A day out

Today I just went out for a few hours. I wasn’t doing much but I sure was busy. Aside from running some errands I picked up a hot glue gun and a small folding table. One of the errands was to a local school district. The district that wanted me to drive for them but which dilly-dallied from February til June. Anyway, it looks like I’ll be driving for them this year. Whether I drive for them all year depends upon what other opportunities present themselves.

In an email my dad said to me “Driving can house and feed you while you update and look around but it's not going to be more than a hand-to-mouth existence. and not going to give you a pension pot.    It's not likely to give you any stimulating social contact either.” That’s about right. Driving is a hand to mouth existence. It’s better than McDonalds which is employment funded by the Welfare system but not much better. In fact I wonder if McDonalds workers aren’t better off since they get their rent paid and they get food stamps so any cash they earn can be spent on whatever they want.

When I made my connector that fits on the battery, I was unhappy that the wires were just held in place by solder. I know it’s a lot of solder but even so I was unhappy. Thus today I bought a hot glue gun and filled the back of the connector up with hot glue so the cable is more firmly anchored. Hot glue gets used a lot in industry. It’s used to cover electric components that have to be firmly attached to the circuit board for example.

I trimmed the piece of angle iron that I cut the other day (which I might not have mentioned) and drilled a couple of holes in it. These holes will anchor the other connector that the connector I just hot glued will connect to. The angle will be bolted to the underside of the bus. This will make changing batteries much easier. I wish I’d thought of this before! There’s definitely a spell under the bus coming in the future.

That’s the piece that bolts under the bus. Imagine it the other way up. I still need to drill the bolt holes and paint it white but there it is in all its glory.

While I was in the bus today I looked at putting the rear solar input together. I wanted to mount it mostly on the back panel but it looks like I’m going to have to mount it on the ceiling. There is space on the back panel but in a fit of exhuberance I put spray foam behind that panel which makes drilling tricky as wires can’t move out of the way of my drill. I tried digging it out but it was such slow, laborious work I gave up. Note to self - no more spray foam unless I want to use the can to make a work of art!

Oh the fun you can have with a spray foam can that won’t let the foam out until it’s shot with a .22 rifle. The foam comes out then, for sure!

So, tomorrow will be more going out and about. I have forms to fill and drug tests to be performed plus my Dept of Transport medical - all in order to prove that I’m fit to drive a bus! Well, it’s income and not bad income either. It’s not wonderful. I’m not going to be rich but I’m not going to be sleeping under a railway bridge either.

The plan is the same - to install the back solar input, including rectifier, switch and fuse. To change the battery under the bus including installing an easier way of switching batteries. Once that’s all done I will concentrate on working on the bus. I need to sort out the buzzing relay in the console, check to see if I can lower the brake pedal about an inch and might hunt out a new driving seat. The one I have tips forward a little. There’s also the matter of the loose wire dangling from the transmission. That’s something the hillbillies installed.

The little table I bought will go with one of my folding chairs (which is currently in a shed). Thinking ahead to the September trip I figured I could set the little table and chair outside and use the table for my gas cooker or to hold drinks etc while I sit in my chair and enjoy the vacation.

The battle of wounded knee.

Today my knee is still swollen and painful. I can bend from the waist but bending the knee is still uncomfortable. It really needs a day or two of absolute rest but it’s unlikely to get that so recovery is likely to be very slow.

I tested the battery again today and found it had settled at 12.69v. That’s not terrible. It’s not 12.8v but it’s not 12.6v either. It’s about what I’d expect from a year old lawnmower battery. They only last two years which is a darned sight longer than a Harbor Freight deep cycle battery. Actually I’ve begun to question the savings from Harbor Freight. The fact their prices rise and fall faster than a whores drawers complicates matters but I’ve found Walmart’s prices while not beating them tend to be so close that the ease of returns at Walmart beats the price of Harbor Freight after gas has been added into the mix.

Looking at the top of the lawnmower battery, it’s different from the top of the Harbor Freight battery. Thus I needed a new top bracket for the battery. I went outside and cut some steel. I decided for simplicity two pieces of angle iron - one to grip the battery and the other to raise a flat bar up to above the level of the battery vents. Cutting was quick enough with my Walmart angle grinder (remember my 3rd Harbor Freight grinder or was it the 4th, committed suicide immediately after the previous one). In fact I’ve not had a Harbor Freight grinder that didn’t die on me though the 2nd lasted me the longest. Needless to say I burned my fingers on a piece of steel I’d cut some moments before and thought would have cooled.

That was what the bracket would look like when completed. I looked toward welding but then the sky clouded over and thunder began to roll. It looked like we were in for a storm so I put aside my plans of welding for the day.

20 minutes later, the sun was shining as brightly as if it had never been overcast. Thunder still rolled in the distance so I made haste to get my welding done before the clouds and rain came back. The wending went fairly quickly though I think I used more welding rods than I would have expected. I tend to over-weld. I weld each and every surface where two pieces of metal join. In fact my welds are quietly likely well over specified. I could clean them up with an angle grinder to make them look pretty and professional but I don’t care all that much about how they look as long as they function. Quite frankly making them look pretty is just a waste of grinding disks and my time.

I sprayed it with anti-rust primer then after that had dried, in the failing light I sprayed the final coat of white paint. I like all the stuff I build to be primed with rust-killing primer then painted white to show up rust. I still have to drill two holes in the cross bar to attach it to the turnbuckles but that’s a job for another day.

I finished the last of the three wires into my 12v 50a connectors today. The other needs to be done under the bus. So far it’s looking pretty good. I’m quite happy with progress. As I’ve said, my knee is still poorly. I made the mistake of getting down on it one time today and immediately felt the pain. Needless to say I did not attempt to get on my knee again for the rest of the day.

I had a go at charging the old Nexus and found it wouldn’t even power up. As I’ve probably said before, second hand electronics aren’t worth buying at any price. I’d clearly bought somebody else’s problem and was lucky to get 14 months out of it before it died. That pretty much puts the tin hat on writing code using my old Nexus. As far as my old RCA tablet goes, the USB charging port is dead. The physical keyboard barely registers too. Sadly, those two are totally beyond redemption. I’ll have to seek out something different if I want to do any coding. I’m not buying an old secondhand anything though as that’s just money thrown away.

So, tomorrow I head to commence the paperwork to start a new job. That’s welcome. I’d imagine by about Christmas (assuming I stay that long) I should be able to afford a tidy laptop to code on. Meanwhile I’ll look at some C++ books to remind myself what it’s all about.

Got some wires

Yesterday I charged the lawnmower battery just to see how much charge it would hold. Immediately after charging the battery held a little over 13v which really isn’t right. Leaving it for an hour to settle, it came down to a more believable 12.77v. This afternoon I checked and it was at 12.69v. That’s not horrible and not unexpected for a battery that was purchased a year before, used a couple of times in a riding lawnmower then left idle until April then replaced when it failed to start the lawnmower. As it turned out there’s something else wrong with the lawnmower but as it has a brand spanking new battery and this one is lying idle, it would be a crying shame not to use it on my bus. Especially when the pricy deep cycle battery gave up in less than a year. I suppose it goes to show that the expensive option isn’t always the best.

Yesterday my battery connectors arrived without instructions. I couldn’t work out how to put them together so ended up looking it up on YouTube. Thank Heavens for some of the instructional videos. Actually, now that YouTube had stopped small guys from earning money from Adsense, the lack of Adsense adverts makes YouTube much more watchable. Anyway, having found out how to put the things together my mind turned to wiring. I had a long piece of 10 gauge black wire that I’ll use. I have a fair length of 10 gauge red wire under the bus with plenty excess.

I’d decided that since I have to replace the battery and I’d wired the cables directly to the battery making detaching them somewhat of a challenging prospect, this tie around I’ll do it properly and use a battery connector. That means I can unplug the battery, undo the restraint straps - all by hand and then get it into the bus to remove the connectors. Much more user-friendly. As I get older the less I want to do with tools in cramped spaces underneath vehicles.

Heading to the store and returning fairly swiftly, I purchased a pair of 3 foot long 8 gauge red and 8 gauge black cables. I also purchased 20 feet of twin 12 gauge cable. The 12 gauge cable will go to the second solar inlet - the one at the back of the bus. It will also allow me to plug in a wind generator if and when I eventually build one.

This is the Chinese wind turbine that I bought a couple of years ago. I don’t expect it to last terribly long because of the quantity of plastic used in the construction. On the other hand, it could be fun to put a small turbine together. If I can make it small and light enough, perhaps I can actually use it.

On YouTube I did see a few days ago a very interesting video where somebody took the motor from an old weed-eater and added an electric motor, producing a 5w 12v generator. That was very interesting though the fuel tank will only hold about 15 - 20 minutes of fuel on most weed eaters.

In my past purchases I bough a (probably) 4 gauge pair of cable eyes. It was something I never ended up using but I remembered having them and located them last night. Putting 8 gauge wire into a 4 gauge socket required a lot of solder to fill the voids. Neither the cable nor the eyes was small enough for my electric soldering iron to cope so I pulled out my little gas blow torch. That did the job brilliantly and I very quickly had the first cable soldered into the first eye and then the second. That was when I ran out of gas.

For about the last 10 years I’ve had a small bottle of butane that came with a gas soldering iron that I had. That iron fell apart having had hardly any use and hence I replaced it with my small butane torch. The little gas cylinder had worked for years - filling my gas soldering iron and then my butane torch. Well, I filled the torch before I started today and then put as much in the torch as I could before the gas in my 10 year old cylinder finally ran out.

There wasn’t really enough in my torch to be able to tin the other end of the cables. Remembering I own a butane gas cooker which has cylinders of the same kind as my lighter-filler cylinder, I tried one of those. It fit the blowtorch perfectly and within a few seconds I’d fully charges it’s little tank. Away I went. The ends were soldered onto the connectors, ready to be inserted into the plastic of the connector only I’d dribbled quite a bit of solder. A file quickly removed the excess and I clipped the whole thing together as can be seen in the photo.

Saving time for tomorrow, I located a length of 10 gauge black wire. I was sure I had spare 10 gauge red but I think I might have used it. I could not locate it. Soon the extra cable was ready to insert into the plastic plug. That left me with to wires to cut under the bus tomorrow, one wire to solder and the battery to pull out and switch with another. Depending on the cross bar I might have to build a new cross bar to go over the battery to hold it down. The existing one is not designed to pass over such huge battery vents. The vents on a flooded battery are much bigger than those on an AGM deep-cycle battery.

A few days ago, if you’ll recall, I had a series of falls and accidents. As somebody else said - it was a good-for-nothing day. Now my knee is swollen so I think I have some bursitis. That will probably only go away if I rest for a few days.

The plan for tomorrow is to switch out the battery, connect the connectors and test the battery voltage. I’m hoping it won’t have dropped any further than 12.6v tomorrow. A flooded lead acid should be 12.6 - 12.8v. After that it will be a case of seeing how long the battery will last before it drops to 12.35v or 12.4v. At that point the battery is 25% discharged and should be recharged in order to maintain optimum efficiency.

Overnight I considered batteries. If I had four lawnmower batteries costing $21.72 each then I’d have a total expenditure of $86.88 or around the same cost as a 35AH deep cycle battery with around the same optimal capacity (maybe more ). Do I need that much power? Most likely not. The cost of welding extra brackets is not trivial either. Assuming the battery is 35ah then 25% would keep my fans running for about 75 minutes. That’s more than enough time for solar power to kick in and. Run it straight from the panels.

For the past couple of days I’ve been sitting in the bus working by lantern light. I’ve left the 12v system unused because the battery is in such poor condition. It really has not been bad and had me wondering whether the 12v system was overkill. That was until I remembered charging my phone etc. While out in the bus I’ve been thinking about getting back into coding.

Until about 2007 I did a lot of computer software coding. I stopped in 2007 For reasons that shall not be mentioned. I trained as a programmer and never actually managed to find a programming position. It took me literally years to find out that advertised positions don’t really exist and that the way to get work was either walk in the door at the right time or know somebody on the inside. Anyway, I looked at getting something to use for Linux in order to do coding. Then little by little I found that I have an old Nexus tablet that’s been bricked for a few years. It came from Walmart as a refurb and gave up after 14 months. I had a go at reflashing it and the instructions must have been wrong because nothing happened. Now I find new instructions and might have another go. More so because I found one can actually write code using an android tablet. That would be enough to get me back into coding. Maybe even get myself a position writing code. The beauty though of coding is it can be done online. It’s the perfect online job. Perfect to do if you’re traveling in the bus and have time to kill.

How much power do I need?

How much power I need is a very intriguing question. This revolves around several different scenarios:

• For cooking and refrigeration I need 120v and probably at least 20A
• For lighting and air circulation I need 12v and about 2A
• For USB charging I need another 12v and about 2A
• For the shower pump I need probably 3A at 12V.
• In total if all my 12V electrics were used simultaneously (which is nuts) then I’m talking about 15A
• For ventilation I need 3.75A at 12V.

Right now the power is off. The extraction fans used so much in their 5 minute runs since this morning that at about 3pm the charge controller cut the power. It’s a bright, sunny day too. As the charge controller reckoned I was getting only 5W from my combined panels I took both of my watt meters out of the system as I know they both gobble power. I also put my twin 30w panels directly in the sun. 

I had an interesting issue this morning. The charge controller cut the power from the battery at 3pm citing low battery power and showing me the battery was at 11.4v. At 5pm the charge controller showed the battery was at 0% charge yet the power being taken off the panels was low. The controller also said it was administering a float charge - which would tine in with the minuscule power being taken off the panels. 

Curiosity overtook me as I noticed the controller was on “float” so I flipped the battery switch to turn the battery off and then on. Immediately I did, the controller went into boost charge mode then declared the battery to be at 100%.

For a 13.8v battery to have a top of 13.4v and to recharge from empty to full on 95w of panels in about two hours is little short of unbelievable. In fact, it is unbelievable. 95W will produce at maximum 7.9A and in two hours 15.7AH. For a flat 35AH battery that might just about be possible but given the panels are not all ideally situated and the twin 30W are partially shaded by tree leaves I’m going to say these battery figures are total poppycock.

We keep returning to the battery being questionable. I’m definitely going to say that I just don’t think the Harbor Freight battery was worth the money I paid for it. Given how little use I’ve had out of it and how unstressed it has been I believe that it was probably a customer return. What probably happened was a customer had a Harbor Freight battery and kept it looking good. They probably bought a replacement, wiped down the first one to make it look good, put a full charge on it using a car charger then put it in the box from the new battery, returned it as not required and took the money or the credit for something else. What a great scam. He could get a brand new battery every year like that and leave suckers like me buying the equivalent of used shoes.

Two things my mother told me never to buy secondhand. One was shoes and the other was underwear. I’d add a few extras like electronics. They’re not worth anything secondhand as they’re just somebody else’s problem being sold.

Going back to how much power I need, a small generator would not give me enough power to run my 120v electrics. I’ve looked at generators many times and found them both expensive and not all that good. 1.5KW would be the ideal size but there aren’t any that will fit underneath the bus without protruding below the skirt. They also all seem (in the economical range) to be pull start. The small generators seem to be 800w maximum and they still weight about 50lbs. That’s quite a bit, especially for something that’ll have to be hauled in and out regularly.

Returning to the battery - as the solar controller was giving me 100% charge, I turned my ventilation fans on for exactly 60 seconds. During that time the controller recorded the battery as dropping to 72% then as soon as the fans were turned off, it sprang back up to 94%. A minute or so later it was back at 100%. If I didn’t already suspect the battery was toast, I’d be banging my head on the desk wondering why I was getting such odd results. 

My battery connector left Houston via DHL a few days ago. No news as to whether it has gone anywhere else yet. The Chinese cigarette plug to SAE adaptor never left New York so I contacted the seller who managed to sound surprised and asked if I wanted a refund or for him to send another unit. I told him it’d been so long already that I had a work around in place and that a refund was in order. I’ve not heard back yet.

When the connector arrives I shall remove my existing battery. I shan’t fiddle with the connections under the bus - that’s too fiddly - I’ll just snip the cables off close to the terminals. Then I can add my real connector to the wires, put a connector on the battery, lift the replacement battery into place and see how it all goes.

It’s just a lawnmower battery but should be good for a test subject. If I can get better life out of that then I might stick with it or get myself a better battery. I really don’t see why a battery shouldn’t last a lot longer in actual use. My suspicion is that the Harbor Freight battery is confusing the solar controllers because it’s so much beyond the end of its life. I’m very tempted to buy a battery tester so that I can do a proper drop test on the battery. Thus I checked and Found Harbor Freight has a load tester for $21.99 but Walmart which is far closer has one for $23.28. I can guarantee that I’d spend more in fuel driving to Harbor Freight than I’d save over buying Walmart’s thing. It’s a darned sight easier to get to Walmart in the event of returns too.

As I’ve been without power in the bus the most part of the day, I’ve had the window open and a screen in place. That screen isn’t perfect. It needs some masking tape along the top and bottom to stop critters sneaking in but it stops 99% of the casual fly ins. I’ve had quite a nice cool breeze too.

Just now I watched an interesting video on how to recondition a battery. It just seemed to me to be a bit pointless because after reconditioning the battery still came up as weak. I think mine would come up as beyond the grave! So, yes, I’m going to have to replace the battery. I’m scratching my head over somebody reconditioning a battery so that instead of working like it was new, it works half as well. Seems to me they could have saved the effort and the fiddling about and just gone and got a new battery.

Meanwhile, those with long memories will recall the problems I had in acquiring this thing. It’s a remote operated video camera. As I’ve now got access to real (fast) wifi, I thought I’d try it. When I used it as a standalone device it was very sluggish and slow. Using it as a wifi connected device hasn’t changed anything - it’s still sluggish and slow. I’m so glad I didn’t pay a lot for it. Not only is it - as I said - sluggish but it also gets dreadfully hot. Now the reason for that I cannot fathom. I’ve never seen any other webcam get hot. Still, its something to play with further. I can put this outside and connect to a small solar panel and a battery to see just what it’s capable of. I suspect it’s probably a darned good yard monitor. I might set it up one day to observe the front yard. Or I suppose I could use it to observe inside the chicken coop. Indeed, put a small telescope on it and I can record the goings on elsewhere.

All now is dependent upon bits arriving. I need wire to be able to complete the back solar input so that’s on hold til my next trip to the hardware store. That’s bound to be coming soon since somebody mentioned they wanted me to drive a bus. No point in rushing and spending gas money, especially since I might still have to fork out for a new battery even though I’ll try to use the lawnmower battery.

Vague figures adding to the confusion

It would have helped if the Harbor Freight battery had come with a data sheet. It did not, sadly. Thus I have pretty much a mystery battery. Indeed, adding to the mystery - the Harbor Freight website claims it is an AGM battery while the battery itself has no marking on it declaring it to be AGM , SLA, Gel or a fruit. Clearly as the voltage goes up to 13.4v it cannot be SLA nor a Gel nor even AGM. It’s definitely not FLA so it must therefore be a lemon.

Today my second watt meter arrived and I put that between the charge controller and the solar panel. Now I have two in use - the first goes between the charge controller and the load. Flipping the switches at 3pm to clear the data on both wattmeters should prove interesting. As I sit writing I have just a circulation fan blowing over my desk. The circulation fan is a 0.25A CPU fan. It makes a loud whirring noise but it’s not objectionable.

As you can see, with the two diagnostic watt meters in place, the wiring looks worse than ever. It’s going to be helpful at about 8pm to compare the figures. I’ll just compare amp hours but I have a feeling that it’s not going to match. I’m probably going to be putting more into the battery than I’m getting out due to internal leakage. I’m at this point trying to find a reason for the battery to be playing up rather than a reason to buy a new battery.

One of the problems about figures for batteries in the absence of a data sheet is that the only information is online. We all know exactly how wonderfully accurate the internet is, don’t we? I remember a cartoon of Little Johnny holding up a report card with a big red F on it, exclaiming “but I copied it exactly as it said on the internet”. I saw a very nice graph the other day that said AGM batteries are 100% charged at 13.8v. Today I found one that said 13v. Another the other day claimed temperature made a difference and that in low temperatures 14.3v was full and the hotter it got the lower the capacity. These sites are not forums nor other questionable sites but allegedly authoritative sites. With a variation like that, the fountains of blood from the average rock seem easier to capture than the truth.

Just as a little titbit, the power usage at 45 minutes was 0.184AH and the power from the panels was 0.204AH. The batteries were not quite full when I started operations. That’s 2.5 watt hours used and 2.7 watt hours in.

I did a little research about batteries and apparently there’s some kind of formula where one should not draw more than 1/8th of the battery power. Thus with a 35AH battery one should not draw more than 4.375A. My twin extraction fans use 3.74A between them. I’m comfortably under the C/8 figure. There’s another school of though that used C/20 which would be 1.75A which I’m well over. But there you go - a morass of different figures. At this point I’m not going to be conservative and pick the lower figure. I’m not going to run around screaming with my hands in the air either. I’m going to say that there are so many unverified figures that these have to be more of Little Johnny’s facts.

Looking into batteries, there seem to be a huge number of different types. AGM, Gel, FLD, Lithium and SLA. Lithium is just rohibitively expensive as it’s the trendiest. AGM seems pretty good but is unsupported by the vast majority of charge controllers. That just seems bizarre. Going further there is also ordinary, deep cycle and marine. This latter option is what I want to talk about today since the first are just different chemistries and thus pretty much like the choice between raspberry sorbet, cherry parfait and tiramisu.

An ordinary battery (usually FLA (flooded lead acid) is intended for starting cars etc and is not intended to go below 75% capacity. Below 75% and there’s a risk of damaging the battery. In a lawnmower size, these cost about $20. The deeper the discharge the shorter the life.

A deep cycle battery is intended to be charged slowly, discharged slowly and is supposed to last a good long time because all the articles say the plates are thicker. Without a data sheet on the Harbor Freight battery, I wonder whether the discharge rate is insanely low.

A marine battery marries the deep cycle with the FLA. It’s designed for use with trolling motors. I always thought trolling was going onto a White Supremacist forum and posting messages like “Hey Dude, I just did your wife and I’m black”. Apparently there are electric motors driving small boats. Who said the hobby fishing industry hadn’t tried to go green though they could get some exercise in by using their oars! Anyway, looking at the marine figures it seems at 5A draw one should get 7 hours out of a 35AH battery.

Now, let’s look at that figure - seven goes into 35 very nicely but brings the battery down to zero so the figure is theoretical rather than practical. I’m going to say that at 80% maximum draw from a marine or deep cycle battery, the lowest one should go is probably to 8ah or use a maximum of 27AH. At 5A that’s just over five hours, not seven. That’s the problem when Little Johnny writes out all these internet tables and figures.

Today I had been going to run my ventilation with a single fan just to see whether it would have taken 50 minutes to get to the same level it did yesterday. As my watt meter arrived, the plans changed and I decided to compare solar input versus power used. So, looking at the power usage I’m currently using just over 12 watts and generating just over 4 watts. Given that I have 95W of panels that has to have something to do with the battery’s absorption rate. I can honestly say I don’t truly understand that.

The fans both cut on automatically as intended a few minutes ago. That proves that the charge controller is way better than the previous controller. The fans brought power consumption up to 60W and yet solar generation or pull from the 95w of panels did not raise over the 4 or 5 watts. That’s just very strange, especially considering the sun is directly shining on at least 20w of panels with the others picking up reflected light.

In a few days my battery connecting plug arrives. I will try running the bus off a used lawnmower battery for comparison. I bet I’ll get better results! What I can’t fathom is why I’m not getting more power off the solar stuff at the moment.

Turning off all the major power using stuff - the fan, the phone charger etc and just leaving the 160ma door lock working, the figures read in favor of charging the battery. The input wattage rose to 5, the output down to 0.1w.

To be brutally honest, my original plan had been to power everything off D cells. It was pointed out to me that D cells at $1 a pair was a costly way of doing things. Somebody then talked me into solar. While I have had some success from solar, looking at the costs, it would have been way cheaper to have put a switch in the cockpit that allowed me to charge a house battery from the engine when the engine is running and to carry a $90 Harbor Freight generator. In terms of cost the switch is a negligible cost so say $20 max. Add the Harbor Freight Generator at $90 then add a 100AH battery at $100. Total cost $210. Instead I have spent:

• $80 on charge controllers
• $160 on solar panels
• $55 on a Harbor Freight battery

For a grand total of $295 or $75 more than if I’d just used a generator. And the system still isn’t functioning as it should. $75 would have bought 30 gallons of gas. More than that, it would have brought me battery charging when it’s dark, stormy or rainy. 

A few days ago, in a review of one of the solar items I saw somebody had written that by the time all the needed components had been purchased, solar power was uneconomical. I think I agree at the moment with that argument. This is why when I was asked today about an inverter and a battery to power two 160watt fans I suggested that a $90 harbor freight generator be used.

If I was starting from scratch again, I’d still be extremely tempted by the false promises of solar power. I think though that the reality is that solar just isn’t ready for mainstream use. I’m certainly not findit it worthwhile at the moment.  This could all be down to the battery though causing problems.

The crazy thing is that after having used 27.1 watt hours and generating just 11.9 watt hours, the battery is recorded as being at 100%. Something just does not seem quite right there. Where did the missing 15.2 watt hours come from? They have to have come from somewhere! Power does not miraculously appear. I shall have to see what happens next. This is more frustrating than gripping.

When the battery connector plug arrives, I’ll be able to dismount the current questionable battery and use a questionable lead-acid battery. That will, at least, have some known characteristics. I don’t actually know for certain exactly what this harbor freight battery really is.

One thing I have not done is to compare the two watt meters to see whether they both read the same. I’d totally forgotten about doing that! I could be going by swayed figures. Still, switching the battery out will be very interesting. If I charge the battery fully on a car charger, set the charge controller parameters and the time the system until it all cuts out from low voltage (having reached the cut off preset voltage) I’ll know how many AH I’ll have to play with. The I can let the solar system charge the battery and see how long that takes and how well the whole system works with a totally different battery chemistry.

I really feel I want a nice simple thing like the Harbor Freight battery being bad. Then I can just curse Harbor Freight and question the parentage of their Managing Director before going with a different solution. Nothing has ever been this simple and straightforward however.

As far as replacement batteries go...
A 35AH Deep Cycle SLA Duracell battery is $86 at BatteriesPlus.
A 35 AH Lawnmower FLD battery by an off brand is $21 from Walmart.
A 35AH Marine battery is $110 from Amazon.

I bought my Harbor Freight battery about a year ago. In fact, checking my blog it seems I mention at the end of August last year having bought it a “few weeks ago”. As it’s now July, the thing hasn’t even lasted a year if my analysis of it being a dead battery is accurate. Logically though - everything else in the system seems to work so logic dictates it’s more than likely to be the battery that’s bad. Wednesday will be the reckoning though as that’s when my connector arrives. I shall be able to disconnect my battery, connect a straight lead acid and try that as well as being able to take the AGM to some place like Batteries Plus or Autozone for testing.

HQST - WTF????

I sent an email to HQST to ask about the Bluetooth and USB connections on my charge controller. I stated they weren’t referenced in the manual but they were there and how do I use them. I received back an asinine reply that said there was no Bluetooth but there was USB. No instruction on how to use it - what it’s for etc.

Thus far the charge controller seems to be doing very well. I set my extraction fans going and it did not throw a wobbly unlike the previous digital controller though having said that, the previous controller didn’t do it consistently. It would let the fans work occasionally.

Today I set the fans going and found the voltages on the HQST meter are out of whack. I need to study that a bit more to see exactly how out of whack and which way they’re out of whack. I have a feeling they read higher than they actually are but I’m not sure by how much. The battery voltage stop I’d set at 13.8v but the battery voltage was 13.5v when I started the fans. It did not seem to have climbed much under the HQST controller.

After 26 minutes I could hear the fans weren’t sounding that great so I stopped the test. I’d left the solar panels switched on during this test. According to the HQST meter I had used precisely 1ah of power while my little blue meter reckons I had used near 2. The amperage used by my two 2.5w fans seems to be 3.75A combined. That’s pretty much what the little blue meter reckons. We’re pretty much agreed on that. It’s just the voltages that are out of whack.

Still, 26 minutes even with the panels switched on does not say an awful lot about a 35ah battery. According to my calculations, 26 minutes times 3.75A is 1.625AH. Now if the HQST meter is rounding down then the 1ah would be correct. If that battery was good I should be getting more than 26 minutes. I should be getting more like (based on 20AH usage) 5 hours and 20 minutes of just the two fans blowing. That’s approximately 12 times as long.

I’ve tried three different charge controllers on that battery. Despite the sky being overcast I’m getting plenty power from my solar panels. I’m going to say that having put a brand spanking new charge controller on that battery that the battery is likely no good. I’ll leave it charging with my HQST controller but I have very much a feeling that I’ll be replacing the battery next. This was a Harbor Freight Thunderbolt Magnum battery. I clocked it at 3.5AH instead of 35AH a week or two back. I’m going to have to say that today I probably clocked it at 2AH.

After just a few minutes with 95W of solar panels on an overcast day the controller reckons that battery which it said was close to 20% full is now 80% full. All I can say about that is that I will never buy another Harbor Freight battery. At $55 after coupons they’re just too darned expensive for something that only lasts a year. It could have been a customer return that had been put back on the shelf but that would make all their batteries suspect.

Having had interesting issues under the bus when I was trying to disconnect the battery a few days ago, I have a different solution. Rather than disconnect the wires from the battery I shall simply clip them and put a connector on them. That way I can simply wire a connector to the replacement battery and simply plug and unplug when needed, just transferring the connector over.

This time, rather than putting an expensive deep cycle battery I’ll put a cheap used lawnmower battery in and see how long that lasts before I kill it. Actually, according to the figures online, it seems a full car battery is 12.65v and one in need of being charged is 12.45v. Quite a narrow range! Having said that, if I can take it down to 12v that’ll give me plenty extra power. The downside is that unlike my AGM, it’s not vibration nor spill proof so it’d have to be mounted somewhere other than behind the back wheel. Perhaps that’s not quite the killer for that idea but a disincentive. Definitely if I had a plug in battery connector (got one ordered) then I could simply put the connector on a lead leading to a battery sitting on the ground if needed.

After about 90 minutes the batteries were recorded as being 100% full by the meter (or should I say battery). At the full 95W coming from the panels, this would work out at 150watt hours or about 10AH. Given that it’s cloudy and the 35AH battery was recorded at 20% (7AH), I find it extremely unlikely that the batteries are genuinely holding 35AH. It would have at full power taken 336 watt hours to fill the battery. That’s over 3 hours of full 100% sun on all panels. That will never happen because of the way the panels are mounted. This lends yet more credence to the Harbor Freight battery being stuffed.

An interesting (and unwelcome) side effect of my latest solar controller is that the meter on my solar panels reads zero volts. This is absolute nonsense since the meter is powered by solar electricity and would be unable to light itself up without power. I put this down to something funky the controller is doing when it had completed charging the battery.

While the battery is charging, the solar voltage is proudly displayed.

As can be seen - the panels are producing plenty voltage. Actually after the charge controller is turned off, the voltage usually rises to 19v or thereabouts.

As many of you know, I have a CDL and drove for a while for a school district. One has been in touch with me about doing more driving. I’m pretty 50/50 over doing more driving for school districts. $15 an hour really isn’t a lot of money. In many states that’s probably little better than minimum wage.  Today sealed it though - if I get a school bus driving contract then they’ll pay for my next driving medical. Those things are about $150.

I can’t say it’s a nastygram but definitely a reminder from the DMV that I need to book a new medical. I must say they’re sending this about 2 months in advance is going to cause a lot of people to completely forget about this. I know mine is due in September. If anybody read it (or if I even mentioned it) I signed up with a school district in June and went to a week of education sessions before working from August until October 2016 as an aide on a special needs bus. From then on I was a driver though I didn’t get my own bus until August of 2017. Then I got transferred from special needs to regular route in February this year. That was when (after a bunch of uncontrollable children that I assessed as a serious danger, I quit - my spotless driving record and no accidents on my conscience are worth far more to me than a pay packet). While I found it great fun to drive a school bus, I really want to do something else not driving related. Perhaps I should pick up programming again?

So, where now? The second watt meter should have arrived yesterday but didn’t. According to the tracking it should arrive tomorrow. It did arrive in Columbia but about 11:30 this morning - after the postman had left. Putting that in the system will tell me exactly how much power I am putting into the charge controller. I think by now though it has been established beyond a reasonable doubt that the battery is worthless. I can go on buying charge controller after charge controller hoping to make the battery work but I think it’s time to face reality that no charge controller changes will alter the fact that I should be getting more than 2AH out of a 35ah battery. That battery is trash. It might even have been trash when I bought it! I could take it to Autozone to get a drop test done on it but I don’t think that’ll change the result.

In terms of programming, 30 years ago I trained as a computer programmer. I never ever could find work as a programmer. Mind, I think the problem was nobody took me to one side and told me that job applications don’t work and that the only way to get a job doing anything was via contacts. Since then every job I’ve done has been through contacts or walking in the door and asking. I have had a go at these online services such as Careerbuilder etc. I’ve never ever had anything worthwhile out of them. In fact I wonder whether they’re just there to get people’s details ready for identity theft and to send spam and junk phonecalls. Looking around, Java seems a pretty strong contender for being worth learning. Perhaps I could get a cheap laptop, put Linux on it and write some Java?

The bus being all but completed. All I need to do is to change out the battery and fix a problem in the console. The rest is touch-up and modification. I’m not happy with the way I mounted my windscreen wiper because it’s at a very slight angle. That could do with being reworked, for example. Or I could just not drive in the rain (my preferred approach).

My old war wounds!

Yesterday I was out shopping and was rammed in the back of the ankle by a Walmart shopper crazed with blood lust who was attempting to drive one those electric shopping wheelchair things. Let’s just say the blood curdling scream of pain had the entire row of 30+ checkouts silenced so they all heard me remonstrate with the offender. Then getting the shopping home, one of Walmart’s high-quality plastic bags disintegrated and dropped a 10lb can of beans on my toe - hard enough to turn the entire toe black and to break the skin so when I removed my tennis shoe later, there was plenty blood visible.

Following that I fell over a casually discarded pile of garbage, going sprawling across a carpet from which I’d only just finished shoveling dog excrement. Let’s just say my skin touching that carpet is a nightmare so I ended up with a bloodied elbow, a bruised knee, a bruised thigh and a wrenched neck from that. Then, putting a frustrating folding nylon shopping cart away (which was playing as awkward as could be), I managed to wrench the nail on the same thumb that I broke the nail on a few months ago. It now looks horrible and is pretty painful.

So today I am pretty much hobbling around as though I’ve been thrown out of a plane without a parachute, landed in a tree, fought through 300 miles of territory with enemy soldiers shooting at me, kicking me and stumbling over rough terrain. Let’s just say there’s a lot of discomfort and I can’t bend down. It’s hard to walk, hard to get up from sitting, hard to sit and hard to turn my head.

Nevertheless, I picked up the mail yesterday and my charge controller had arrived. The second watt-meter was due to arrive today, according to eBay (whose figures sometimes work). Looking at the controller, it’s a great big very solid thing. It’s much bigger than my existing controllers and has a real heat sink on the back.

It’s twice the size of my other controllers. According to the display there’s a Bluetooth connection and a USB connection method. This is not referenced in the manual. There is a USB port on the side. Very puzzling to be honest. More so because I can find no information whatsoever on the controller online other than some YouTube reviews and copies of the manual. It wasn’t even possible to find any applicable apps for tablets or computers online relating to the feature.

The first thing I did was to set the controller up with my 5w panel and a 7ah battery. It worked and told me the temperature outside at that point was 42 centigrade. It’s all in Metric so for all you Fahrenheit lovers, 42 centigrade is 107.6F. I thought it was warm outside! So I had it going for about an hour then down came the rain so I had to rush to get it all under cover, nothing being waterproof.

Today I set to and installed the unit. It needed No 6 bolts and fortunately I had used No 6 bolts and No 6 rivnuts on the last controller. This one was bigger though so I needed to install more rivnuts in order to match up the mounting holes. As I could use one rivnut, I only had to install another three. That was a performance. I thought I knew where the mandrill for my rivnut puller was. I couldn’t see it. I hunted high and low to find it, scratching my head. In the end after drawing a blank I went back to the original container and found it hiding inside a bigger rivnut.

Putting the three holes in was a breeze using my step drill bit. Ideally I’d have used M5 rivnuts since I have a ton of them but couldn’t fit an M5 bolt through the holes in the charge controller. Similarly I couldn’t fit a No 8 bolt through (they’re similar in size). Fortunately I had spare No 6 rivnuts.

Having mounted the controller, connecting the wires was the next stage. That was the usual pain in the neck. The screws are pretty visible but where the wires are inserted is hidden. It’s too easy to open the screw a certain amount and put the wire in behind the clamp instead of into the clamp. This is a task for infinite patience and a small mirror - plus of course fifteen pairs of hands! So, I got the wires in place. The battery was switched on and that read the correct voltage. The solar panel was switched on and that read the correct voltage. Then The load wires were connected. Then came the fun bit.

Programming the device was nowhere near as simple as the instructions made out. There were extra steps involved or each time the thing would reset itself. I’m not sure even now that I have it set correctly. Reading around it seems that since it offers the options of... Sealed Lead Acid, Flooded Lead Acid, Gel and Lithium that I have to put it on the gel setting in order to charge my AGM battery. Then I had to raise the charging ceiling to 13.8v from 12.6v. While I was in there, I also raised the cutoff voltage from 11v to 11.6v. The bizarre thing was it was still showing me a 100% battery yet the battery is not full. The voltage is 13.4v not 13.8v and that will only run my fans for 30 minutes.

I missed a trick when I installed my ventilation system. I could have retasked the wires from the original student lights to power my fans when the bus was driving and just had a couple of relays to switch power from the solar battery to the bus circuits while driving. Still, at the time I put v1 of the ventilation in, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I’d not even conceived having solar back then.

Returning to the bus after several hours, the overcast day had not helped much. At one time the new solar controller told me the panels had been producing 18.1v but when I checked, the battery voltage was 13.1v. Not desperate but given that I did manage to raise the threshold to 13.8v, it’s not awe-inspiring. It’s scheduled to be pretty overcast for the rest of the week. I’m thinking that perhaps if I get a really good sunny day then the battery voltage may climb. If it never reaches 13.8v then I’ll know the battery is suspect. Mind, the second watt meter between the solar panels and the charge controller would tell me a lot more. I’ll also check to see if HQST has some kind of plugin monitor I can put on the USB side of the charge controller.

I’m definitely narrowing the problem down. It’s unlikely to be a brand new charge controller or the idiot between the chair and the desk that’s the problem. Right now I’m going to say it’s too soon to be certain but as of right now it’s a sunlight or a battery issue. I can put in an order for a new sun and they can just bulldoze the old one but I think that might be a bit expensive.

Slow post

I’m sitting in my bus in the dead center of South Carolina. A place so dead that if a leaf falls, they write about it in the local paper. Actually, that’’s probably not true - living here is quite noisy with the silence punctuated by the staccato rattle of gunfire and the occasional meth lab explosiuon. Time was the countryside would have been full of illegal stills but now meth pays more apparently.

Despite being in such harmonious surroundings, the post does get here and gets here quite respectably too. The postman graduated to a Jeep a few years ago and retired the horse. Mind, it was either a Jeep or a horse to get through the local dirt tracks with the Jeep being largely immune to the profusion of copperhead snakes.

I have four things on order. Some are coming from California which means they might be coming from California if China Inc has them in the warehouse. If they’re still on the banana boat however it could be optimistic to believe they’re going to arrive this month.

On order are:

• my new charge controller - due to arrive from California on the 24th. Hard to track this as the tracking number doesn’t work.
• My new watt meter - due to arrive from California on the 25th. Hard to track as the tracking number doesn’t work.
• Some MC4 connectors - due to arrive August 16th from Guangzhou, China. The tracking for that quit on the 6th of July so it’s hard to track.
• my SAE to cigarette lighter plug adaptor - due to arrive from Shenzhen, China between June 27th and July 18th. The tracking for that quit on June 24th when it reached New York.

The crazy thing is all of this stuff is lightweight and small. It’s incredible the amount of time it’s all taking. The parcel from Shenzhen looks very much as though it has been lost by USPS. That, for me, will be a first. In all the years I have been in the USA, I have only had one problem with USPS and this is the one problem.

It really wouldn’t have mattered if I’d bought this on Amazon or eBay though I used eBay because Amazon’s prices are outrageous, especially combined with minimum orders before shipping is waived. Amazon spends too much time trying to sell memberships and too little time on offering a right-priced product.

Years ago I used to work for a well known chain of bookstores, notable for producing their own e-reader when in fact rebadging an existing ereader would have been so much simpler. They had a membership that was only worth getting if you spent $250 a year on products from them. I don’t know about you but I buy all my books secondhand on abebooks.com or download free ereader versions on my iPad. I have not set foot inside a bookshop since I quit working for the last one in 2013. Why would I when I can get everything online? And of course with $80 Amazon membership (which probably only goes to Jeff Bezos booze and broads fund), I can guarantee I’d never buy enough to justify the $80. Last year I think I spent $30 on Amazon. The year before, $0.

So, I’m stuck with strange arrival dates from eBay. Having said that, I ordered a couple of switches from Amazon and they took weeks to arrive. It turned out Amazon had stated on the advert in small print where I wouldn’t normally look that the goods were not sold by Amazon but by some guy in China via Amazon’s website. I hadn’t realised Amazon was sneaky and dishonest like that but now I do. By the time they had arrived, I had employed a different solution.

My gripe with eBay is it’s hard to identify where their products come from. If it says it’s coming from California then I expect that to be true. It seems though that things coming from the common ports - New York, California, Charleston etc are likely not to be coming from a warehouse there but rather they’re advertised as soon as the slaves start pulling on the oars to propel the boat from the Chinese harbor toward the USA. It takes those political prisoners forever to row those great big boats - they need to eat some spinach!

So, end result I’m pretty much cooling my heels until stuff starts to arrive. The charge ontroller is the vital component I’m really waiting for. The connectors are the next most useful component. Once they arrive I can recycle some of the wire I’ve tasked differently in order to provide wiring for the rear solar input. As for the SAE to cigarette adaptor - I just don’t think it’s going to arrive. The watt meter isn’t essential but will be useful and will help me monitor my power situation better.

I’m looking at my first trip in the bus as a camper as being on the 7th of September. That’s going to be very good. I can’t wait to use my bus. Over the intervening time, once the new solar controller is installed and the second solar input installed, the bus will be completed. Then I have to fix a buzzing relay in the console. I suspect a screw might have fallen down there and look into lowering the brake pedal. Other than that, there is one stray wire that’s dangling from something the hillbillies did to the transmission.

As the bus has not had an oil change since November 2014, it’s overdue as the oil does not last forever even with occasional engine turnovers. That’ll be the ideal time for a good clean and lube and a new gasket on the sump. Some time I’ll have to buy new tires too. Those I have are elderly remolds on the back and the front has the infamous Goodyear G159 suicide tires. Those are known for exploding unexpectedly.

On the whole things are looking up though this China stuff is holding up progress. A pox on the people that lie and claim stuff is coming from California when it’s not. Another pox on Amazon and Jeff Bezos - just because!

Revelations 1.0

Not quoting the Book of Armaments, chapter two verses nine through twenty one, I did indeed have a revelation. Last night as I lay on my deathbed contemplating getting up to visit the loo, I realised that AGM batteries have a float voltage of 13.8v. My cheap and cheerful Chinese charger has a float voltage of 13.4v which is .4 of a volt off kilter.

Not being quite with it, being on my deathbed, I did order another charge controller. Probably not a smart move because it’s another PWM controller. Looking through the details today (I chose it because it was identical to the one Harbor Freight sells but less costly), I realised that while identical, even Harbor Freights charge controller won’t work with the AGM battery that Harbor Freight sells. Duh! I should have looked at that but stupidly thought that Harbor Freight knew and cared what they were doing. I forgot - they’re just box shifters.

So, today I’m still on my deathbed. I think I might have picked up something from rolling around in the dirt the other day, looking at my battery.

As you can see - the ground is just sand. I’ve been bitten by a black widow under the bus. I’ve seen snakes in the vicinity. Cats and rodents probably pee and poo everywhere there. There are probably spores galore. No wonder I’m on my deathbed. I’ll probably not be right for a few days.

Last night after I blogged, I pulled one of the controllers apart - the LED controller. It was as awful as the guy that reviewed one on YouTube  had suggested. The back forms a great big heatsink with the components on the PCB vaguely pressed against the heatsink. Good luck on that working all the time!

As can be seen, it’s got a date on the PCB of 2015. It needs to be updated to be able to charge all the different varieties of battery. SLA, gel and AGM batteries all have different voltages. The controller I bought yesterday can handle everything except AGM. Looking for something that handles AGM is hard. Nobody seems to stock anything.

This is the inside of the front cover. How lazy is that - they used the same cover for a different unit but put a sticker on over all the holes they weren’t using. Of course, being Chinese, its totally impossible to find out if the manufacturer has anything better or whether the case was designed for something produced many years ago that’s now no longer produced.

My blue charger that lacks any sort of name or model number (in true Chinese style). It does have three battery settings and they’re nicely labelled: B01, B02, B03. Heaven alone knows what all that means. Even the sticker on the side doesn’t give me any worthwhile information.

Taking the back off the controller - which also worked as one of those strange heatsinks, I found the remains of thermal glue on the backs of the 4 mosfets. Clearly that had not been glued well as the back just fell off with no reluctance of any sort. No identification visible anywhere.

I took the PCB out and looked. Right in the very center was a little text that said W88 1.2. That wasn’t very informative either. What we have therefore is a mystery charge controller that operates in a mysterious fashion. Basically, it’s yard art that is crying for a couple of decorative bullet holes.

So, where do I go from here? I have looked at expensive charge controllers and not been greatly impressed by what they claim to do. My MC4 connectors, second watt meter and so on are still on the way. My SAE to cigarette adaptor is still listed as being in New York. Since it’s been there since the 24th I’m going to say that the New York gangsters have worked out how to resurrect the dead and have resurrected Al Capone and he’s broken into the USPS warehouse specifically to steal my $6 adaptor.

These days I’m more in favor of ordering from within the USA than from China. Six weeks is just too bloody long to wait for everything. Having said that, when there’s a major price difference then I see the value.

Looking up the W99 v1.2 online I found everything from exotic sex toys to parts for a Soviet anti-aircraft missile. I did not find any listings for solar controllers. That’s a bummer. Looking around though I did find a charge controller that came from India. That might be worth a look. Having said that though I am reminded of a video I saw today on YouTube. A fellow bought an American brand generator from Lowes for next to nothing because it didn’t work. He stripped it down and discovered that the piston rings had broken. The manufacturer couldn’t find the part number then quoted 15 days to get them. Clearly coming from China. Armed with the part number and the logo stamped on the piston head he found it was a Chinese part by a Chinese company. It wasnt an American generator at all - it was a Chinese generator assembled in America. As a footnote he found some piston rings that fitted, off the shelf and they came from a 50 year old Honda moped.

I’m skeptical about buying things that are allegedly “American made” because hardly any manufacturing happens in America. There was a scandal some years ago when the defense people found American missiles were made with chips that came from China.

I will put the new charge controller in when it comes. Being digital I should be able to control the shut off, start-up and float voltages. If that doesn’t improve on the miserable 20 minutes I’ve been getting out of the battery then I shall have to don a breathing mask and get down under the bus, take the Harbor Freight battery out and put a SLA deep cycle or just the plain old lawnmower battery in and see how that does.

When I tested my twin 30W panels I was getting plenty wattage out of them. Those alone at just 30W between them instead of the 60W they are, should produce in a day 300 watt hours or 25AH which is more than enough to fill a completely dead 35AH battery.

Now we know - or do we?

At about 3:30pm I turned on the battery on the bus. It measured 13.2v so we can safely assume that it’s charged or patially charged resting voltage is 13.2v. Seventeen and a half hours should have allowed the battery sufficient rest time.

What I have not yet done is to charge the battery on a car charger. That’s still to come. I have bags of time to sort out what’s going on. I’m not going to be using the bus til September. I know I should take it for an oil change, clean, lube and new oil gasket. I can do that in August.

I’m still waiting for stuff to arrive in the post. I’ve got MC4 connectors coming and a new watt meter.  The cigarette lighter to Hopkins adaptor seems to be missing. According to the website it reached New York but I’ve not seen it update since. It has until the 18th to arrive so on the 19th I can file it as missing.

Before I start charging my battery with a car charger I want to put the watt meter on it so I have watt meters both sides, run the battery down after dark, let it charge during the day and then run it down in order to compare figures. I want to see what kind of loss is going on between power coming in and going out.

At this point I’m still not 100% sure what’s going on. It’s either a faulty charge controller or a faulty battery. It could be both. To be honest I’m not keen on the cost of replacing either or both. I know it’s going to be between $80 and $180.

In my research on charge controllers I’ve seen a lot of different reviews. The general theme seems to be that the cheap charge controllers have issues. The really crazy thing is that the issues could all have been easily resolved by simple design changes.

As can be seen, there are the terrible two. I have several copies of each of these controllers. The blue one comes in many guises and many different prices. Look at the form factor of both. If the charge controller is under $100 and resembles either of these, it is to be avoided. I’ve seen the bottom one sold as MPPT whereas it is PWM. As said before, the top one works but the software crashes and not only that but it will switch the load off randomly. The bottom one does not switch the load off when the battery is low. Instead it pulses the load in a rather useless manner. It might just as well not have a place to wire the load!

This little gizmo is a voltage converter. It’s supposed to convert any voltage from 9v to 24v to 12v. It’s allegedly a DC-DC converter but it cab’t be. There is no coil. There should be a whopping great big coil. I couldn’t see one initially until I put on my jewelers eyeglass. Then I saw it - that little circular component at the top right. I had been expecting something more solid than this to be honest and something way bigger. It’s not worthwhile for anything I’m doing and is a mere toy. If that converts an amp, I’d be surprised.

As I keep saying - don’t spend anything over $20 on eBay - you never know what you’re going to get or whether it’s going to be worthwhile. For charging the 12v battery to keep my internal fans, lights and USB chargers running, the bad chargers are acceptible but would be better running off a burglar alarm battery.

Looking at the differences between MPPT and PWM charge controllers, I like the fact MPPT controllers get about 30% more out of a solar panel than PWM controllers get. Having said that, how much do I get with my solar panels? Because I put a panel meter on and can switch the panels out of the circuit to the charge controller I can tell you that I’m currently getting 19v from my panels. There are 95W total of panels. If I divide 95 by 19 and multiply by 12 that should give a reasonable approximation of how much power the panels are capable of producing in bright sun. That works out as 60W. Notice how the panels now produce a third less power? In average lighting they will be producing maybe 30 - 45W. So, lets do a quick calculation. At 30W over 8 hours that will be 240wh of power or around 20ah. That would mostly fill a totally empty 35ah battery.

I’ll now plug my door lock back in and turn the desk light on. I have my desk fan, tablet charger, light and door lock on. That’s a draw of 1.22A or 15.7W. This is what I normally have going on when I’m sitting working at my desk in the bus. Under this load I can (assuming the low 30W figure) work for 16 hours before needing to take a break to allow the batteries to charge. In actual fact the normal power usage is considerably less because there’s something called sleep and something else called daylight.

Assuming my door unlocker keeps using 0.02A then That should consume in 24 hours no more than 0.28AH. With the current strange power situation, it should be safe to leave it plugged in. I’d been concerned that the controller would start pulsing current to it which would be the absolute worst for any kind of electronics.

Looking at the barge controllers, an MPPT could probably recover some of the lost wattage with its built-in DC-DC converter. Equally one could just put a DC-DC converter and simply output 15v DC straight from the panels converted from 19v between the panels and the PWM controller. I like go mess with electronics but when I want something that works, I tend to buy it if possible. We did electronics in high-school but at a very basic level. I wanted to get into the more interesting electronics but did not get on well with the teacher or the ultra-geeky electronics students so I never managed to get into that class. The computer class was another matter entirely! I knew more after the first week than the teacher did. In fact that’s what I qualified in, the first time around in college. It didn’t get me anywhere because I didn’t and still refuse to kiss asses to get work. The world should not be a casting couch! It goes against my morals.

Looking at the reviews of charge controllers it’s very hard to differentiate at the low cost level what’s good and what’s bad. It seems as I’ve probably mentioned before to be that the sub $100 controllers can be an iffy proposition. I like the idea of an MPPT controller but am alarmed at the fact somebody had one that caught fire. I like the low cost of the PWM controllers. I’m still stumped though until I receive my new watt meter. I need to be able to record what’s going in and what’s going out, simultaneously. I do know the current controller needs to be replaced from a performance point of view.

Renology has a nice PWM controller that works solely as a charge controller. It does not attempt to cut the power to the load when the battery is critically low. That’s a bit of an annoyance. Looking around there seems to be a low power consumption low voltage cutoff relay. It requires a manual reset but that shouldn’t be a major problem. In fact, a manual reset does alert one to the presence of a problem. Lots of things to think about though the simple thing would be to go for an all-in-one unit.

The more I look at PWM controllers, the more people seem to sell them with various badges. It’s really hard to tell which are the good and which are the bad after having seen several hundred reviews. Pretty much the same with MPPT but at a higher price. It very much seems a case of trying to pin the tail on the donkey.

Memory Effect?

I recall reading somewhere that batteries have a memory effect. I’ve also recently read that lead-acid batteries should be left to sit for 12 - 24 hours before the voltage can be properly measured. What that means in terms of my battery problems, I’m not sure but I’m willing to try anything as long as it’s free.

After dark I wandered to the back of the bus and checked my watt meter. I’d flipped the power earlier today to reset the watt meter. Already in the maybe 4 hours since then it had racked up 0.3wh of power usage. Now that is the actual watt meter, the broken fuse sensors and the rechargeable fan timer. Nothing else is switched on. 0.3 watt hours isn’t going to kill anybody but I switched the load off in order to let the battery settle. At that point (9.06pm) and it had been dark for about an hour, the voltage read 13.14v.

Tomorrow the plan is to return to turn the battery back on some time after midday. The system will have had about 18 hours to “settle”. Then I shall be interested to see what the voltage reads. Earlier when I checked I was seeing about 14 volts and when I put my battery tester on, the battery was reading full. I think somehow the meter was being misled.

You probably can’t see but I also turned the solar power off. That’s the brown circular switch. That’s so that when I turn the battery back on (big orange switch), the meters etc will not be misled by the sudden influx of 95 watts of power.

Also in the picture you can see I perched my other charge controller on top of my working charge controller. The top one is one of those black $10 charge controllers with a digital diaplay. There are tons of them around for prices ranging from $10 to $200 on Amazon and eBay, frequently misidentified as MPPT controllers whereas in fact they’re PWM. The digital controller has the distinction of being the only controller I’ve ever used that experienced regular software crashes. Ideally a controller would have no software but would work off straightforward bug free electrical circuits.

Oddly enough I grew up loving computers and studied to become a computer programmer. Well I passed all the exams and never could find work as a programmer despite being very good at it and selling shareware that I’d written online. Now the point of that is that I know there’s no software ever written that does not have bugs. This is why I like things that don’t have computers aboard. My bus has no computers. I’d love my charge controller to be computer free too.

In this picture you can see the timer. It’s one of those programmable timers from China. It’s way too fancy for my liking with too many settings but it works. I have the fan set for automatic on-off periods. Given that I’m experiencing issues, I’m not able to use it on timer right now. I’m having to use manual mode which bizarrely neeeds the keypad to be unlocked every time by poking the bottom left button 4 times in quick succession. Needless to say it’s Chinese and probably some Chinese fellow’s idea of a good time.

With the current battery state, the fan left on automatic will just drain the battery, using the current setup. With the digital charge controller, each time the fan comes on, the charge controller will just crash.

This picture shows some 1 microfarad capacitors. I had one spare small Mylar capacitor and put it across the fan motor and reduced crashes from the digital charge controller considerably. I didn’t eliminate them though so I got a bigger set of capacitors. It will be very interesting to see what effect if any, using these willl have. I should not, or course, be having to put capacitors. The charge controller should just work but who knows what was going through the Chinaman’s head when he designed this. If the 18th and 19th century are anything to go by, I would not be surprised if the drafting pen wasn’t right beside an opium pipe.

With the power off for the moment I resorted to my older lighting method. These lanterns are not the best in the world but you can just about see to do things with them. They’re in no way comfortable for reading but they do provide light to see. I even have a shower pump powered by 4 D cells. My original plan had been not to have any native electrical power. I’d figured I could run lighting off D cells and the shower too. I even got a solar D cell charger. Heaven knows how many days it would cost to charge a pair of D cells. I even managed to get some but never managed to get any more of the same capacity. Then I went for a 12v system anyway.

So tomorrow will be interesting. With the battery having rested for 18 hours I will be able to measure it. Of course it might be worth leaving it the full 24 hours to see what difference that makes. I’m in no great hurry.

5:42 and the fan is running

After a couple of days of pretty good sun and having all my solar panels in use I figure that 11 hours of daylight a day even if it’s only producing 10% of my 95W of potential power should have produced a minimum (two days) of 209 watt hours or 17 AH of electricity. That should be enough to run my 4A of fans and light for about 4.25 hours. I rather suspect that it will be considerably less - more like 30 minutes. To avoid corrupting the figures, the solar panels were turned off at the commencement of the experiment.

For ventilation I do get the feeling that a proper roof hatch and floor vents is probably a better way of doing things. Use natures convection to remove hot air. Indeed, the Arabs have had air conditioning for centuries. They have underground reservoirs stocked with fish that eat mosquito larvae. Air is sucked in via convection and then passes up into homes. The homes have tall chimneys that increase draft so the hot air is expelled and cool, moist air is drawn in. Very neat and very low maintainance.

Anyway the upshot of the test was that at 6:02 the light started flashing though I’d heard the fan slow down way before that. The voltage on the watt meter kept dropping and when it got to 10.4v with thelight flasing and the fan doing hardly anything, I stopped the experiment. At that point the 4A recorded power usage should have been about a third of 4Ah. Indeed it came out at 2Ah though I did not zero the meter before commencing the experiment.

Today the weather is cloudy but there’s still plenty light - sufficient for solar power! What I really need to do to get definitive figures is to install two meters. One on the solar input and one on the battery usage. Right now I’m kind of kicking myself for allowing myself to be tempted into using solar panels.

I have two 10W panels and I think they might have been $25 each. I have a 15W panel that was probably $50 and I have two 30W panels that were about $60 for the pair. Thats $160 of solar panels plus the dubious Harbor Freight $75 battery that I actually paid $50 for after coupons.

Now, with a split charger and a big marine battery put in the battery compartment with the bus batteries I would have no issue with solar panels and indeed a big 100AH marine battery would have been $100. That could have been charged using an ordinary car battery charger when the bus engine wasn’t running and that could have been run off a $80 Harbor Freight lightweight portable generator.

At 100AH I would have 50AH of power giving me 12 hours of one light and the extraction fans instead of a 35AH battery giving me 17AH or 4.25 hours of light and fans. The kicker there is that I would have spent $30 less doing it that way.

So, what’s the way forward? I’m still not sure what’s going on - whether it’s the solar thing that’s garbage or the battery. I did see somebody trying and failing to run solar powered air conditioning on their top of the line RV on youtube. I believe their AC kicked in at 80A and ran at 50A. They were congratulating themselves over having working AC but 50A at 12V is still 600 watts and my experience of solar is that it doesn’t provide anywhere near the wattage promised.

The crazy thing is, a few minutes after the voltage dropped to 10.5v, it was back up to 13v which is were it currently stands. It’s now 6:25 and the voltage is 13V. Now on a rational system that would be a 100% battery.

Assuming for some unknown reason I’ve been well and truly shafted by Harbor Freight and that inside my huge 35Ah U1 sized battery is a tiny little 4.5AH burglar alarm battery, in 25 minutes at say 10W then I might have picked up half an amp hour of power. Being generous and saying I’m picking up 50% of what my panels are rated at then that would be 45-50ah so say 45ah. Over 25 minutes (say half an hour) that would be 1.875AH. Indeed, that would probably be about half the battery and a reason for the battery to be full.

I can honestly say whatever’s wrong, I’m not very impressed! The next stage will be to roll underneath the bus to see about removing the offending battery. Then I’ll put it on a proper battery charger before retesting. There are two possible scenarios then. If the battery runs the fans for a full 4 hours then then the solar side is a total waste of time and I might just as well strip the panels off, patch the rivet holes and toss the panels before going for the split charger and bigger battery that I feel I was talked out of in the first place. Or I could just leave the panels there and recognize all they’ll do is reduce power usage. If its the battery then I have a lawnmower battery standing by ready to take its place.

Right now I’m so irked I could spit! I do feel the world has been hoodwinked by the green movement. Because the energy generators could not make their power more efficiently (read were unwilling to make the investment) the blame for greenhouse gasses (don’t get me started on that one) was placed on the hapless consumer. The hapless consumer was told to use energy efficient (read dimmer) light bulbs. Instead of using standard incandescent light bulbs that lasted as long as the manufacturers designed them (6 months) and which were made of glass, steel, plaster and tungsten, all of which could be happily buried in your vegetable patch with no worries, the hapless consumer was pushed to compact fluorescent lighting. CFL is far dimmer so the lies that said a 9W CFL was equivalent to a 100W incandescent meant people had to get 18W CFL. Now the CFL is made largely of glass and plastic and mercury. Mercury is highly toxic and the vapor form of mercury in the CFL will kill and cause all kinds of nasty effects.

Eventually CFLs got better in longevity but not in toxicity and not in recyclability. The glass from an incandescent bulb would have broken down into sand over time while the rest would have rusted away and been absorbed by the soil in a harmless way. CFLs remain toxic for centuries. Then some smartass came out with LED lights. Harsh, directional light that’s nowhere near as bright as claimed. While the LED lights have no real toxins aside from phosphorous, they cannot be recycled and have no place to go other than landfill. They will not break down like an incandescent bulb. They don’t last as long as manufacturers claim either. In the bathroom I put 4 LED bulbs. There was an incandescent there already. The incandescent (which hasn’t been made for 5 years) is still working. The LEDs - only one is still working. They were supposed to last 10 years and three didn’t last more than 6 months. One didn’t make a week! In my bus one LED failed within a very short period.

So, green movement? Not really - pollution movement. Look at the cadmium, arsenic and mercury plus all the slave labour that goes into making solar panels. They’re not exactly green. Look at all the unrecycable waste the green movement has produced. CFLs, LEDs... None of it is recyclable.

The problem with the green movement is in measurement. They don’t give honest measures of anything. Coal fired power stations produced soot and carbon dioxide. The soot could be cleaned with filters. The carbon dioxide captured and turned into something else. But no - carbon dioxide is bad because the power stations can’t be bothered to recycle it or clean up their act. Hence it became the fault of the consumer. That logic feels like a rapist being appointed to be the judge in their own rape case.

Give me a generator and let me run it off alcohol. That’s green. The generator is steel and steel is recycled. Alcohol comes from plants. No slave labour is involved nor especially polluting processes needed to make the generator nor the alcohol.

Looking under the bus nd getting awfully sandy in the process, I saw my offending battery. It’s going to be a challenge to remove. I think it was a challenge to install too. Unlike most other things, the battery connectors seem to use a 10mm bolt. Well, I have a 10mm wrench but I need two. I certainly don’t want to go to Harbor Freight and don’t remember how I did it last time either.

So, I looked at the battery again and decided what I need to do once the battery is loose and on the ground is to put it in the right way around. At the moment the black cable goes to positive and the red to negative. I was too fed up to switch it around. Another thing I need to do is to add some kind of easy connector that I can just pop apart and pull the battery down.

I grabbed a battery charger from the shed with the intention of trying it on the battery but what with it getting dark, I really didn’t feel too much like it today. Tomorrow though is a complete other day! This will be my last ditch attempt with this battery. If when I turn the solar and the battery off and charge it for 8 hours, it doesn’t give me the power I need, it’s the battery that’s dead.

Meanwhile I shall look online to see if I can get a second watt meter. That will allow me to measure incoming solar and outgoing power simultaneously. That’ll tell me where I am. Another thought is to put some kind of incoming power port in my electrical system that will allow me to switch the battery to mains charging and charge it from the mains.

I remember reading somewhere that while a solar panel will produce (in my case 95W) that 95W doesn’t go to the battery. In a best case scenario when the panel is producing 19v, the wattage is divided my 19. Thus 95w over 19 is actually 5A as opposed to the expected 7.9A. It’s a third less. Let’s back-calculate my power from today.

2Ah from the battery times 12v is 24 watt hours. That works out at 12 watt hours a day. That’s 1 watt of power (approx) for every hour light was striking my solar panels. That works out at 1% efficiency. That, surely, has to be some kind of practical joke! Anyway, up-converting by generously doubling it, that works out at 2% efficiency at 2 watts per hour. Divided by 12 that’s 0.16A.

I remember metering my two 30W panels and I was definitely getting at least 50W from them or as much as my charge controller would allow. Thus, I spent a massive $11 and ordered another watt meter. I want to measure input as well as output, Normally I wouldn’t bother but since the guy who seems to be some kind of electronics guru on youtube was using exactly the same meter to measure input and output with the solar controllers he was testing, I figure it’s a good equipment choice. He seems to know what he’s doing. Not only that but he used two for the very same reason I feel I need two.

I will get to the bottom of this. I’m stumbling around in the dark right now.  Now the flaw in the plan is that the charge controller has a tendency to reduce and stop accepting charge when it figures the battery is full. That will tend to skew my measurements as it will not be a measure of watts actually produced but watts accepted by the charge controller. It’s not a case of being back at square one but it’s a case of having a little more information.

Confusing matters is the fact the battery is constantly reported as having far more charge than a battery should have. Making things further difficult is that I read one answer in one place and another that’s totally the opposite somewhere else. Indeed I am reminded of the cartoon I saw some 20 years ago. A boy was holding up a report card with an F on it in red. “Whadda ya mean?... I copied it down exactly as it said on the internet!”

Tomorrow is going to be battery out day. It might also be an opportune time to add a charging port in the side of the bus so I can top up the battery without getting complicated. I figure 8 hours on a car charger then let it sit for a day should tell me all I need to know for now.