Finished equalizing today. I had another go at the house battery that has an ok voltage but poor cell. I manage to bring the acid concentration up further but not too far. The house battery with a really bad cell was next. It failed to respond. Last on the list was one of the drive batteries I had been focusing on. We brought it in and connected it close to the charger and equalized it until it was hot. It’s bad cell made little further recovery.
So the realization that was dawning yesterday, that was confirmed today, is that these batteries have had it. Two years for a bunch of lead acids is not impressive but these are cheapos and they’ve been in charter so maybe this is not so bad.
We’ve decided to replace the drive banks and the house banks with Trojan 6V batteries. I can fill the space of the house bank with 8 of these increasing my capacity from around 500Ah to 880Ah. This should be a bigger effective increase as I very much doubt we’ve had anything close to 500Ah of capacity on our house bank.
I need to keep the capacity the same for the drive banks so this means another 24 batteries which will fit in 2/3 of the space. This will be a big improvement in terms of accessibility and weight. Thanks to a recommendation from Matt from Where II I have found someone willing to sell me 36 of these batteries (4 for spares) for a pretty decent price down in Trinidad. The order is confirmed and, touch wood, we’ll be picking them up early August. It will be nice to visit Trini for a week or so but we must get back for carnival here in Grenada.
Once we have these in place I’ll be a lot more relaxed without having nagging worries about the batteries. I know we’ll look after them so we should get a decent life out of them.
Today has also been ordering day from the US. We now know pretty much all the parts we need for spares and priority project completion. The windlass alone justifies the cost and effort of shipping our stuff down here. Everything else we send along saves us further $$$$s. Our shopping so far today has been :
- Sacrifical zincs for the genset
- Dry bag
- Cheapo GPS to be hooked to VHF radio & SSB
- Cable for above
- New VHF radio with capability for helm remote
- Helm remote and cabling
- Hand held emergency water maker for ditch bag and last line of resort for water maker failure/contamination
- Genset impellers
- Windlass
- Spare galley foot pump
- Fan to replace borrowed one put in bedroom
- Primary fuel filters
- Secondary fuel filters
- Oil filters
- Spare water pump
- Jacklines
- 36 6V Trojan batteries
I still need to find a spare fuel pump.
What else. From yesterday’s account I forgot to mention we had a go at fixing the leak in the dinghy. I think it was mentioned a while back that water gets between the inner and out hulls. This time we’ve sealed around the water drain as this looks like a possible source of ingress.
I also compared topping lift shackles with Where II and now feel comfortable with our new one. I’m therefore crossing that one off the list.
Just about to have dinner with Helen so signing off. Later, Where II and Bristol Rose are over for talking. Just talking. Honest.
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