Day: February 16, 2013

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2036 Hours and All Is Well

I got home to 12.5V and 0.5 going out. Very normal readings. I may actually be able to sleep tonight. L and I think that I had the great misfortune of checking the monitor when the fridge was cycling on.

Speaking of the fridge, I woke up to it being 3.5 degrees Celsius warmer than I normally keep it (4.5 versus 1), which is on the high side of okay, since it had shut off due to low voltage. I restarted the fridge once the batteries were topped up, but the temperature was veeeeeeery slow to drop. It’s now 2.8 after being at 3.5 when I left an hour ago, so it is steadily going down. But it just goes to show how long it takes for a fridge to cool down and how little time it takes for it to warm up. I’m glad I have my thermometres now.

L and I had a nice time at the saloon reminiscing about our travels in Yukon, Alaska, Manitoba, and Scotland. It’s always nice to meet an American who is so well traveled in Canada (he’s been to every province plus Yukon). We are both annoyed that the saloon allows smokers, so we’re both pretty smelly right now. I’m due for laundry anyway. 🙂

I’m beyond exhausted but willing to concede that it is way too early for bed so I’m going to shut down everything, put on a movie, and let my batteries sit for a couple more hours. Da da da dum.

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Phantom Draw

Night has fallen.

With everything off but the fridge, I am drawing 1.0A. Normal is 0.5A. So in the 13 hours between no solar charging whatsoever and charging starting again, I will go from losing 6.5 to 13A. Not a huge deal, that’s only 1% battery capacity. But where is that phantom draw coming from? Perhaps my truck battery that mysteriously has the exact same voltage as my house batteries?

We’ll know more in the morning. L and I are going down to the saloon for a few beers and I’ll see where things are after a few hours of nothing but the fridge running.

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Appendages Crossed

The correct solenoid is in.

While pulling out the old one this morning, the guys wondered if there might have been a problem with the grounding. Lo and behold, the continuous duty solenoid had an extra connection for ground. Hmm…

We installed the starter solenoid at the same time of day in the same type of conditions. When I started the engine, I saw zip on any of my voltmetres. With the continuous duty solenoid, the voltage increased by 0.02. Curious.

I am going to try to stay up later tonight to keep an eye on my battery monitor for a bit and see if the mysterious draw comes up again.

The Walmart run let me replenish my stock of beer, so we had a few cold ones after the installation. I’d bought Lonestar, ‘The National Beer of Texas’, which is tastier and cheaper than Budweiser and the perfect thing to soothe a throat parched by an unrelenting white hot winter Texan sun.

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The Right Part

Neighbours B and S had planned to go into town today, so they brought me along to get the correct solenoid from O’Reilly’s.

Before that, B and L gave me their opinion about what the deep discharge did to the battery. It coincides with what Barre has to say, that an occasional deep discharge like this won’t do much to affect the battery life of true deep cycle 6V golf cart batteries so long as I get it charged up again.

So my batteries are likely okay. I know there are folks out there who would never let their batteries get below 80% who are going to chime in on that and that’s fine, but I doubt I’ll have anything to say in response.

The guys pulled the old solenoid and, in reply to NW-Bound’s comment, it was fried!!! It wouldn’t click and there was tons of resistance. It had tested fine at installation (clicked and no resistance). Also in reply to NW-Bound’s comment, there was no valid number on the old part to cross-check and the old part used to work properly; it would charge my batteries when I as driving and not drain them overnight.

The weekday manager wasn’t on duty at O’Reilly’s, but the weekend manager was. I explained everything to him and he did a search for a continuous duty model, but was unable to find one. He called NAPA while a clerk called Autozone. The latter was useless, but NAPA gave another number to cross-check and that turned up the correct part in stock.

The continuous duty solenoid was $60, four times the cost of the starting model. They did right by me and did a straight up exchange. So I’d go to O’Reilly’s again, but I’d use my cell phone to cross-check a part number instead of relying on the clerk. The continuous duty model actually had a piece of paper in it explaining that it’s for a dual battery system. The starting one had no documentation, not even a part name.

L, B, and I did a lot of research this morning trying to figure out why the house battery drained over night (or, rather, why the two banks paralleled themselves and equalized to comparable voltage). If the same thing happens tonight with the correct part in, then we’ll know there’s something else going on that was being corrected by the old solenoid going bad.

L and B are both engineers and long-time RVErs so I’m in good hands here and can trust that they understand how the part is supposed to work and that they will help me figure this out.

The expression leave well enough alone is making me feel rather bitter today. *wry grin*

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Correcting A Misread on A Xantrex LinkPro Battery Monitor

Once I correctly installed my Xantrex LinkPro battery monitor, I was puzzled to see that it was correctly reporting amps and amp hours, but not the voltage.

I emailed Xantrex for help and they told me to check the voltage on the back of the terminal strip of the monitor itself. If the reading showed the same voltage as at the batteries, I had a misread problem. If there was a discrepancy, I had a wiring problem.

Checking the voltage was easy with a multimeter with pointy tips since the + and – terminals are clearly marked.

In my case, the voltage was correct, so I had a misread.

I waited until unrelated events decalibrated my monitor and then I disconnected the fuses. I installed my monitor using the Xantrex connection kit. In my kit, the fuses are in black holders connecting the thin red wires. So disconnecting the fuses was a matter of unscrewing the holders, removing the fuses (careful, they are tiny!), and then reassembling the fuse holders.

I checked the battery monitor and while it was now decalibrated, it was showing the correct voltage.

Removing the fuses allows the monitor to power down and reboot itself and is apparently the solution for a lot of problems if wiring issues have been eliminated.