No Sun, Low On Power - What We Can Do

well good morning all what a lovely Sunday morning wet and rainy day so this is the third day of rain which is really good I'm not complaining because we need the rain but when we got the rain you look look here well there's no sun so that means we're not producing very much soar power at all when we've got this thick cloud cover which means I'm running out of power so I needed to uh charge some batter it's just starting to rain I'm just having a little the rain gauge we've got I don't know if you can kind of see that but we've got 5 mil of rain overnight I'm going to go back inside because it's just starting to drizzle again so we got 5 m rain overnight and the batteries the 24v system batteries well they are running out of power because I've got no way of charging those batteries so let me get get in here because it's it's raining so we've got the generator here which runs the power into the 48v system and charges that up but I've got no way of charging the 24v system cuz I don't have a 24 volt main charger that I can plug in I need to buy one but I do have some 12vt Chargers but I'm running a 24v system for that King on those King's batteries so I'm going to show you in this video how I'm going to charge those batteries up as well as a couple of things that we're going to do a little bit differently in the cabin to conserve power so that's what this video is about this lovely wet Sunday morning okay so let's come into the power shed and let us have a look at the king's battery and show you how I am charging those batteries up so down here I have two 12v battery chargers this one is a lithium charger this one is an AGM charger yes you can charge lithium batteries from an from an AGM charger I'll get into that a little bit later so this is how I'm doing it what I do is I put one of my 12v Chargers on One battery and I put the other 12vt charger on the other battery so those batteries are getting charged up individually from the each or their own charger so this charger is doing one battery this charger is doing another battery and that will work fine you won't have any issues with any feedback of 24v or anything like that this does work I've done this multiple times before on other systems so that is how I'm getting away with charging my batteries when I only have a 24 uh 12v charges and I will buy a 2 4V charger for this so then I have these Chargers plugged into a power board and then that plugs in to the power up there which is running from the 48 volt system which I will be Char topping up from the generator very very shortly so let us have a look at how much power we're producing from our solar it is about 7:30 in the morning so it's a little bit early in the morning we're getting nothing coming in from our for uh 24v systems panels was 1.1 KW let's have a look we're getting 4.4 Watts coming in our 48v system we are getting again we're getting nothing coming from its 3.4 KW of solar we're actually getting in 9 watts of power so not we're not really getting very much solar input at all but then we look here well there's no sun so what we're going to do now is we've got our 24v system sorted out topping those batteries up from those two 12vt charges I'll quickly touch on the AGM side you can charge lithium batteries from AGM Chargers there are some people businesses on YouTube that want to sell their products and use the fearmongering techniques that a lot of people use nowadays to trick you into believing that you have to buy their products you can charge a lithium battery from an AGM charger the only thing I say is don't leave it on the charger once it's full so that is the uh take-home bit I would say on that and make sure there's no Equalization settings on the charger activated which there shouldn't be if it's an ATM charger right so let's move on let's go in the cabin and have a look to see what I am doing to minimize my power consumption in the cabin right so we're back in the cabin now where it's nice and warm and I'm going to show you a couple things that I'm doing a little bit different today than I would normally do so we can conserve power and that first we'll look at the heating side of things so what I normally do is I've got this electric heater here and I normally have this electric heater just sitting on low doesn't pull very much power and the 48v system runs this without a problem with the solar that I've got on the roofs and enough power to charge batteries as well but today we can't do that because we don't have any sun so I am using this little gas heater here so this little gas heater which is the Mr bodyy Heater every year I bring this out it works a treat and I've got the bottle outside just goes through that vent there I will be putting a permanently mounted LPG heater in here that's is one thing I'll do with with my uh gas installer and get something sorted out better than this but for the moment that works a treat and I'll show you the bottle outside in a second the other thing that I am doing is well I want my coffee in the morning and normally when I have my coffee I turn the electric kettle on here but that electric kettle consumes power so what I am doing now is for today and yesterday is I've got the old Whistler and I put this on the LP gas stove and turn that up and that is going to boil my coffee so I can enjoy a nice coffee without consuming power out of my batteries so I think what we need to do is we need to go over here we need to get one of these we need to get a bit of sugar cuz I'm a bitter old man and I need sweetening up and a bit of my coffee mate and I'm going to make my coffee I'm not going to show you me making a coffee but you get the idea oh you got to love the old traditional whistlers there's something about these kettles and off-grid living that actually go hand in hand and now I can't get the lid off this there we go that's better I'll bring this over here I did did I say I wasn't going to show you me making your coffee oh I changed my mind because interesting enough a lot of people like seeing these type of videos where you're just doing ordinary everyday things and yeah I'll put a little bit of milk in it as well okay so we're going to grab our coffee and going to go outside and we'll have a look at that gas bottle oh you got to have a coffee in the morning right so what we're going to do we'll go out and I'll show you the gas bottle out there there going to be some that want to know where that is and what it looks like but you're also going to have a question saying well hang on a minute Glen you've got a wood heater a wood fire and you've got plenty of firewood on your property why are you not running the wood heater and the wood fire well the issue I have not so much with the fire but it's with the wood our Australian hard wood is incredibly hard and hit my head on that Inc I could almost put that in as a blooper there it's incredibly hard wood and to split it by hand takes a lot of work and it is a lot of hard work trying to split the wood the problem I've got is two things firstly I've had post heart surgery a couple of years ago so my chest was completely cut to two and I open up my chest to cut my heart open so swinging a wood s splitter is not a very good option anymore since I've had that done the second thing is well I've got arthritis in the spine and I've got to watch my back I do have issues with pain in the back all the time and swinging and twisting is not good for my back so unfortun I can't do that work anymore what I need to do is invest in a hydraulic wood splitter and that is something that I will be doing so once I get a hydraulic wood splitter I can then start splitting the wood and getting that wood fire going again but in the meantime there is the gas bottle it sits just here yeah I know it's sitting next to the uh electric uh pump I know someone's going to say that but this is only a temporary thing until I get a proper gas line run around here and proper heater but this just goes in through this duct here which used to be the old diesel heater duct Diesel's too expensive now so I don't use a diesel heater so this is what I'm doing is a temporary thing just on these really wet rainy and cold days when there's no sun so like I said that is only temporary so I'm not going to worry too much about that so anyway something a little bit different walk around that I hit my head this time something a little bit different for you on this wet and rainy day here on the offg gr cabin oh one thing we haven't done and I know people love to see this oh okay I know you want me to do it I'll do it then I'll do a cold start on the generator one of the most popular videos I think there is on YouTube let's see how many cranks this is going to take not very many it's pretty quiet I don't think I'm going to upset my neighbors anyway cuz they're way way over there and way up that way way up there somewhere right the advantage of being on a ridge [Music]

Channel: Glen Parkinson

Views: 4,261

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Id: akQVj-PfPs0

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2024