Day: February 13, 2013

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Shrimp Boil

As promised, L showed me how to boil shrimp southern style tonight. He does it simply, just shrimp and Zatarain Crab Boil, but you can add potatoes, andouille sausage, and other seafood. His secret is that he breaks open the bags of crab boil so that you occasionally get a shrimp with a spice seed on it for an extra burst of flavour. I really liked the Zatarain, which is good because he offered me the other half of the box. I have enough to boil 12lbs of shrimp… or 36 crabs! 😀

The fresh shrimp were beyond delicious. He dumped them onto a plate and we all helped ourselves, peeling the plump pink goodness until our fingers were sticky. He makes his own shrimp cocktail-type dipping sauce, which was delicious! There was also potato salad and coleslaw, crackers and hot sauce, and… raw oysters. Ah ah! I finally got a chance to try the dang things. Can you believe I have never had raw oysters before? Verdict? Meh. Slimy and briny. L said these were okay, but not great and that I need to try them again. Maybe. 🙂

His friends provided cupcakes for dessert, which were pretty dang tasty with the beer. 😀 We then gabbed for a few hours until the cold sent us home. It’s amazing how quickly the beach went from warm and comfortable to cold and nasty once the sun went down.

Our dinner reminded me of one of my favourite pre-Miranda travel days, and I have to say that peeling shrimp is tons easier when you have fingernails!

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How a Solar Two Stage Charge Controller Works

Greg at AM Solar just emailed me back with a reply to my question about my solar monitor flashing that the battery is full when it’s not.

The short answer is that the panel is poorly labeled. Solid light means that the charger is bringing me up to 80% capacity. Blinking light means that it is gently charging the other 20%. More below. But I wanted to comment on this part first because guess what my battery monitor was saying when the solar monitor started blinking? 80-ish%. It’s properly calibrated! Who cares that it’s registering 0.00V; it’s doing it’s job of tracking my amp hours! Woohoo!

This is Greg’s explanation:

“The 22B is a two stage charge controller when set for “Dry Camp” mode. This means the controller will deliver all available charging amperage until the batteries reach the set point. This is called “Bulk” charging and generally means the batteries are about 80% full. It then goes into “Absorbtion” (or Taper Charge) mode which means it holds the batteries at the set point while tapering off the charging amperage. This will finish charging the last 20%. As a general rule of thumb, when the charging amperage tapers off to about 1% or 2% of the battery capacity the battery is considered full.

When the 22B “Charging” light is on solid, the controller is in “Bulk” mode. When it starts flashing, it is in “Absorbtion” (or Taper Charge) mode and will continue delivering charging amperage at a reduced level so that it won’t unnecessarily drive water out of your batteries. So, for your situation, the 22B is still charging the batteries even when the light is flashing.”

He also confirmed that adding a solar panel is just a matter of mounting it then plugging it into the combiner box. Easy! Now, if I only had the $400 to order another 150W panel while they have them in stocked and boxed up. But I’d really like to be able to eat in March and I do need to think about moving on to San Antonio at some point, so I need to hang on a bit.

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Sun! Blue Sky! Amps Coming In!

The day started off really crappy, but the weather couldn’t be any better now! I’ve gained 16AH today and am still getting a good charge, so I will be ahead tonight.

I emailed AM Solar to ask them why my solar control monitor claims that I have a full charge when I know for sure that I do not. I was worried that the batteries would stop charging, but the battery monitor still sees the full amperage going back in, so I probably have a reporting glitch the same way I do with the volts on the battery monitor.

L and I went into town this afternoon to get shrimp for a traditional shrimp boil tonight. Mmmmm… sun, shrimp, beer, and ocean. This is the life!

We also detoured to the H.E.B. grocery store so I could check out their cat food selection since the Walmart didn’t carry Whiskas (!). Thankfully, I found my brood’s favoured food, and in the giant economical size to boot. What I bought them on Monday to tide us over hasn’t sat well with them at all and they were very happy when I opened that bad when I got home!

Finally, L took me to the post office so I could get my general delivery mail. Gina, your package hadn’t arrived yet. 🙁

It sure is nice to have someone else do the driving (and expend the fuel!). 🙂

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A Bang In the Night

Around 2:30 a.m., a loud bang that shook the rig thrust me out of deep sleep. WTF?! I then noticed that the awful winds had returned. I clambered out of the loft to investigate, the noise having been way too loud to ignore.

I stumbled into the kitchen, found a light, and the sight that greeted me was so unexpected that it took a moment for my sleep addled brain to grasp it. My front door had blown open and I had belongings strewn down the stairwell onto the beach. Outside, the winds of Hades whipped about and icy pellets of rain were falling loudly.

After Tabitha’s great escape, I make checking the door the last part of my evening routine. Had I done that before bed? I was so out of my senses that I couldn’t even remember. I picked up everything and tried to close the door. It wouldn’t catch. I tried again.

After a few attempts, I noticed that the deadbolt was on and that it wouldn’t turn off from inside. I tried with a key and succeeded. I still couldn’t close the door. Holy moly, the door had opened so violently that the secondary lock, that I never use, had activated! Where was a key for it? Oh, right.

I grabbed a spare set of keys that had the secondary lock key on it and fumbled to get the dang thing functional. The wind was blowing so hard that I knew I had no hope of getting the door properly shut from inside. I forced it shut from outside and reentered through the cab.

By this time, I was slightly more awake and I realised I had to do a headcount. Tabitha was cowering in the study. Neelix was AWOL.

I went back out into the maelstrom with a flashlight, calling his name quietly, knowing that the sound of my voice wouldn’t carry to the neighbours over the roar of the wind. I started by checking under Miranda and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tail go by.

It was impossible to track the passage of time, but it didn’t seem to take that long to coax him out from under Miranda to under Moya to him finally letting me grab him. But once we were inside and I checked the time, more than an hour had passed since the big bang.

The night that followed was interminable. The cats were jittery. I managed to stab myself in the chin with a nail and had to get back out of bed to find paper towels to stop the bleeding. My dreams were incredibly vivid.

At 7:00, I got up to put the computer on charge in the truck and then decided to try to get another couple hours of sleep. After an hour and a half, I gave up.

The winds are still roaring, but there is quite a bit of blue sky and sun this morning. Perhaps I should give that goat to the wind gods?