Almost There

We’re almost all done on the drive battery swap. In the morning I dropped off old cables to be chopped up and have new ends put on. I didn’t get them until the end of the day but it didn’t take too long to connect them up and test everything out. We then ran the genset for several hours to charge everything up while doing two washing loads.

A quick check this morning shows they’re still showing a high voltage which is all good news. The only thing left to do is to bend the rear of the lids around the cables that come out of the back of the boxes.

We’ve also come up with a way to put all twelve remaining batteries into the area we currently have our house bank. We need boxes to store five of them at a time. Helen came up with the idea of sawing up our spare 8D boxes and joining them up to make boxes the right size. It was worth a go so I spent a couple of hours sawing up two boxes then melting the two pieces together.

The result doesn’t look too bad although the joint, on its own, is too brittle. We need to brace the joint with something.

Mike from Whitebird who took our two 8D batteries last week has shown interest in one of the 4Ds so this gives us an incentive to do some of the house bank installation while we’re down here. I may just give this a go tomorrow.

A couple of extras from yesterday.  I picked up a breaker for our house bank charger.  Right now it is wired in parallel with another breaker which is not good.  This will let me do a proper job.  We also visited the duty free wine shop.  Once we have checked out of the country we can buy wine without duty on it.  The prices end up quite reasonable.  We’ve ordered nearly sixty bottles.  I hope this will be enough.

Today we’re touring the island. Should be fun.