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<\/a>This trailer is actually a bit too light duty for this heavy a load when it is all concentrated in one location. The wire held but it was sure sagging under the almost 1500 pound load.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>We put the stick immediately in front of the tire against the wheel covers, to keep the weight of all the batteries over the axel as much as possible and to prevent them from sliding down to the gate or tipping over.\u00a0 And we used the totally useless wooden pallet to keep the batteries from tipping over towards the front of the trailer.<\/p><\/div>\n
The batteries arrived safe and sound and they hadn’t moved at all.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Dan removed the stick easily as the batteries were putting no weight on it at all.\u00a0 Turns out we could have done without any props, but who knew.<\/p>\n
Now the work began.\u00a0 The second part of the project was to get the batteries into the house.\u00a0 Each one weighs about 125 pounds, being full of lead and acid.\u00a0 Dan had positioned the trailer so we would offload the batteries directly onto the sidewalk.\u00a0 We used a hand cart, and had to get each one up two steps leading into the sunroom.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 They soon realized it wasn’t deadly afterall, and they just enjoyed the show.\u00a0 Mishkin thought the whole process was something he’d rather not be involved with, and he stayed well out the way.\u00a0 Good kitty.<\/p>\n
<\/a>These seven steps seemed really long and steep!!<\/p><\/div>\n
Once a battery was in the house, we had to take it down seven stairs and into the basement.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But we perservered and after a couple of hours of very hard work, all the batteries were down the stairs.<\/p>\n
<\/a>All stacked up and sitting in a group, waiting for the next step.<\/p><\/div>\n
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.\u00a0 That was actually fairly hard work, bending over, and messy since all the connections were covered with a thick coating of Vaseline.\u00a0 That prevents the connections from corrosion caused by oxidation and proximity to acid in the batteries.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This was what electricians call “working hot.”<\/p>\n
<\/a>Old batteries still connected to the power system.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>I took an extra picture of the wiring in case we got lost in the middlle of reconnecting the new batteries into a string. No worries. Dan understands all this stuff!<\/p><\/div>\n
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.\u00a0 And then we had to move the new batteries back to where the old batteries lived.\u00a0 Removing the wooden box made that relatively easy.<\/p>\n
<\/a>New batteries where they belong.<\/p><\/div>\n
And then we had to replace the connections and turn the individual 2-volt batteries into one large 24-volt battery.\u00a0 We started at one end of the string and by the time we got done with the last\u00a0 one, we were actually getting pretty good at it.<\/p>\n