Day: January 29, 2013

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In the Words of Lieutenant Dan, Blow, You ?%@, Blow!

It has been crazy windy out there today and it’s not letting up!

The rig was been rocking and making me wish I had stabilizers. It was good to see the clouds being blown to sea this evening and I hope the sky does clear overnight as promised. I used way too much power today and the batteries are super low, probably around 75% capacity.

Tomorrow will be a good day to catch up on household projects and continue painting to give my batteries a good soak regardless of the cloud cover. I’m not in desperate mode, just conceding that the clouds could last a few more days and that I need to go into deep conservation mode.

In other news, a friend in the Yukon has informed me that I have totally lost touch with the reality of what a real, proper, cold, and snowy winter is like. Isn’t that great?!

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Boondocking Trial of the HP OfficeJet 8600 Inkjet Printer Series

The day has come where I had to print something. Eeeeeeesh. My batteries are sitting somewhere around 82% (the battery monitor will be useless until I can resynch it when the batteries next get a full charge). It’s cloudy outside and I’m barely bringing in anything from the solar panel.

With trepidation, I turned on the whole house inverter. No problem, voltage held steady and so did amperage use. That confirms that I got all the bad connections and that my battery is operating at optimum capacity.

I turned on the HP OfficeJet 8600 printer. No problem, voltage dropped a point only and amperage use went from 3A to a mere 4A. Hit print, all the numbers held steady. My job printed beautifully.

To me, this was a worst case scenario for using the printer and it performed better than I could have dreamed! It truly is a low energy printer! It did seem a little slower than it does on 120V power, but that could be my imagination.