Friday, February 3, 2017

BBBC 2017 #3 + Battery Coffee

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. 

Least favorite household chore

There are so many chores that race for the bottom of the list but sorting through the mail is right there. Maybe 95% of it is junk that heads directly for the trash. Bulk mail rate needs to go away. It costs just as much to deliver the worthless junk as first class mail.





As part of my continuing playing around testing of the RV 12 volt system, I temporarily moved the Keurig coffee gadget out to the garage to make a cup of coffee (actually a chai latte) running off of the battery bank. The black diamond plate truck tool box makes a good coffee bar in the garage. I turned on the inverter using the remote switch (see I'm still testing) and watched the DC current on the Trimetric monitor. Both of the inverter remote and the Trimetric monitor will be installed inside the living space.

Right after the Keurig was turned on, the DC current jumped up to 120 amps for several minutes. The LED "-" on the monitor shows that current is being drawn from the battery bank. That calculated to about 1440 watts (12 VDV x 120 amps). Once the display on the Keurig changed to "Ready", the current draw dropped down to about 8 amps (96 watts). While brewing, the current again jumped to 120 amps. After the one cycle was completed, the Trimetric reported that I had used 6.61 amp-hours from the battery bank and I still had 98% available. The Trimetric is a pretty handy tool.

8 comments:

  1. That Trimetric is a cool tool indeed!

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    1. Extremely useful tool. I suspect that it will sit on the percent utilization display most of the time. The inverter also has a DC current reading and I was glad to see that it matched the Trimetric reading.

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  2. Taking out the trash is by far my least favourite household chore. However, the OCD in me likes trash separation ;-)

    Now, a Keurig in your RV... talk about glamping.

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    1. Recycling hasn't returned to Fairbanks. It was attempted but except for aluminum, has proven to be very expensive. There are groups trying plastic and glass again but until they find a cheap or free way of shipping things out of the state, they run into the same issues. For a number of years some of the grocery stores shipped stuff out in their empty containers but I think they outsource their shipping now.

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  3. Sorting the mail! As I read your least favorite, mine, and the others I've seen on blogs, I'm reminded of the terrible burden we all share as we wrestle with our weighty, first-world problems...

    I keep waiting for someone to chime in about milking the cows at 4am in the freezing cold, churning butter, or processing a hog. Probably not many Amish willing to post on our blogs...

    About junk mail -- don't get much anymore. Just bills.

    Steve Williams
    Scooter in the Sticks

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    1. Processing a hog is a lot of work but I've done that more than a few times. At the time it was a new enough task that it hadn't turned into a chore. Having to walk the dogs at daybreak for me is somewhat of a chore but I don't have to do it very often. Very first world...

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  4. So you can make about 100 cups of coffee on that battery ☺

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    1. Using the Kill-A-Watt, I got 60 watt-hrs/cup and this time using the Trimetric monitor it was 80 watt-hours. It could be inefficiency of the inverter or, more likely, this time the Keurig was starting from cold. The initial test was done shortly after it was used. Also, the earlier calculation used the entire bank down to zero. A better coffee number is 430 ah x 12 v / 2 / 6.61 ah x 12 v = 32.5 cups of coffee if each cup is started from cold and using no more than 50% of the battery capacity.

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