Caroline and her hubby are exercising their generator tonight by letting me plug in. I thought, woohoo! I’ll have a fully charged house battery bank tonight AND a fully charged computer!

Reality according to my LinkPro has been somewhat… disappointing.

Since yesterday, when I actually hit full charging amps from my solar panel for a bit, I’ve noticed that my LinkPro is only showing half the amps going in that my solar charger claims is going. And, yes, this reading is taken with everything off.

I’m getting the same deal from my dedicated battery charger! I’m on the 15A setting and only getting a measly 7.5A in. If I plug in the computer, I only get 2A. 7.5A is barely worth running the genny for and 2A is a waste of gas.

Who do I trust? The solar array monitor and battery charger or the LinkPro, which has been 100% accurate in recording the amp hours going out?

Xantrex hasn’t been any help regarding this and I’m not finding any anecdotal evidence about it. I’m convinced (ie. hopeful) that I’m wired correctly since I’m getting an accurate record of amps going out.

The only thing I can fathom with the current situation, being on the genny, is that the charger realises that I’m above 80% and is only doing the tapering charge. That would make sense when I’m on solar, too, I guess, but if that’s the case, then there’s no sense getting another panel because I wouldn’t squeeze any more juice out of it than I already am.

Do any of my experts want to give their theories on yet another mystery?

Today is another day with more sun than expected. It’s chilly, but I’m not complaining!

I’m going to have the computer on charge all day since I’m in major backup mode. My MacBook Pro keeps crashing, so complete hard drive failure is imminent. I just need to decide on a new drive and order it; the choices are a little overwhelming. I want to make sure I have several recent Time Machine backups and two different bootable backups. It’s likely way more than I need, but with the current drive being only good for the dump, I want all the chances I can get to be up and running perfectly about four hours from the new drive making it here.

Power right now is at 88% and holding. I’m actually getting 7 to 8A in, so I’m breaking even. The more the batteries are depleted, the more efficiently the alternator charges them, so I’ll wait till about 4PM and then run the engine for a bit to make sure I’m at at least 90% capacity tonight and then I’ll aim for 100% tomorrow.

In other news, R and S from Colorado are back, so a beach party is imminent!

My Macbook Pro has been a little flaky lately, so I ran disk utility on it early this afternoon. Surprise: the hard drive was in bad shape and needed to be wiped and restored from a backup.

Backup…

On shore power, I don’t think about such things. My UPS is always on and therefore so is my external backup drive. Time Machine backs up my system once per hour. When boondocking, I tend to be laxer about such matters, only backing up when I absolutely need to run the inverter for something else….

I froze when I saw that message. I know better than to run systems maintenance before not only a Time Machine backup but also a bootable SuperDuper! backup. When was the last time I backed up? Yesterday morning. What had I worked on in that time? Nothing I needed to recover. My email was still on the server and the only picture I’d uploaded to iPhoto had been shared on Facebook. A day old backup wasn’t going to be a huge loss. Phew!

I don’t know what’s involved in wiping a drive and then restoring it on a PC to bring a user back to the exact same stage there were at when the backup was done. On a Mac, you just select the Time Machine backup you want to use for the backup and then go do something else for a few hours. I’ve complained a lot about Apple lately, but after a frustrating afternoon on the PC, I can only say that it’s good to be home.

My inverter finally works the way that it should and I really enjoy it being technically a whole house-type installation.

How I have it wired is that it has short beefy runs directly to the battery, and then I have a 120V heavy duty extension cord running from the inverter to the shower power cable compartment. In there, I use a 30A to 15A adapter to plug the shore power cable into the extension cord. So when I flick on the inverter, I have 120V power in most of my outlets.

The unfortunate thing about my setup is how my converter is wired. To avoid a huge drain on my batteries, I have to flip off the breakers for the fridge (so that I don’t accidentally switch it to AC), the microwave and air conditioner (in case I lose my mind), and the converter (which would stick my batteries in an endless charge and discharge loop). The converter is on the same breaker as all the outlets on the driver’s side of the rig.

This means, I only really have access to three outlets, the new one under the desk, the old one above the desk, and the hard to access one in the kitchen above the fridge in the far corner of the cabinet.

Having the one under the desk be live is great since my UPS is plugged into it and all my computer peripherals except the printer are plugged into the UPS. But the printer and shredder are normally plugged into an outlet by the converter and I have to snake an extension cord across the room when I want to use them when boondocking.

Now that I’ve ascertained that the load on the new outlet is actually very small, I feel comfortable getting an extension cord and running it around the rig to the UPS to permanently plug the printer and shredder into that outlet. So I’ll do that soon as I get a chance to pick up a good extension cord.

In the kitchen/front room, I like the outlet at the foot of the bed under a cabinet for plugging in the vacuum cleaner or the crockpot. I now have an extension cord coiled up for easy access in the over fridge cabinet and I pull that out when I need to plug something in in the kitchen. It’s a good workaround even if I would prefer to plug the crockpot into the outlet by the sink and not have to worry about tripping over an extension cord (not that I would, it’s long enough that it can sit flush across the floor).

I don’t leave the inverter on 24/7, only when I need it. Even so, it has zero to negligible draw when it’s on without a load. I’ve checked and rechecked this and my inverter is definitely not a power hog, which is a pleasant surprise.

One thing that bugs me about it is that I had to mount it at floor level because of the cable lengths available to me. It came with a remote starter, so I thought I would be able to put the start button within easy reach, but the dang remote starter doesn’t work! So I have to bend down to start the inverter. A bit of a pain, but it’s not something I do often. One good thing about having the inverter in that location is that it forces me to be more thorough in my vacuum (you know, move the chair to vacuum behind it instead of just going around…) to keep dust to a minimum. 🙂

It was a bit of a steep climb to getting the inverter to work correctly and to perform according to my expectations and needs, but it was worth the work. Being able to press two buttons (inverter plus UPS) and have my office come to life is a real blessing.

And so was being able to use my jigsaw to cut a little trim the other day. Imagine that, I’ve gone from not being able to charge my computer while boondocking to running power tools. I’ve come a very long way since the start of my boondocking experiment.

BLECH. The day’s weather just keeps getting worse. It is so damp and chilly. I put the computers in the truck to charge them and then realised that I might as well join them so that I can enjoy the HEAT.

This was an afternoon for curling up with a good movie, so I put on the mini-series True Women, which I mentioned after my trip to Goliad.

The mini-series starts just before the Goliad Massacre and ends after the Civil War. It is the story of strong, brave Texan women pioneers and is very honest about the harsh reality of life on the frontier. The Dana Delaney character in particular is remarkable. I really do have to read the book on which the series is based.

My new favourite line from the series is, “I’m glad I came to Texas.”

Indeed.