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up to 57
Sunday, December 8 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
It's hard for me to get perfectly comfortable when sleeping on a couch, as I can never really sleep face-down, which is a position I like to switch to every now and then (particularly when there is a likelihood of a cat walking on me, as there never is at the cabin). So I woke up several times in the night in time to load more wood into the fire. This constant stoking allowed temperatures to gradually rise through the night so that by 6:00am, temperatures were in the low 50s. I was less diligent about fueling the fire for the rest of the day, but meanwhile temperatures were rising outside, so temperatures continued to rise in the cabin until they peaked at around 57 degrees.
It's less convenient to cook in a winterized kitchen, as all the water has to be carried up from the basement. So I never actually made any coffee. I just reheated some leftover Stewart's coffee. Later I heated some water in the teapot and had some kratom tea. At some point I even made myself a small pot of rice using the InstantPot, and I ate that with an Indian curry from a pouch. I was able to clean all of the dishes I dirtied just using water from a five gallon bucket, some of which I'd been soaking my feet in. I didn't use any soap, but the dishes looked clean enough. Under camping rules (which I was definitely operating under) that's good enough.
While continuing to watch old episodes of Alone, particularly Season 9 (which is set on the boreal coast of Labrador), I built out the relay circuitry to make the remote additional battery connection. I was using a thick wire to connect to the additional battery's +12v terminal; I think it was probably six gauge. The conductor consisted of seven braided strands, each about size of a 14 gauge conductor. Since these needed to terminate as two adjacent female spade connectors to attach to both poles of a beefy 30-amp relay, I decided to separate the seven strands into two bundles, one containing three strands and the other containing four. I couldn't cram that many into the little crimp hole on the spade connectors I had, so I opted to solder them on. Since the heat necessary to do that would quickly destroy the connectors' plastic jackets, I opted to burn all that off first in the woodstove. (This required me to put the connectors in a bean can and roast them among the coals for several minutes.) After arranging the connectors at the end of each bundle in a position perfectly spaced for the male spade pins on the relay, I heated them up with a MAPP gas torch and allowed the solder to flow in. The result was pretty stiff, but it was possible to press the connectors onto the relay for a convincing connection. Since the voltages we were dealing with here were low, I decided to just mount the relay directly to the plywood panel below the circuit breaker box close enough to the floor for the hanging connector clip to reach a battery sitting there. I only had to run three different wires to this relay: +12v from the generator, +12v from the battery, and a groundable signal coming from the ULN2003 that controlled it. The relay's coil would be powered by the 12v+ from the generator (tapped from nearby pins that were part of the switched load) and that signal from the ULN2003. Once I had the relay and battery in place, hooking up the new ULN2003 board (the one using that circuit board I'd worked with as a kid) was easy. And on the very first test of this new capability, the relay worked great. I could turn it on and off like anything else I remotely control.
As I was finishing that up, it suddenly occurred to me that it would be very helpful to measure the voltage of the 12v supply as it passes by the SolArk Co-pilot. That voltage will depend on whether or not the extra battery had been remotely engaged, but by reading the signal with that on or off, I could get a lot of information about how much power is in both batteries. Conveniently, the ESP8266 has a single analog input, so I could just use that to measure the voltage. But I would have to divide it by a factor of about five so that its range would fall below the 3.3 volts that the ESP8266 can tolerate. Using a 470 KΩ resistor and a 68 KΩ resistor, I built a voltage divider on a little scrap of project board (the one I'd been looking for yesterday and eventually found). I also added some additional header pins to give me multiple places to connect to both 12v and ground, as I was running out of those on my SolArk Co-pilot board constellation. Passing the value from this analog pin to the backend, I was now logging a value with a linear relationship to the 12v battery's voltage.
With all that done, I drained some more pipes, initiated a complete drain of the hot water tank (on the low possibility the basement freezes this year), and then put the toilet and kitchen sink back into winterization. With everything winterized and fairly tidy, I could trudge back out to the Forester and begin my two hour drive back home. The trudging was even harder than it had been yesterday afternoon, as about four more inches of snow had fallen. This meant there were something like 22 inches of snow on the ground. But at least conditions had warmed somewhat and it was no longer below freezing. I didn't even take my gloves when I left the cabin. The snow plow had been through since yesterday and I had a little shoveling to do before I could be certain I would be able to get out. But that only took a few minutes.
Back at the house, Gretchen was off socializing with her friend Lisa, so my only interactions were with the cats and dogs. I saw that pet door was falling apart again, so I did what I could to stick it back together using Gorilla Glue.
The dining room table as I worked on my projects today. Note the pile of old IR remotes next to the bananas. I brought those remotes to scavenge IR diodes from.
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The East Basement Remote Controller as it looks today. It controls seven different devices.
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The SolArk Co-pilot, featuring that scrap of board that I had once used as a calculator automator 43 years before, now with a ULN2003. The board in the upper left with the red and green LEDs is actually the SolArk WiFi dongle, which is now connected to the inverter via a conventional serial cable. Signals from that cable give my system much finer-grain (and less stale) inverter info than I could get from the nverter dashboard hosted by SolArk. The SolArk Co-pilot can also turn on the generator, add an additional startup battery to the generator, and turn off power to the East Basement Controller should it require a reset.
Click to enlarge.
The new relay to switch in the extra marine battery. Note how I split the power between the relay's two poles.
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The cabin under 22 inches of snow. The solar panels are invisible and thus useless.
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The cabin, viewed through the trees from our driveway as I was trudging away.
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The Forester as it looked after overnight snows where I parked it along Woodworth Lake Road.
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