Lawnmower Man 2 - The Final Solution

Today was not a good day to be under the bus. Not because it was Friday or Friday the 13th. It was the 13th but most definitely Monday and not Friday. That being said, work under the bus was quite unpleasant as I was being attacked by full squadrons of mosquitoes.

It took quite a while but I managed to install the battery connector - the red thing. That’s two interconnecting plugs with screw holes allowing one or both to be screwed into place. Needless to say one side is bolted to my steel bracket (top of the picture). That used to be the bottom of a bus seat so it’s quite sturdy.

The battery - as can be seen is a cheap lawnmower battery. That still has plenty life left in it. Now the only thing I might redo up there is to slip some plastic sleeving over the cables from the battery to the connector. I didn’t think of it at the time. I was too keen to be out of there and away from the mosquitoes.

Drilling the four bolt holes for the bracket took forever and I had to keep switching drill bits as the drill bits heated up. That and spraying WD40 to lubricate the drill. Needless to say my front is covered with oil splatter and my back and sides are covered with sand. My skin is covered with mosquito bites so I must look quite frightful.

Having done all the connections I slipped inside the bus and switched the battery on. I had to reprogram the controller to have a maximum charge of 12.8v, a charging program for flooded batteries and a maximum discharge of 12.4v. Now I’ll have to see how long that 0.4v lasts me.

While I was down there, I noticed the welds on my battery bracket are showing signs of rust. That’s very disappointing considering there was no rust present when I welded them and that as soon as the welds had all cooled I’d slapped rust-killing primer and then when that had dried, white protective paint on top. I can only assume the rods weren’t that great. I know what you’re going to say... Harbor Freight. Yes - it’s true - my rods came from Harbor Freight. I’ve not noticed a problem with rust from rods before though. Now you see why I paint everything that I put under the bus, white!

Other than that I haven’t done anything else with the bus. I have an idea about a second solar input that’ll be capable of handling higher amperages. 30A is the limit for the charge controller which frankly is quite enough. I doubt I’ll ever be likely to need quite that much power.

Tomorrow or soon - whenever I have time - I’ll test my new (secondhand) battery. By my guesstimation, I reckon that since my Harbor Freight Deep Cycle Dodo was 35AH and many similar batteries are around 30-35AH, this battery is about the same. Assuming the lower end of 30AH and being about to take a starting battery down to 75% only then a quick back of a tax bill calculation shows that I probably have 7.5AH to play with. That means around two hours of just my extraction fans running. We shall see though. Anything over 30 minutes is better than the Harbor Freight battery. That surely has to have been leftover from April 1st!