Troubleshooting....

7:24 am - Tuesday - December 17th - TWW - 36° F, humidity 31%, wind 6 mph out of the southeast.....partially cloudy today with a forecast high of 65° F.....the view this morning.....

Our waning moon

Beautiful high desert sunrise

.....on this date in 2016 I had just returned from the Wittmann, AZ flea market with three new to me tools.  I still have these tools, and have used all three of them this past week...

I've been concerned the past week, or so about the state of our two 8d house batteries.  They were not charging like they have in the past, and rarely get back to 100%.  In my mind there were several things which could contribute to that situation....1) Our charger/converter is going bad (we have a spare), 2) It is probably time to check the water levels in the two batteries, or 3) Our Blue Sky battery monitor is not providing accurate readings.  Troubleshooting 101 dictates you begin the the simple things, and progress to the more complicated things.  

I had been fiddling with the setting of the Blue Sky monitor and off for the past 2 weeks, and believed they are correct, so I turned my attention to the water levels in our two 8d, flooded cell house batteries.  Each battery has 6 cells.  In order to access those cells I must disconnect the positive and negative cables from each battery then pull out each battery tray until all six cells on each battery can be seen.  As it turns out all 12 cells (6/battery) had water covering the elements, but needed water, so with TLE's assistance we topped off all 12 cells using around a gallon of distilled water.  After putting the caps back on each cell I checked the resting voltage of each battery and found them to be at 12.5 to 12.6....12.5 is considered 90% charged, and 12.6 is fully charged, so the batteries are alright.  I just need to recheck the Blue Sky monitor settings to reflect the actual reality.

As you will recall, I recently moved my Bluetti AC200P solar charger outside the trailer to the Rubbermaid storage box.  I have the Honda EU2000i generator connected to it to recharge it until I could hook all three Bluetti portable solar panels to it.  I had to order another 3 way splitter like I have on the three 100 watt panels at the shed, and it won't be here until later this week.  I happened to be 'cruising' Facebook Marketplace Sunday evening and saw a guy advertising 325 watt monocrystalline solar panels for $125 each.  The guy selling them is in Ash Fork, which is about 50 miles from TWW.  He offered in the ad to deliver them for $1/mile.  I message him that I was interested in two of them, and asked if he could meet me half way at the Chevron station at the first westbound exit for Seligman (there are two....we live 25 miles to the west of the second exit), and he agreed to meet us at 12:30 pm.  We left TWW around 11:50 am, and arrived at the Chevron station right at 12:30 pm....Jason arrived about 5 minutes later.  These panels are huge....6' x 3', and they barely fit in the back of the Expedition.  We were home in about 35 minutes, and quickly hooked up one of the new panels to the Bluetti AC200P, and immediately were getting 280 watts of charging power.  With the three 100 watt Bluetti portable panels I could only get 220 watts, so these large 325 panels are much more efficient.....

The 325 monocrystalline solar panel hooked 

to the Bluetti AC200P solar charger

.....next we removed the three 100 watt panels from the shed, and hooked up the 2nd 325 watt panel, and immediately got the same reading as the other....280 watts of power going into the Bluetti AC200MAX.  Once we get the solar array installed, we will repurpose this second panel to help charge the batteries in the sister Newell....

.....once we were satisfied with the solar panel installations we turned our attention to dumping our black tank, and refilling our fresh water tank.....I hooked up the new battery I bought on Sunday, and it worked like a charm......

....it took us around an hour to dump the black tank, and refill the onboard fresh water tank.  Now we'll need to refill the IBC water tote as it is stone cold empty....lol!

While we were at the Chevron station waiting for Jason we ordered a foot long Subway Club Sandwich for dinner, so around 4 pm TLE cut it up and we had dinner.  We had another nice sunset, but no sunset fire......

....we were too tired to make the effort.  And thus another TWW day came to an end.

Thanks for stopping by!