Diary from the cabin, page 10

7-16-06

It's been a couple of weeks since I decided to spend a weekend in the sun and fun at the cabin catching fish and doing what you do when you have a cabin. Work on the damn thing. The good news is that I have reached my goal: My 2000 Dodge Dakota pickup truck with a 4.7 liter 8 cylinder engine now gets 24.5 miles per gallon, which means 1/2 of a tank of gas each way to the cabin (10 gallons used and 245 miles traveled). At 3.00 + a gallon for gas, this is good news for me.

I have to admit something right away. I made a mistake. An error of epic proportions that could have spelt the ruination of the entire northern half of Michigan and parts of Winsconson where cheesy people live. 

 It started so innocently as all bad things do. If you remember from exploring this site, my original plan for the totally incorrect battery bank was to have (2) 67 amp hour batteries at the ends of a bank of (3) group 31 (110 amp hour) batteries. All deep cycle, of course. Well, upon reflection, I decided to approach the deal from a different direction. I would combine the two smaller batteries to produce a 134 amp hour battery string and connect that to the other (3) to get my 400 amp hours. But like an ass, I hooked the whole thing up wrong then spent 3 weeks scratching my head wondering about two things:

1. Why didn't I have any capacity in my battery bank?

2. Why wouldn't the bank charge up past 13 volts?

Why indeed! I discovered in a brief period of sobriety that while I thought I hooked everything up right, I had indeed made the entire bank smaller. My original intent was to create two strings, one of 300+ amp hours and one of 130+ amp hours and combine them in such a way as to make them think that they were all a bunch of big ass batteries instead of (3) big and (2) small batteries. This is what happens sometimes when you don't keep things simple like you should. 

Here's a couple of graphics to demonstrate what I mean. The idea was to have 4 big batteries. What I had done by accident was create a smaller bank by choking the entire bank through one end of the bank. Not good.

Bad.	Good.

Could have exploded the whole deal and then it would have been goodbye Winsconson. So, I hooked up the bank the way that I had intended to in the first place and Volia' everything works like it should. Trace the wiring in each graphic and you'll see what I mean. My intent was to have the charge enter the bank from both ends and the discharging from the opposite end. What I had done was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Here's an example. First, I know my solar panels and how much they will charge the bank, taking it up to 12.75 to 13.00 volts while I'm not at the cabin. Not equalizing voltages, but enough to keep the bank in good condition by minimizing the sulfur deposits in them between full charges. Much to my surprise, the bank was only at 12.45 volts for the past 4 weeks. I ran the generator for 4 hours the last time I was here at the cabin only to be able to get a total bank voltage of 12.79 volts instead of the equalization charge I should have been able to get.

After I had fixed everything, I had 12.95 volts from the solar panels and after running the generator for 1 hour, I had the bank up to my equalizing charge of 14.3 volts (this is from a 10 amp regulated charge). This falls perfectly in line with my original plan: use 10% of the bank capacity during my stays at the cabin. This allows for another 30% use in emergencies if we are ever forced to stay here. So, now while I'm writing this (using my Tripp-Lite line conditioner and my generator) I'm equalizing the batteries. Again. Insert your own swear words here > %^&*$@$%!!

The whole idea is to charge the bank once in a while instead of every day and I had ruined the whole idea by doing what I did. So now that summer is half over, I get to start over. Sigh.

Speaking of my generator, as you read in one of my previous entries, I have the thing in the storage shed. What I wanted to do all along is to have a nice large fan blowing air into the shed so I can have the door closed and keep the thing nice and quiet. Mission accomplished. Using one of the fans from my enormous fan collection, I have been able to keep the thing nice and quiet. It has also reached it's first oil change and has been switched over to Mobil 1 synthetic oil.

Northern Michigan is home to many oil and natural gas wells including several pretty close to the cabin. This area sits on the Antrim Shale Deposit that runs east-west across northern Michigan. 

Here are some photos of one of the wells and shots of another being sunk.

Photos of a new	well being put in
A natural gas we	ll near the cabin
Yep, they're eve	rywhere

 Michigan has recently cleared oil companies to sink dual wells (that is two wells next to each other called "Twinning"), one below the shale deposit and one above it to produce more natural gas. Here's a link about it. In the immediate area where the cabin is, there are several dozen wells, a natural gas processing facility, a gas pumping facility and a small diesel and gasoline distribution center.