Hello Everyone!
A weird time warp day, Heavy stuff goes in small containers, Testing some deep cycle batteries & Water musings!
Alright, I am beginning my writing routine eight minutes behind schedule this evening... and doing my best to 'focus pocus' here with it all. It has been a pretty strange day as far as my routines go... so bear with me as I spell things out.
I have no idea when I wound up falling asleep last night but I awoke at some point around one (or two) thirty in the morning... and just could not fall back asleep. So instead of laying in bed tossing and turning... I decided to get up... brew some espresso... and dive into my day regardless of the early hour.
Honestly, I am unsure when I fell back asleep again... but I think that it was around nine in the morning... after I had thoroughly worn myself out doing a bunch of packing. Basically, I spent several hours crawling in and out of the attic... packing down my journals (along with a few other personal items) into those new buckets that I got the other day.
All total, the journals themselves wound up filling around seven buckets... and although I did not 'stuff' each bucket as full as possible... I did utilize the space inside them as best as I could. In the end, I still had a few things that would not fit in the buckets (like an old photo album and some pads of drawing paper) so I still have to find something to store them in.
By the time that I wrapped all of that stuff up... and finished working in the attic altogether... I was feeling rather exhausted and took a nap... which is pretty much where my day started to get weirder and weirder feeling. Pretty much every time that I awoke from a nap after that point... I would dive into a packing project indoors (because it was pouring rain outside) then I would fall asleep again... just to wake again to see that hardly any time had passed.
It was kind of like being stuck in some kind of 'time warp' because the time that it 'felt' like it was... did not match up with the actual time that it was on the clock. I guess that the best way to describe it is that I was continually surprised that there was still so much time left in the day... and each 'spurt' of working and napping that I did... felt like an entire day passing in and of itself.
Anyways, at some point early in the day I decided to haul the wagon to where those deep cycle batteries are stored at, clean the rodent waste off of them and haul them back to the shelter site. I am unsure if I had mentioned it yesterday... but when I tested all those batteries with my volt meter all except two of them (out of eight batteries) had a voltage reading of '00.00' and two of them had a reading of '00.01' which I think indicates a dead short instead of just being depleted.
The two batteries that I picked out to test had a decent amount of fluid in them... and they did not have a whole lot of signs of swelling. There were others that had less swelling but for some reason I chose the two that I did for doing further testing on... and if memory serves it was just because they were less filthy than the other batteries.
It was pouring rain by the time that I got the batteries hauled back to the shelter site... and if I had not had my rubber boots on... I probably would have called that project 'good enough' and went on to doing other stuff. Instead though, I went ahead and alternatively scrubbed the batteries down with a short bristled brush... and sprayed them off with some high pressure water.
Once I got them fairly clean... I loaded them back into the wagon... and hauled them to the solar shack where I cleaned out a small amount of room to fit the batteries inside on the floor. Thankfully, at that point I could work on them without being in the rain... and after drying them off... and cleaning the black corrosion off the terminals... I was able to wire them together into a twelve volt array.
As far as wiring them together goes, I had a very heavy gauge piece of wire that had a female connector on one end... and a bare wire on the other end and after a good bit of fiddling around with it all... I got the female end to fit on a positive terminal and used some small 'vice grip' pliers to clamp the bare wire onto the negative terminal.
When I first hooked up my cheap little twelve volt battery charger to the batteries... it did not seem like it was working at all... but after leaving it alone for ten or so minutes it eventually began charging them. I think that at first there just was not enough voltage in the batteries for the charger to detect... but eventually it had trickle charged them enough to start working correctly.
I am unsure how many hours that they have now been charging for... but I think that it is somewhere around ten hours now and the charger has not faulted out... so I guess that the batteries are taking a charge. My plan is to leave them on the charger overnight... and then if it is not raining tomorrow morning... I want to get them connected to my solar rig to give them a deep charge and hopefully finish the charging process.
For all I know the batteries might (or might not) be capable of holding a charge... and the only way to find out is to get them as charged as possible... and then put them under load to see what happens. Basically, once I get them 'as charged as possible' with the solar rig... I am going to connect that new 20v cordless tool battery charger to them, plug a depleted battery pack into it... and see how fast it drains the larger batteries.
Although I am not exactly excited to be working with (nor hauling around) some junk batteries... they do not really need to do much more than be able to handle the 'live power' scenario that I have in mind for them. I know that it is hard to describe what all I mean by that... but in essence they just need to not drop below a usable voltage during my solar panel's peak performance time (during full sun) when a cloud or two goes in front of the sun for a few minutes.
I have yet to decide on whether I should try to salvage more of those batteries... but after I do further tests (on the two that I am testing now) I will know one way or another if it will be worth the effort. It would be kind of nice to set them all up on a single twelve volt circuit... but whoa it would take a heck of a lot of good wire to do that (and require a lot of storage space) so I may wind up just keeping it simple by making each set of batteries into a standalone twelve volt pair.
On a different note, I got a good bit of other stuff done throughout the day... and even gave the dogs their second dose of the de-worming medicine. I was also hoping to get my dog with the mites treated... with another round of pyrethrin dip... but with all the rain I just have not had the 'sunny hours' that are required to let it dry on her before I can let her indoors.
Seriously, the rain has been putting a massive damper on many of my plans... and trying to get everything washed... and packed down has become quite the challenge due to it all. At this juncture I have a bare thirteen days left to get everything taken apart, cleaned up and packed down... and there are at least five more 'rain days' ahead in the near future... which yeah is going to leave me feeling very pressed for time here at the end of things.
Even though I have paced myself well enough with this entire pack down process... I am definitely feeling quite 'worn around the edges' but after a few days now of eating lots of food that 'general irritability' that I described last week... has begun to dramatically fade away. I would not go so far as to say that I am feeling happy... or even all that excited... to be living in a tent again... but I do have some small peace of mind growing as the day of the big move approaches.
I still have yet to really come to terms with the fact that I actually own my own land (or am owned by some land as the case may be) and I guess until I actually set foot on the place... the 'surrealness' of it all will not fade. In other words, I think that I am just so accustomed to 'things not working out' that I instinctively safeguard myself by not getting my hopes up too much.
Then there is the practicality of doing everything that I know that I will have to do at the new place to get myself all setup again... which yeah is not something that I 'candy coat' or over romanticize to myself. It is going to be a really long slog on some far less than ideal terrain... during the rainiest and hottest days of the year... with limited resources (and utilities) at my disposal.
My main concern of course is the water scenario there... and while sure getting some bottles and containers filled for drinking water purposes at that public spring is a good strategy for drinking water... I know full well that I will need a heck of a lot more water than that. I also know that if I only have 'drinking water' available I tend to over ration it... and never quite get enough of it 'in me' because I prioritize the animals getting the bulk of the water.
All of which is why I am pretty stoked to be getting the driveway put in the way that it is getting done... because the three four inch (twenty foot long) culverts are being put in an excellent spot to catch surface water as it flows onto the property at the highest point of the place. It is a bit tricky to describe... but basically the place has a large gulch that runs along three quarters of the road (on the uphill side) in a parallel fashion.
The gulch then enters into what looks like a very large seep (a depression in the ground or a sort of bowl shape) where there may have once been a spring... but is now full of large trees soaking up the water. From the downhill edge of the seep the gulch then continues downhill... at around a twelve and a half degree angle... and about twenty feet into that leg of the gulch... is where the culverts will begin.
In a previous entry I described how I want the driveway and culverts setup... but I did not really explain why I chose the three smaller plastic/polyethylene tubing culverts over using one solid twelve inch culvert. Aside from being able to easily attach to the smaller culverts for capturing water... the main reason is because I do not understand the water runoff scenario there well enough... and I would rather the section of the driveway with the culvert(s) to be able to breach in a heavy storm instead of causing erosion... or even worse... unintentional flooding.
If everything goes well the culverts (and where they are placed in the terrain) should help not only control the water flow downhill from that point onward... but also help soak some of the water into the ground (on the uphill side of the culverts) near the bottom of the seep. More or less I want to possibly remove all the trees from the seep... keep the downhill portion of it damp... and see if I can either develop it into an actual spring... or harvest water from it as a functional seep.
Well, I have rambled on enough for this entry. I hope that everyone is doing well. Ta ta for now.
