Tag Archives: studer inverter

Friday 5th December 2014 – IT WASN’T QUITE AS EARLY …

… as last night. Still, being in bed by 23:30 is still something relatively unknown around here, as regular readers of this rubbish will realise.

And as you might expect, I was wide awake by 06:00 and if this carries on, I shall be emulating Rosemary in that I shall be making myself a coffee early in the morning and then going back to bed. And I forgot to say that Percy Penguin – she who doesn’t feature on these pages half as much as she deserves – put in an appearnce during the night, as I was on my travels in Cheshire.

First job after breakfast was to empty the compost bucket that I have up here. And then second job was to empty the beichstuhl – such are the delights of my living habits around here.

Once all of those were out of the way I carried on with the power board. This involved making up a flying lead so that I can connect all kinds of things to it – including the portable power board, if ever the need arises.

Once I had done that, I had to make some cables to connect the dump load. This le to a good half an hour looking for the negative 25mm cable.

And hereby hangs a tale. This cable only comes in blue and red, and I use only red and black for the 12-volt circuits. So you can see an immediate problem. However, I have learnt, by serendipity, that the red cable, if left out in the sunlight, fades to a nice dull yellow. I therefore have a couple,of lengths hanging upoutside quietly fading, but it took me ages to find the length that had already changed colour.

Eventually I found it, and so I could make up a red cable and a yellow cable for thr dump load. As you know, my sldering is rubbish but I have a crimping tool for fastening the big aliminium terminals that I use, and then I finish off with half a dozen turns with the vice.

Cecile rang up too for a chat,and she was on the phone for a good hour. Terry rang up too for a chat. It is nice to be popular.

After lunch, I made up a couple of cables for the big Studer inverter. But I’m not at all sure about this. I bought it years ago off eBay and it’s never been installed, although when I gave it a whirl a few years ago, I found that the capacitor was faulty and I had to send it away to be repaired.

The cables were not much problem, but fitting the inverter certainly was. You have no idea how heavy it is, and it’s hel on by screws through bolt holes, rather that cutaways, so you need at least four hands. After much binding in the marsh, I fitted a shelf onto the power board in the barn and put the inverter on that so that it was in the correct place – and then I could screw it up.

I remain unconvinced about its effectiveness and I might end up taking it off again.

I spent the rest of the evening looking for the keyswich that I put on one side on Sunday. This is actually a keyswitched battery isolator and I need that in my circuit so that I can disconnect the batteries without disrupting the system. I had it in my hand on Monday and put it safe where I knew that it wouldn’t be lost.

And I have another three somewhere too – and could I ‘eck as like find one of those either. But this is the story of my life, isn’t it? I spend more time looking for stuff than I do actually using it or fitting it.

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Monday 17th October 2011 – THERE’S A LOT …

… to be said for being up at 08:00 in the morning at the first tinkling of the alarm clock. It  means that by the time you have breakfasted and done your 3 hours on the laptop, there’s still two hours before lunch.

And it’s just as well because it took me a while to empty Caliburn ready for this furniture removal, and then there was still some time to do another little job that I’m thinking of.

You might recall that the 12-volt immersion heater has stopped working and had something of a meltdown. I had a good look at it and what has happened was that the heater element has folded downwards and shorted out against the metal sides. This has

  1. produced a short-circuit that has melted all of the plastic causing the wires to short out (and why the fuse didn’t blow is a mystery to me)
  2. the arc that was created has burnt a hole in the bottom of the drum.

Despite the catastrophe (and it could have been 10 times worse if the insulation had caught fire) I was still impressed with the heat that must have been generated from just 500 watts and my surplus energy.

But at least now I know why the heater elements are fitted vertically and not horizontally – it stops them shorting out like this. The issue with that though is that you need running water into the tank to make sure that when you drain the tank it refills instantly so that the element is never exposed to the air.

That won’t work for me because of course I don’t have running water. My solution would be to go for a non-conductive material like plastic, it I would find a plastic tank that would take water up to 70°C.

Anyway, the result of this is that I have no dump load for my surplus energy and so I had a cunning plan.

>When I was in Canada last year I found some black sockets formy 12-volt circuit and I bought a dozen with the idea that they would be so different in appearance to the usual white ones that it would evidently have some significance.

12 volt fridge dump load les guis virlet puy de dome franceI cut out the wire from the dump load controller and put the black socket into the line. You can see it at the top right of this photo.

As winter approaches and the solar energy begins to die down, I’ve unplugged the fridge from the main circuit because I no longer have the charge to run it 24 hours. That will have to wait for next Spring.

What I’ve done is to move the fridge into where the water heater was and plugged it into the black socket. That way, from now on it will only switch on when there is surplus energy which isn’t too bad in winter. When there isn’t enough sun to run the fridge it will be cold enough to do without it anyway

It’s only 75 watts instead of 500 that the water heater gave out but nevertheless it’s better than nothing and it’s something useful to do with the surplus current.

What I also intend to do in the long run for the coming winter is when I wire in the big Studer inverter that I have, I’ll use the 600-watt one wired into the dump load circuit and couple up a small 400-watt oil heater that I have. I’ll put that in my room up here and it’ll take the chill off the place in the winter whenever we have plenty of sun.

This furniture removal this afternoon – well, I won’t say too much about it except that I was there at 14:00 as planned and Caliburn was all loaded before 14:30. For the 90km drive, we finally arrived at the house at … errr … 17:40 and it wasn’t until 18:10 that we got back under way.

So never mind the plans that I had about doing the washing and so on – we were lucky to make the Anglo-French meeting tonight in time. Still, what can you do in circumstances like this?

And so tomorrow I’m hoping to be back up the wall again. It might be finished this week – you never know.

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