Thursday, July 16, 2020

52% yet full sun and 100W on 70AH

I had two 10W panels in full sun all day. That should have gathered at least 8 hours of full sun so assuming only 10W was coming from those two panels, that's 80W or 6 2/3 amp hours or possibly even 13 1/3rd amp hours. Add in the other 80W of panels and that's a potential 66 2/3amp hours.

I did order the bluetooth dongle for my charge controller. Maybe that will help to work out exactly what is going on. I do suspect the batteries are worthless. On the other hand since the 30A charge controller throws a fit if I dare to ask 4A of it then it could be that this Renogy Chinese junk is not up to much.
Yesterday at close of play I'd put some piles of crush and run out. Today I spent the whole day working in short bursts in order to deal with the heat.
By the end of the day, the bus parking lot looked like that. There's still a lot of crush and run left. I'd say I probably used 2/3rd of the pile so far. I need to fill in some of the bigger gaps and then add more to the left side. I did locate a rake but it's very well buried in the shed so it'll be a case of taking things out in order to get at it. That's a task in itself.

Once the bus parking is sorted out I'll have to lay some more in order to park my car.  Oh for a mechanical way of doing this. It's hard work. I have blisters, aches and aggravated an old wrist injury that had already been aggravated fairly recently. In fact it was so bad I was losing feeling in my hand.

As far as flattening that crush and run is concerned, all I can do is to rake it. Whether I use real rake or just bolt a piece of angle iron to a length of 2x3 really depends on how I feel tomorrow about digging in the shed. OK. Foregone conclusion - I'll be looking for bolts tomorrow! I won't be able to roll the crush and run but fear not. The weekend and next week are forecast for torrential downpours. The weather will be my roller.

In other news, a roll of conspicuity tape arrived. It's supposed to be orange and is in fact orange which is confusing because all the other conspicuity tape manufacturers call yellow tape, orange and barely yellow white tape, yellow. OK. It makes no sense and I'm as confused as everybody else.

Meanwhile, as many of my regular readers will know, my phone service of choice has been Straight Talk for the past 5 years. I liked it because I got unlimited data when I wanted the unlimited package and could use my phone as a hotspot. Now it appears the unlimited data option has vanished and use of my phone as a hotspot has been blocked. Now that is NOT user friendly. I'm quite disappointed by this as the phone hotspot has been invaluable at times. It makes a bit of a mockery of the advertising for 5 and 25 gigabytes of data on the phone when it's a phone. Who on earth uses more than a few megabytes of data on a phone in a month? If others are like me, my phone is in my pocket 99% of the time, either waiting for calls or making calls. Very occasionally I might look up using GPS or hunt for an address or contact details but that's it.

Occasionally I'd be out in the boonies and would want to send an email. Now it seems that's just impossible. Great work Walmart/Straight Talk/Tracfone - whoever made that stupid decision. It's now a phone service I cannot recommend. They would do that, of course, within 8 months of my buying a new phone that only runs on their network! Talk about welshing on the customer!

Well, the plan for tomorrow is to level all the crush and run then if there's any left over, I'll lay more to the right of what I've laid over the past few days.


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