High fiving......

 7:56 am - Saturday - November 14th - TWW - 43° F, humidity 69%, cloud cover 57%, wind 15 mph out of the west by southwest....very cloudy right now with clearing later this morning with a forecast high of 52° F.  On this date in 2023 TLE and I were at Glamis North Hot Springs, CA.....

.....soaking in a hot springs tub watching the sun set.  The view this morning....

.....rained last night, but it it beginning to clear.

I was sitting at my laptop composing yesterday's blogosphere offering wondering what we would be doing workwise Friday when I got a call from Charles about a hose on the washer which was leaking at one of the fittings to which it was attached.  When he first said 'there was a leak' my mind immediately thought of the pump house where we had numerous leak issues last winter, but we solved those leak issues a long time ago, and there has not been one leak out there since last January, or February.  I said I would come over to the house after my blog was published.

As it turned out the leak was where the cold water supply hose connected to the back of the washer, and it was just a matter of replacing the old, brittle washer in the female end of the hose, then removing the old Teflon tape, and applying new tape.  Within minutes the leak was fixed, so I returned to the Newell to get dressed and ready to assist Charles in getting the Champion 7.5 kilowatt generator connected to the Solark Inverter in the battery room, so it could be used to recharge the house batteries on rainy, or cloudy days.  

We've attempted to get this done on at least two other occasions during the past two winters, but failed.  This time Charles called the Solark help line for assistance.  It took a while waiting in the 'call que' to get a live person, but we did, and was he ever on top of his game.  Within 15 minutes he had connected to the Solark Inverter via the Interweb, and made three changes in the default generator parameters so the inverter would recognize, and allow the power from the Champion to enter the system.  We then started the generator, and within another 2-3 minutes power was flowing into the two Cloud Energy LifePo4 batteries from the Champion 7.5 kw generator.  We've been trying to solve this issue since we first arrived here back in October of 2024.

Next up we began removing the hydraulic cylinder which lifts and lowers the 'rake' on the Gannon scraper.  It was actually a pretty simple job, and withing 15-20 minutes we had it removed, and in the back of Charles' Ford pickup.....

....he found a place down in Phoenix which rebuilds and/or services hydraulic cylinders who will check it out too see if it rebuildable.  I'm sure it is, but that is not my field of expertise.  Hopefully, within a few weeks, we'll have a functioning hydraulic cylinder!

When Charles and Phyllis arrived Thursday they had twenty, or more, 200+ watt solar panels Charles had bought to supplement the house system.  One of them was designated to be installed on the roof system to replace one panel that was damaged in the summer of 2025 during a severe wind storm.....

The old, damaged panel

Waiting for the replacement

.....leaving an open spot for the new panel.  These panels Charles bought are older ones, predating the use of MC4 connectors, so we had to remove the old connectors, and install the MC4's.  It took a while to figure out which of the two wires on the back of the panel was the positive one.  A call to the manufacturer cleared that up quickly.  Next it was just a matter of installing the MC4's, then boosting the new panel up to the barn roof.....

Order is finally installed

.....and installing the 'new' panel.  With the damaged panel replaced the wattage being generated by the entire solar array jumped to over 4,300 watts.  By the time we finished it was well into the afternoon, but we were done, and exchanging 'high fives' all around.

The weather guessers had forecast rain around 5 pm in the afternoon, so I spent time putting away things we don't want to get wet before heading indoors to take a rest before dinner.  As it happened, the rain came at 4 pm, and continued on and off most the night, finally abating around 6 am this morning.

We, once again, joined Charles and Phyllis for dinner in the house which consisted of Clam Chowder, and garlic toast....the perfect cold, and now rainy day dinner.  We ate and talked until after 5:30 pm when we bid our adieus for the evening.  It was a very good day at TWW with a lot of long languishing projects crossed off the list!

It is now 9 am Saturday morning, and the rain we thought was gone, has returned.....😊

Thanks for stopping by!