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how a 12v battery depletes
Thursday, December 12 2024
Gretchen went up to Albany today to with a book artists with whom she is collaborating to so some research among the Albany County archives for information about incarceration in the early 20th Century. She would come back with a mind blown by the insane details used to describe the arrested and the wanted. Back then, phrenology was considered a legitimate science, so pains were taken to measure the relative sizes of human skulls (and other features) in a hunt for patterns associated with criminal behavior. Those patterns didn't turn out to exist, but, as with any pseudoscience, there can be enough patterns in noise to keep a pseudoscience alive indefinitely, especially among the deluded and conspiracy-minded.
This morning I took the dogs for a walk (both came) west of the Farm Road and then back homeward on the Farm Road. It was an especially morning so I was actually wearing a winter coat on top of my hoodie, which I rarely do even in the worst part of winter.
At some point in the morning, I lost contact with the SolArk Co-pilot and the East Basement Controller at the cabin when the battery supplying them power was exhausted. Fortunately I'd been tracking a proxy for the voltage on that 12v battery, so one of my reports plots a graph of that number just before I lost contact. Unfortunately, though, once that battery was exhausted, I couldn't remotely add the fresh other battery because the device that controls that function is the SolArk Co-pilot, which now is dead. It also likely means that the Generac generator had now been reset, since that battery also controlled electronics, and its state (the one allowing it to be turned on remotely) does not survive power loss. However, if the solar panels are exposed enough to collect power, it's possible the SolArk inverter will once again turn on power to the cabin, which would recharge the 12v battery in the generator and allow the SolArk Co-pilot and East Basement Controller to function once more, which would allow me to connect the additional marine battery and get some control back at the cabin. Until that happens, the only device running my ESP8266 code is the Hotspot Watchdog, and all it can do is collect weather data inside the cabin and restart the hotspot when it glitches out. That does keep the internet connectivity working for awhile, meaning I can still get SolArk inverter data. But now I have to rely on the SolArk dashboard, which gets data directly from the inverter's WiFi dongle, something that is powered by the inverter even when it has cut off power to the rest of the cabin.
A little aftet 2:00pm, I decided to go do some more work on the stone wall at the bottom of the Woodshed Path. I found some nice big flat rocks higher up on the nearby talus slope that I used as layers on the the wall as I extended it eastward. In that section, the wall is still pretty low, just low enough to step over in places. But it was built from the ground up with the idea of being a tidy wall, unlike the wall further west. So it looks nicer. Before I returned to the house, I ended up extending the wall all the way to the Stick Trail, making it over sixty feet in length.
While in Albany, Gretchen had bought a couple burritos at Wizard Burger with the understanding that we could each have half of each one of them (she likes to "taste" things). I started with the cæsar salad burrito, which was really good. After Gretchen got home from pilates, I had half of the buffalo (as in the city, not the animal) burrito, and it wasn't very good. But maybe it's just no good cold. I've never particularly liked the hot that comes with a lot of vinegar, though, so buffalo has never been my thing.
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The graph of the failure of the 12v Generac generator battery. The plateaus at the beginning and in the middle are when the extra battery had been connected. X-scale is not volts, but it has a linear relationship to volts. The highest values on the graph are at around 12.6 volts and the lowest are somewhere above 9v (the lowest where the DC-DC converter still operates, thus allowing the data to be reported).
Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?241212 feedback
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