The O-Zone

Yesterday was the Autumnal Equinox, and the sun sets in line with the middle window in our sunroom instead of way off to the north.  In three months it will set way off to the south.  Pretty neat watching the sun’s path arc across the western horizon.

A chore we’ve been pretty much dreading having to do was completed yesterday. Batteries we ordered for the house power system arrived by truck in the afternoon.  We met the semi truck down by the bridge across the river, about 5 miles from our house, where there is a wide spot in the road.

Something extremely cool happened while we were waiting for the trucking company to arrive.  We walked over to the bridge to look into the water for fish swimming around, and there was an adult River Otter munching on one of the said fish, out of the water and taking his ease on a log which was partially submerged in the river.  Munch crunch.  The Otter was obviously enjoying his meal enormously.  After he finished eating, he slid back into the water and poked around both under the water and in holes in the bank, back and forth under the bridge, before finally gliding off in the deepest part of the water, heading upstream where he disappeared from view.  Wonderful!!  Don’t see Otter much so that was a real treat.

Back to the trucking saga. Getting the batteries loaded into our trailer was an adventure as they could not stay on their shipping pallet, all neatly wrapped.  They had to be hand carried onto the trailer. Fortunately on the side of road, propping up a street sign, there was a nice long driftwood stick which we appropriated.  We used to keep the batteries from sliding to the back of the trailer when we had to drive up the narrow washboarded and steep switchback gravel road into our house.

The batteries arrived safe and sound and they hadn’t moved at all.  It was a very slow trip up the hill, and we felt each and every washboard, being paranoid the load would shift, but it didn’t move an inch.   Dan removed the stick easily as the batteries were putting no weight on it at all.  Turns out we could have done without any props, but who knew.

Now the work began.  The second part of the project was to get the batteries into the house.  Each one weighs about 125 pounds, being full of lead and acid.  Dan had positioned the trailer so we would offload the batteries directly onto the sidewalk.  We used a hand cart, and had to get each one up two steps leading into the sunroom.

At first the parrots were off the opinion that the hand cart was going to eat me, judging by the screams from Terry when she saw me bringing it to the trailer, out of the garage.  They soon realized it wasn’t deadly afterall, and they just enjoyed the show.  Mishkin thought the whole process was something he’d rather not be involved with, and he stayed well out the way.  Good kitty.

Once a battery was in the house, we had to take it down seven stairs and into the basement.  This was the hard part, and the process we had been dreading since last winter when we realized we were going to have to replace the batteries.  But we perservered and after a couple of hours of very hard work, all the batteries were down the stairs.

Next part of the process was to turn off the power coming into the house from the solar panels and disconnect the batteries from the inverter, and then disconnect them from each other.  That was actually fairly hard work, bending over, and messy since all the connections were covered with a thick coating of Vaseline.  That prevents the connections from corrosion caused by oxidation and proximity to acid in the batteries.  Did make the bolts really slippery, and lot of bending over was required, plus trying to keep from touching a positive and negative terminal at the same time made it a little stressful.  This was what electricians call “working hot.”

Then we had to pull the individual batteries out of the wooden box Dan built when they were installed, and move them across the floor.  And then we had to move the new batteries back to where the old batteries lived.  Removing the wooden box made that relatively easy.

And then we had to replace the connections and turn the individual 2-volt batteries into one large 24-volt battery.  We started at one end of the string and by the time we got done with the last  one, we were actually getting pretty good at it.

The final test was to flip the breakers and when we had lights, we knew we had connected everything correctly.  We’ll put the wooden box back at some point today.

This whole process took about five hours of very hard work, from the time we had loaded the batteries onto the trailer, to lights back on in the house.  Yay!!  We won’t have to do this again for another six to seven years.  Both of us are tired today, Dan more than me because he did the majority of the heavy lifting.

Last, but not least, we still have to remove the old batteries from the basement, which entails hauling them up the seven stairs (gag), and the taking them to the transfer station for recycling.  But there’s no time constraints and we don’t have to move all them at once.  We’ll do a few at a time.

And today it is completely cloudy and our new batteries are being starved to death and we’ll end up running the generator just like we were having to do daily with the old batteries. Figures. 🙂

Haven’t seen the bears lately.   The plum tree is done dropping fruit, to all intents and purposes.  The pear apple tree still has fruit but nobody seems to be super interested.  Can’t say that I miss having bears in the front yard, overly much.