The weather in Denver took a turn for the worse and the last few days have been cloudy, rainy and in the mid-50s for a high.  all of that put the kibosh on most of my outdoor activities so I haven't been accomplishing much of anything other than setting new personal records for laziness.

I had thought I was going to get my new lithium iron batteries hooked up by now but I found yet another new thing I had to order. Deciding to use the larger 3/0 welding cable to replace the 1/0 cables that I had used before to wire the batteries had more ramifications than I had anticipated.

The latest problem is the new cable won't fit into one of the old fuse holders that I had bought for the 1/0 cable, so I've had to order a larger fuse holder which should be here Wednesday. Looking back on it I think that 2/0 cable would have been sufficient to run to the new battery location and I think I could've saved myself some expense and hassle if I had used smaller cable but when it comes to wires I always feel like bigger is better.

A while back I was talking about the meaning of the term "cycle" when it comes to lithium iron batteries. So recently I talked to the folks at Battle Born batteries about it, and here is the condensed version of what they said.

A cycle is every time the battery discharges and charges. And the depth of the discharge is one of the determining factors in how many cycles you will get from the battery. If you discharge 20 percent of the amps and charge it back up the battery will live a longer life  than if you discharge 80 percent of the amps and charge back up. Which is why some manufacturers give a range of cycles for their batteries such as Battle Born's range of 3000 to 5000 cycles.

Since that range of cycles gives a fulltimer like myself between eight and 13 years of use [ I hope ], I'm perfectly fine with that especially if I can come in at the upper end of those numbers. And if I understand them correctly the battery is not totally dead and ready to be thrown away at the end of those cycles it has simply lost some percentage of its original power but can still be used.

   Theboondork

I'm still staying pretty busy, at least what I call busy. After I finished my wireless video camera project I started working on the, "winch to pull my motorcycle up on the rack" project but ran into a snag and put that project aside to do some more work on my "lithium iron batteries for the Arctic Fox" project, even though I still need a few odds and ends to complete it.

Before I could route the cables to the batteries I had to decide for sure where the batteries were going to be located and how they were going to be laid out. One of my concerns was if the batteries could be placed side-by-side touching each other. I thought it might be a problem because of heat build up or something like that.  I called the battery company [Battle Born] and talked to them for a while about some of the questions I had, I found out that the batteries don't produce any heat themselves so they can be touching each other but they do need to be in a place where there's some air circulation so they don't get too hot in the summer.


I made a hole in the storage area floor that's under my bed big enough to bring in three 3/0 welding cables that will go from the new lithium iron batteries to the storage area under the fifth wheel overhang, where my old batteries are and all of the electronic gadgetry is located.

I spent some time this morning making the short cables that will hook the batteries up in parallel and crimping the large lugs to the cables. I had some black shrink tubing to put on the negative cables but I'm still waiting for my red shrink tubing to show up.

I brought a negative cable up through the hole in the floor, and now I'm just starting to route the cable in the storage compartment where my solar controller and inverter are located.

So far everything's been pretty easy but its just time-consuming because some things are hard to get to, and I have to work in some funny twisted positions which is tough on my back. But fortunately I can take frequent and lengthy breaks, because I'm the boss.


           theboondork

I've been busy the last few days which is strange because busy is not something I aspire to.

I've had three projects going at one time which is not easy for me because of my one track mind, but each project had bits and pieces that I had to order from hither and yon, so while waiting for parts I would work on something that I had parts for, so after a while I ended up jumping around working on three different projects none of which seemed like they would ever end.

But today I finally finished my portable wireless video camera project. The idea behind this was to have a video camera that I could set in the bed of the truck and see when my trailer hitch was perfectly lined up with the hitch in the truck. And to set beside my trailer wheels when I'm pulling it up on the leveling blocks to see when it's   centered on the blocks.

Now I understand I could've gone out and bought a camera to do this but I had a spare wireless video camera sitting around with nothing to do and since I'm the only one in the trailer that's allowed to sit around with nothing to do, I figured I could make my own setup.

The only thing I was missing was a wire with a weird plug on the end and a small battery to operate the whole thing. So I ordered a little 12 volt battery from Amazon, the weird plug that I needed, put it all together, and the thing actually works.

When I set the camera on something and turn on the battery my GPS screen in the truck automatically switches to that camera view and I can see exactly how to back under my trailer hitch. Since backing under the Andersen trailer hitch and getting it just right fore and aft had been my only minor complaint about the Andersen system this will fix the problem and I won't have to get out of the truck once or twice to line the hitch up.

And now that that's done maybe I can get around to doing something with the 35 feet of 3 / 0 welding cable laying on my living room floor.

                            theboondork