So I finished the lighting in the stairwell this morning as you can see. There’s a 12-volt LED light now illuminating where the entrance hall is going to be.
. Once that was done I looked at the list of other small jobs to do. One of them was to fit a piece of insulation over the top of the battery box and seeing as that golden thingy was up in the sky I reckoned that this was a good time to do it.
So I removed all of the rubbish from off the top of the wooden lid, cleaned everything out, and while I was about it I checked the batteries – I haven’t done that for a while.
There are 10 batteries in the box – they are all Hawker 92-amphour sealed gel batteries. 9 of them were all nice and cool and simmering away nicely. The tenth was boiling hot and it you look closely you will see where the case has swollen up. This is pretty serious stuff. It’s the first battery in the bank and it’s quite clear from looking at this that the business of handling 250 amps of current per day during the summer has proved to be too much. It’s boiled, the plates have swollen and made a short circuit inside. The short circuit has created resistance to the charge and that resistance is being dissipated into heat and hence the battery is warm and why the charge in the rest of the batteries is down.
Just at that moment a friendly grey cloud blew over the sun and cut off the solar energy so I did a swift disconnection, removed the battery and subsituted another one. And straight away the battery voltage went up 0.4 of a volt.
I’ve rerouted the cables so the positive lead goes into one battery and the negative lead goes into another and that will help to circulate the current a little better but I think that I’m going to have to reconsider my configuration. I can generate a theoretical maximum of about 75 amps but a more practical expectation is about 50 amps. 50 amps seems to be too much for one battery so I’m planning on reverting to the original idea of having two banks of batteries with each of the two banks of solar panels charging up its own bank of batteries. The bus bar, that connects everything together, instead of being between the control panel and the batteries, will have to be sited after the batteries. That will involve more cable, with a greater potential for voltage drop, but unless I can think of another way then that will have to do.
After lunch I made a start on the jungle but I wasn’t there for long. Claude came round for my assistance with his trailer wiring that he coulsn’t get to work. So the rest of the afternoon was spent rewiring his trailer.
And in other news, here is the reason for the latest attempt at airline piracy. One western country wants to remove another civil liberty from its citizens so it needs to create a panic in order to scare them sufficiently so that they will fall for it hook line and sinker. I’m not quite sure what kind of pervert it is that wants to spend all day looking at naked bodies but if this is going to become law I’m going to insist that the people operating the scanners are completely starkers so we can get our own back by looking at them in the buff.
Of course the way to respond, if this ever happens, is to whip up a scandal of our own by accusing all of the airport staff of being pedophiles anxious to have a sneaky look and the naked body of some unsuspecting minor. That should whip up quite a storm, and quite right too.
