Winter Garden - TT

Sunday - Just a bit of maintenance today. I picked up some spray-on battery terminal cleaner at the local auto parts store. I had always used baking soda in the past, but the commercial product's acid indicator really made it simple. Spray, lit it sit for a few minutes, then flush it with water. Repeat until the spray doesn’t change color. That means the acid has been neutralized. 

Monday - I re-installed the Pi-Hole software, which is a DNS black-hole. There are 143,528 ad domains in its current database. You use the Pi-Hole Raspberry Pi as your local DNS and anytime it recognizes a domain in its database, it just returns a null. The net result is fewer ads, less bandwidth, and faster web pages. I had this running earlier but needed the SD card for another Raspberry Pi. I picked up some new SD cards and got the server back up again. I now have three Raspberry Pi's running on the one buck converter and between all of them, they are drawing about 1A at 5VDC.

I ordered a propane "sniffer" device that detects combustible gases. I tried it out on the stove initially to demonstrate to myself that the device actually works (it did). I then used it to check all of my additions to the propane line at the back of the refrigerator. There were no leaks detected. I had also picked up a squirt bottle at the Dollar General store and put in a 50% mixture of dish soap and water. I used this concentrated solution to look for leaks as well. I really wanted to make sure that there weren't any.

I made a trip to Walmart to look for Calgon water softener for the black tank. It is used for the GEO method. for keeping the black tank clean. In addition to the Happy Camper chemical, you add a cup of Dawn dish soap, and a cup or so of the Calgon. The last time I tried it was several years ago and the SeeLevel sensors actually worked for a while. The Calgon is kind of hard to find so I went to the Walmart on New Independence Dr which is larger than most of the other Walmarts we've been to in Florida. It's promising as the SeeLevel gauge now reads 13%. Usually, it jumps from 9% to 22% and skips everything in the middle. Hopefully, this trend will continue.

Tuesday - It was a really nice morning. Not very humid and not as hot as it has been. It's about noon and only 84°F. I spent the last hour lazing around the pool. Bridget's flights got changed by Delta and instead of arriving at 6:30am, she arrives around 2:15pm. A more civilized arrival time. There was time for a test session before heading to the airport. And we were back in time for the afternoon session.