disconnect them if I have to go out on a sunny day.

That left me an hour in the garden and I weeded one of the beds. It’s stil not all done but at least I can see what’s in there. Tons of brussels sprouts by the looks of things.

>Meanwhile in other news, since I graduated from University, the whys and wherefores of OUSA – the Open University Students Association, have been sadly lacking from these pages.

I’ve been doing my best to put it all behind me but it won’t go away.

The latest is that what should have been a private mail from an elected officer to a member of the Association but which was “inadvertantly” (as if that ever happens) published to a public forum.

The memo reads – Hi all. My name is Hazel (http://www.facebook.com/hazel.pegg) and my Alter Ego is VP Comms. For various reasons my official ID needs to be an admin of your FB page. please don’t force me to go the heavy route?

What kind of threat is that to make to a member of an organisation of which the writer is an elected member?

My own opinion is that it is thoroughly shameful. It reminds me of the Kray Twins or the legendary “Dinsdale” sketch – “he nailed my head to a coffee table. He didn’t want to do it – I had to insist”.

But whatever you might think – it just goes to show that nothing has changed in OUSA.

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Thursday 1st March 2012 I’M GOING …

… to have an early night in a couple of minutes. All of this paperwork in the morning is wearing me out

But still, it’s nice to be up early (well, early for me, anyway) and spend the morning with a pot of coffee.

Ohh what luxury!

But once the paperwork period was over, I excelled myself by doing a little tidying up in the bedroom where I’ve been working. I can actually see some floor now, and that’s real progress.

I’ve also been tidying up a little in the barn, and outside I’ve fought my way further down the garden and hacked out a load of brambles.

What I’ll be doing tomorrow afternoon if it stays nice (and today was easily the nicest day of the year with over 120 amp-hours on one of the solar banks) will be to have a garden fire and burn a load of dead vegetation, and then move one of the compost bins to its final position.

Won’t that be a cue for a torrential rainstorm?

The hour-meters for the solar banks, those that I installed yesterday, are giving me the results that I expected, but the hour-meter on the overcharge is not quite so good.

It seems that there’s some current seeping through the overcharge controller once the voltage passes 13.4 volts. Not much – a question of a couple of milli-amps or so – but it’s enough to start the hourmeter working.

These things are so sensitive that this one is feeding off the current that is seeping. The old car clock that I was using before couldn’t detect that current, and so tHe figures are going to be a little distorted as from now on

Another thing that I’ve been doing, or at least, trying to do, is to continue to drill this 48mm hole through the wall between the lean-to and the house in order to pass some electrical cables through.

But for some reason, the first 25cms went through without any real effort whatsover but ever since then it’s been making no impression at all, and I’m not halfway yet. Today with an hour or so, I reckon that I made almost one centimetre.

There’s definitely something not quite right about this

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Wednesday 29th February 2012 – I’VE GONE …

… onto summer hours!

Yes, already! It’s now light enough to be still working outside at 19:00 and so that’s what I’m doing.

And the computing activities that I need to do, well I’m doing those from 10:00 until 12:00.

So with an early night after my dithering about, I had an early morning as well, just for a change. And on went the coffee pot again because if anything it was even nicer today than yesterday.

So much so, in fact, that I ran the electric heater up here. Not because I needed to, but because it was a shame to waste the energy.

One of the things that I needed to do was to print off about 50 pages of stuff that I need to complete. And I think that I’m having printer issues. The black ink didn’t work at all and in the end I put a new cartridge in.

That worked fine for a few pages and then we were back to the missing lines and dirty heads again. I cleaned the heads, and that worked fine for a while and then we were back in the missing lines and dirty heads.

I don’t know why that is. Printers never seem to last very long with me.

This afternoon I had a pile of fun.

I’ve had a few parcels delivered these last couple of days, and one of them contained the half-a-dozen 12 volt DC hour meters similar to the 230 volt ones that I bought to run with the mains inverters.

control panel solar energy wind turbine timer overcharge meter les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe purpose of these 12-volt hour meters is to wire them into the solar panel circuits to see for how long a solar charge is received by the panels (to help in resiting them to an optimum position), to wire into the wind turbine circuits ditto, and also to wire into the overcharge circuits to see for how long surplus energy is created.

And so I spent a happy afternoon wiring in the overcharge timers and the solar timers. I’m not able to do the wind turbine timers as I need diodes to stop the backflow of energy from the batteries and they haven’t come yet.

The wind turbines are connected directly to the batteries with no charge controller so if you wire a timer in there without stopping the current flowing back from the batteries, the timers will be running 24 hours per day, feeding off the batteries.

I also did some tidying up of the panel that I made a couple of months ago – the one with the 600-watt inverter, the electric meter and the electrical sockets, that I’m using in the barn. That looks neater and tidier, and works better than before.

But I forgot to say that when I was in Brussels at Christmas, Marianne was chucking out an old hair drier – something like 400 watts or so. Anyway, I chucked it into Caliburn and brought it back here.

The reason?

Every now and again I use heat shrink insulation on bare wires and while you are supposed to shrink it using a hot-air paint stripper, I don’t have enough power to run a hot-air paint stripper.

I do have enough though to run a 400-watt hair drier and while it’s slower and not quite as effective, it does in fact work well enough.

I’m quite impressed with that.

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