The plot thickens

Yesterday, after I’d done my blog, I switched the voltmeters again, soldering probes to the one that gauges battery condition. Today after about 8 hours of sunshine, I checked and the battery seemed fully charged.

Somebody had claimed that Amorphous panels were “crap” and that there was no such thing as a crysteline panel. Well, sure there is - there’s poly-crysteline and mono-crysteline. Today I ran a not too scientific test. I put the 30W Poly-crysteline panel on my watt meter for an hour and a half and it pulled in whatever it was that it pulled in. That watt meter doesn’t come with instructions. Next I put the “crap” panel on for an hour and pulled in a third of what the crysteline panel pulled in. Now adjusting for time difference and panel wattage it turns out that there’s zero difference between the panels other than Amorphos panels work better in low light than crysteline panels. I hope the person that told me my Amorphous panels were crap likes eating crow!

 Amorphous 15W panel after just one hour

Poly-Crysteline panel after 90 minutes

But the first thing that happened was a problem. I couldn’t get my external panel to connect to the electrical supply system. It transpired there was an issue with the SAE to cigarette lighter plug. I’m not sure what it was either because after disassembling it and checking the fuse then losing the spring and having to rob an old pen for a spring, it seemed to work. Judging from the sand that fell out of the thing, I’m going to hazard a guess I’d be better changing to SAE for input. It’s not urgent though. What I have will work. I also have a spare SAE to cigarette lighter converter on the way. It’s supposed to be here Saturday but it seems to have been stuck in New York for days.

To quote an old movie, “an interesting thing happened on the way to the forum”. I ran my twin extraction fans for one minute. I’d previously checked the battery level and it was all green. Fully charged. After one minute of twin 2.5A fans using a combined 5A or a sixtieth of five amp hours which is 0.083 amp hours, I checked the battery and it was out of the green into the amber. That should absolutely not be! I’m closer to nailing the problem.

I know my solar panels work. I’ve measured them and they all work well. That leaves the problem as being the battery or the charge controller. Having measured the battery as being full earlier today I’m wondering about the charge controller. What I really need to do is to test the battery. Harbor Freight sells a battery load tester. Now one of the things, thinking about Harbor Freight, that I’d love to do is to run my fuse circuit tester on everything just to see how much current is really being consumed. Trouble is, I can’t find the blessed thing! Like all the other stuff I can’t find, I’ll have to find it when I’m tidying up!

I really need to find somewhere to store all the stuff from the bus. There’re tools I don’t need to carry in the bus and supplies too. All I need is my maintainance supplies and tools. The rest is redundant now.