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.