Energy learnings

What a surprise when I did my bi-annual maintenance on my battery bank.  Every cell (all 12) was empty or water. Thankfully the plates looked wet, so they couldn't have been dry too long.  It took close to a gallon of rainwater to fill them all.  WOW!  I've never experienced that before - and likewise, I've never shorted the PV panels directly to the battery bank either.

After realizing that the Xantrex C35 wasn't doing its thing on equalizing batteries, or charging them properly - i just shorted the whole system for the summer.  I've found out since then that many others do the same thing - but not all summer.... just for a few weeks.  This really juices up the batteries, equalizes them in a hurry and you're all set to reconnect the controller.  Well, i waited 4 months for this... and boiled off a lot of the lead acid in there.  So lesson learned - only a few weeks of shorting... not months.

These huge babies can take a lickin' and keep on tickin'  - but they ain't cheap!My battery bank is fine and are they are all recharging properly. I'll be all set for a long winter - especially with the 400watt wind generator: I'll have power to spare.



Smart Energy
On another front:  An energy monitor (with a shunt) is SO important when managing your energy usage. This is the one I have:

 Simple and effective.  Four numbers: % charge state, voltage, current amp hours, cumulative amp hours (resettable).  Now, if I could just hook that up to my computer and have it log the data over time.

I constantly monitor the amp hours and all kinds of other numb3rs and trends for my energy system.  It's gotten to a point where I play a game of guessing what the meter will say and then seeing how close i get to the actual number.  Imagine my surprise when i discovered recently that my laptop computer external hard drive sucked up as much energy as the entire laptop on a dead battery (4.5 amp hours or ~45 watts)!  That was a new one on me!  So, now i copy all my files off the hard drive while I got plenty of juice (as in sunshine) - that way i use 1/2 the energy at night when watching the Daily Show or a movie.  

Figure it this way (hey, I'm an engineer - in another life!) :  45 watts X 3 hours a nite X 250 days/year = 33,750 watts per year... that's a small chunk off a solar system, but every little bit helps.