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dens above the jumbled rocks
Saturday, November 16 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Charlotte is a weirdo in numerous ways. One of those ways is that she almost never joins Neville and me in the first floor bedroom when we sleep there. She insists on sleeping by herself in the beanbag in the loft. Sometimes in the night I'll go up there and put a blanket over her, as temperatures usually fall into the 50s overnight inside at this time of year. Strangely, though, Charlotte will often join Neville in bed after I get up and start puttering around. I've known him to be mean to her when she attempts to get into bed, but when I'm not there, the politics apparently shift just enough for her to feel invited.
This morning as the dogs were sleeping in that way, I was drinking my coffee and setting up the gauges and vacuum pump so I could test the refrigerant lines on the minisplit. Since it is a two-zone system, I had to test both zones independently and, once they seemed not to be leaking, I could let the refrigerant in. Happily, both zones seemed to be leak-free, but I left the second one sitting while I took the Charlotte for a walk later in the morning. (Neville didn't come.) Again we walked down to the Woodworth Lake outflow, continued into the woods to the north along East Bifurcation Creek, crossed that, and continued northwest into a part of our parcel I hadn't yet explored. It consisted of a ridge between ancient south-north channels (probably different generations of Woodworth Lake outflow creeks separated by rockfalls or even glacial activity). The ridge consisted of huge rocks that had been moved slightly from their original position and now rested on smaller rocks, with sizable voids underneath them. Several of these voids were large enough to accommodate a hibernating bear, and they all were full of thick middens of porcupine manure. There were also a few stunning rock overhangs, including one where the overhanging rock had been smoothed by glaciers into an egglike shape without having been torn from its native bedrock. (I'd actually seen this particular formation once before when walking our parcel's western boundary with state land.)
Back at the cabin, I was satisfied the refrigerant lines weren't leaking, so let refrigerant into one of the zones and then topped-off the vacuum in the other. Once I'd had that running for a good fifteen minutes, I let refrigerant into that one as well. It was only then that I turned my attention to all the wiring necessary at the outdoor unit. I had to install a quick-disconnect and hook up the signal wires. And once that was done, all I had to do to fire up the system for the first time was to make a few connections at the ESP8266 Remote controller and add some records to the database that serves as the source of truth for whether or not device_features should be on or off.
When I turned on the system for the first time (by checking a checkbox on the controller web page), it seemed to work fine. I used the remote controls for the respective air handlers (one in the basement, the other in the kitchen) to set them both to heating mode (which is all I ever intend to have them do) and set the temperature to 68 degrees. Since I don't yet have a way to send detailed settings to these devices using my remote control system, all I can do is turn it on and off, and when I do, they'll be in whatever mode they last were in. At the time, the outdoor temperature was 47 degrees Fahrenheit, and the entire system only seemed to be consuming 600 watts to run both zones. If they can really produce the equivalent heat of four 1200 watt space heaters using only 600 watts, that is highly efficient. But such efficiencies aren't likely to hold as outdoor temperatures drop.
This evening I took Charlotte for a relatively short walk down to the outflow of Woodworth Lake, then south along its west shoreline nearly to Ibrahim's parcel and then back towards the cabin via the Backwards Cliff gorge, which is much easier to hike at this time of year after all the lush vegetation has died back.
This evening I turned my attention to another remote control feature: being able to turn the generator on and off remotely, which would be a way to get additional energy in cases where I need it and the solar panels are covered with snow or it's in the middle of the night. In recent weeks, I've noticed that the solar panels are gathering much less energy than they had been not very long ago. The days are now very short and the sun is low, sometimes low enough to have to shine through the tree (they've lost their leaves, but their branches still cast shadows), and the battery has trouble replenishing after I've used it for high-energy demands like charging the Bolt or heating water. (We've had very strong winds recently though, reminding me that a small windmill might make a valuable contribution, particularly at night.) Since the signals to turn on the generator are near the SolArk inverter (in fact, that inverter can send a signal to it to turn it on using a very unsatisfactory algorithm), it seemed easiest to remotely send those signals via my SolArk Co-pilot, which is basically a remote control node with the ability to eavesdrop on inverter serial data. Before I got started on that, though, I needed to clean up the mess that the connections between the SolArk WiFi dongle and the Co-pilot had become. I screwed a board onto the wall nearby and then attached the various components to that board in a neat, organized way, connecting the dongle to the inverter via a serial cable (it ultimately communicates via a conventional DB-9 connector). Initially the plan was to have the Co-pilot bridge the signal to turn on the generator using an opto-isolator, but that would've required making a little breadboard and hooking it up somehow. It was much easier to just use a little 3.3v controllable relay circuit, which I could screw into the board on the wall with the other boards. By the time I went to bed, I had the Co-pilot successfully turning the relay on and off remotely. The trickiest part of all this turned out to be the vaguely (and inaccurately) labeled pins on the Wemos D1 ESP8266 board I was using as the Co-pilot.
Bedrock worn into an oval shap and providing a sizable overhang on the walk this afternoon.
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A good denning site under a boulder. Note the pellets of porcupine droppings.
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Another good denning site.
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Woodworth Lake at around sunset (the sun is behind us, since we're looking east).
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The minisplit this evening. The wiring is still a mess, since one of the cables was too short and I didn't have a good way to splice an extension on hand.
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The view west from the cabin a little after sunset. You can see Peck Lake gleaming just below the horizon right of center.
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