Today I raised the horizontal panels to 20W. At the end of the day despite the battery having shown 67% earlier, the battery was on 57%. The end of day voltage was 12.2v. I really don't seem to be getting that voltage up much. With a drain as high as 0.05A that would represent a 0.6W drain or over 24 hours, 14.4 watt hours. Given a single 10W panel ideally angled, that 14.4 wh drain could reasonably be expected to be overcome in a couple of hours of ideal sun and maybe a few hours of poor sun. As I'm using a total of 100W and still not achieving any gain over what's in the batteries on a daily basis, I'm forced to assume once again that the batteries are stuffed.
Earlier in the day, one of my friends came by. She'd been looking to get into a new hobby so I'd suggested welding. Thus she was interested and now has my old Harbor Freight 70A AC arc welder. That was a pretty darned good welder to be honest but my new DC stick welder beats it hollow. I'm not so struck by the AC wire welder but that might grow on me eventually though I fear it will be more like a monstrous carbuncle. I gave her the welder as a gift. She's happy and I'm happy.
With a crash and a grinding noise, my 10 tons of crush and run arrived. A pleasant, helpful and friendly driver came and dropped his load exactly where needed and avoided the power lines nicely.
Without mechanical means, it will likely take me a week or more to lay all that where it needs to be so I started pretty well straight away, using an old fashioned wheelbarrow and something called a shovel. I'm pretty sure no Millennial will ever have encountered thousands of years old technology like that. Looking it up, we've been using shovels for 5,000 years and wheelbarrows since Chuk Liang of the Chinese Imperial army invented them in AD200. Of course before then we'd have been using a box supported from two poles with somebody at each end carrying it all.
The easiest way of spreading the massive pile would seem to be to put five shovels full into the wheelbarrow (which by now was creaking badly under the weight) and then make little piles very close to each other that can be later spread and merged with a rake. The ideal layer thickness is apparently two inches.
Having put the 32 barrow loads or 160 shovels full of crush and run into place, my back was telling me it was going to be very unhappy tomorrow. It will be very interesting to see how things go tomorrow. I'd imagine that it's going to take a lot more barrow loads than I'd estimated. As this is my first ever venture like this, I hope I'm going to get it right. I'm also hoping I have enough crush and run. This little pile worked out at $381.81. If I'd bought it as the 40lb bags that the DIY places sell then I'd have spent probably $1,500. At $5 for a 40lb bag, it soon adds up to silly money!
When all the barrow loads have been dumped, the piles can be raked so that they merge. Before that, it might be a good idea to hit the grass with some kind of grass killer.
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