Thursday, February 2, 2017

BBBC 2017 #2 + Batteries

This post is part of ToadMama's Brave, Bold, Blogger Challenge (BBBC) 2017 which is an attempt to make February go by a little more quickly. There are 28 topics, one for each day. 

A special memory from 2016


It runs! March 28th, the first start and warming up of the Ural engine after the complete overhaul. The picture was taken by JedR, who helped immensely with the overhaul, after I had taken it onto the subdivision road and ran up and down a couple of times. No smoke or weird noises though the carbs needed to be balanced. Most of the engine internal parts were replaced so it's almost a new engine. Hopefully it lasts for a while.


And continuing on with the RV battery bank ...



After stripping off about 1/2" of the insulation, the bare copper gets coated with Ox-Guard, an anti-oxidation compound that looks a lot like anti-sieze. The rotational position of the lug gets marked as these 2/0 cables don't bend very well. I am using a hammer style crimp tool but instead of a small sledge, I have just been putting the crimp tool into the hydraulic press. 12 tons should be enough pressure to make a nice, tight crimp. On the right, you can see the resulting crimp. I then yank on the connector to make sure that it isn't going to come apart and use a piece of heat shrink tubing to seal the connection. You want to keep air and moisture out of the crimp. Red shrink tubing for the positive connections and black for the negative. For all of the cables except the short cables for the series wiring, it's the same color on both ends.







Here is the completed battery bank. No sparks or other surprises. Right now it is on the charger to top off the batteries as they were at 85% charge. I reset parameter 3 on the Trimetric meter for 410 amp-hours so I can use the percent charge reading. Once they are fully charged, I can start really testing the inverter. Hopefully, I can pick up the solar panel this weekend and test the charge controller which has a setting for equalization. That reminds me, I still have to run the sense wire and the battery temperature sensor for the charge controller.

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