by steve, on March 9th, 2012 (
New Zealand)
We had an early knock on the hull. It was Neil from Palmer canvass with our rails. We needed to fit them before they could do their final measurements for the custom shades. I said I reckoned I could get it done late morning.
I noticed that the battery voltage was around 12.1V. Not bad but a little lower than I had expected. There are a number of possible causes, many of which are quite ok. I tested the voltage over each battery to see if any of the 6V batteries were down compared to their neighbour.
It turned out I did have one mismatched pair with one battery about 0.5V lower than it’s neighbour. Again, this could be due to all the recent shuffling around of batteries resulting in one battery coming into the pack that was significantly less well charged than the rest. There is only one real way to settle this and that would be to equalize all the batteries, including the four spares. This timely task went onto the list.
First though I focused on the water maker. I checked it out then ran it through it’s flush cycle to rid it of the pickling solution put in last November. While this was going on I helped Dan put in the new battery box which was finally ready.
Once the box was in place and the water maker flush cycle finished I cut off the house supply and set about, with Helen’s help, placing 12 batteries into the box. We cleaned each battery as well as sanding each of the battery cable connections. I then hooked up the four spares so that all 16 were in the bank.
Then on went the generator to bring the bank up to full charge. With everything reconnected I could now use the water maker to fill our tanks.
As I needed a tape measure to install the blind rails, and had somehow lost ours, I popped out to get one. I used the trip to also pick up our Vanuatu Dollars and to pick up some additional connectors I was short on. At the auto store I talked to them about the battery cable I have spare. They seemed interested and came up with a price around double the recent quote from the better scrap merchants. They wanted to know what lengths I had so measuring them went onto the list of things to do.
Back at the boat the batteries and after a quick bite to eat I called Dan over to help with the rails. It was an awkward job which helped to have two people and at times three. By now the batteries were charged sufficiently to engage the equalization which brings them up to around 15.5V which causes a lot of gassing while pushing out a lot of sulphates from the lead plates.
Just at the point where we had the rails in place, Neil returned to measure. I had intended to call him but he couldn’t have timed his return any better. Dan and I still had to to remove each rail, put compound around each hole and rescrew them on. Neil reckons they’ll have the shades ready today so that will be nice.
Next, Helen and I measured out all the battery cables we had that were over 2m in length. Not including those I was using to add the spare batteries to the house bank we had 11 cables totalling 42m. It would be nice if the shop will take all of them. We’ll find out today. I’ll keep the two cables I have joining the spares to the house bank as they may come in handy.
After getting my email off to the shop detailing the lengths Helen and I went on another major provisioning run, including some more wine. I think Helen has conceded that her goal of four bottles a week is somewhat unrealistic.
Once we returned to the boat and unloaded everything it was time to shut the generator down after over five hours of equalizing. Today I’ll remeasure all the batteries. If there is a problem with any of them it should show up. Of course, with 16 batteries now all connected I’m somewhat tempted to find a way to keep it this way.
So if the shades are delivered today, and it looks like they will, the only thing really keeping us here in Whangarei is the outboard repair. If it gets sorted today, we’ll be off tomorrow (Saturday). If not, oh well.