Friday turned out to be one of those boat projects day. The day started a little late as I provided some remote help (though not to successful conclusion) to a fellow on another boat having problems with his wifi setup.
Then I removed the battery which I was fairly sure had a dead cell and we took it into Island Water World to begin charging it and to investigate the results of the two batteries that had been independently charged overnight. The results were puzzling. From IWWs load tests they appeared ok but they still showed low readings on individual cell tests when using the hydrometer. This puzzle requires some attention as the battery with the dead cell had these characteristics six months ago when I first tested all the drive batteries.
I talked the problem around with Hunter from Arctic Tern, who we bumped into in the shop, and Jim, who turned up to borrow a tool, and with Helen. The strongest hypothesis I can come up with for cause is that sometime in the past the problem cells were overfilled with water and some of the acid spilled out. My last refill would have weakened the solution. There are a number of clues to support this idea but it doesn’t make it true. It does give us an avenue to attempt a fix.
The challenge will be to raise the acidity in the problem cells and, to a lesser extent, across a number of other cells which read low but not too low. We have a plan though. We now know that the battery we took ashore in the morning really is kaput. It has five good cells with strong acid it them. We’ll bring this battery back to the boat along with it’s replacement. We’ll drain some of the weak acid from the problem cells and replace with the strong acid from the good cells on the dud battery.
That will address any serious risks. We’ll then be free to sail north (the winds next week are looking favourable). Two to three weeks of usage should be enough to mix the acid into the cells. I will retest all the cells before coming back to Grenada. After this test we’ll deliberately lower the charge levels on the drive batteries which will weaken the acid in each cell. I know I can buy a five gallon container of battery acid on the island. With weakened cells I can again drain off fluid from every cell below optimum and replace with full strength acid. When the batteries are recharged and mixed they should be closer to optimum. We may have to repeat this process once a month a couple more times. Oh well. What else does one do on a boat?
Apart from lugging batteries around and scheming I also permanently wired in my Pure Sine Wave inverter bought in the US. It’s been working a dream although it couldn’t be fully utilized as it was running of a cigar lighter which couldn’t deliver the full amps without dropping the voltage too much and setting off the alarm on the unit.
So yesterday’s task was to mount it hidden away behind the console, wire it up to the fuse box I had earlier installed nearby for the radar and SSB in line with a switch installed on the console. I also permanently mounted a power multiblock close to where I wanted to place all the wifi/computer gear and ran the cable to the new inverter. Because I didn’t want to make a hole the size of the plug I had to disassemble the multi block so I could get away with a hole the size of the 110V wire. The last piece of the work was to move the Pactor modem to reduce the number of cables running from place to place.
Seems simple enough but it took hours. It was worth the effort as everything is now a lot tidier. The whole wifi setup now comes on at a flick of a switch. By being more directly wired I can charge everything of the new inverter without the alarm going off. Neat.
Today I’m off to IWW to buy the new battery and bring three batteries back to the boat (no fun there). We’ll install two of the batteries and do the first part of the acid master plan. This evening we have the twilight hash which starts from the marina right behind us. No fussing with travel today. If we have time we may squeeze in a visit to the museum in town.
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