Another quick side project is done. I built a rack for the canoes, secured to the east side of the cabin. There, they get the least exposure to wind and snow. Sure beats having them just lay on the ground. And, it eliminates the need to occasionally go find the aluminum canoe in the woods and drag it back home!

That's both good and bad news. Good because we had no way to test if the system works as expected--automatically starting the generator when the battery bank voltage stays below a threshold voltage for some period of time. See this post for the details.

Bad, because that means we've gone a while without a full charge on the batteries.

I judge the state of the batteries by the number of Amp-Hours (Ah) they are "down" from a full charge. A full battery bank would have a value of zero Ah. As we pull power from the batteries, this number goes down. So, for example, if we use 10 amps (DC amps at ~24.5V) for an hour, they would go down by 10 Ah and the meter I use to measure system performance would register -10 Ah. (That would also be about 245 watt-hours of power usage.)

For you engineers reading this, I acknowledge that amps is not a measurement of power or energy storage. That would be watts. But, I argue that if we assume an average battery voltage of 24.5 amps, then Ah becomes a decent surrogate "gas gauge" for the battery bank capacity and usage.

Amp-Hours is also useful for a couple of other reasons. Battery capacity is specified in Amp-Hours, so there is a direct correlation there. My battery bank has a capacity of about 1100 Ah. So, if the meter reads -250 Ah, I know I've used about 1/4 of the total capacity. And, I never really want to use more than about 1/2 of the capacity in order to keep the batteries in good condition.

Anyway, back to the main topic. We had not achieved a full charge on the battery bank in many days. This is due to several mostly cloudy days in a row. We'd recover some each day, but not enough to compensate for our daily usage and make up for previous days' deficits. The table above shows the battery capacity readings first thing in the morning for several days.

On November 2, we were down more than 500 Ah, the battery voltage was below 23.4 volts, and after 2 hours, the generator kicked on. It ran until the batteries were fully charged, about 3 hours or so. The sun also came out brightly helping with the charge.

On November 4, I again used the generator, this time turning it on manually because I wanted to get an equalization charge (EQ) on the batteries. To quote the Trojan battery manual:

I also added distilled water on that day as equalization can boil off some of the water in the batteries.

We found this down by the pond yesterday. From the amount, shape and size, I'm thinking black bear. From the contents, I'd say he's been visiting our bird feeder.

Scat is about 1-1/2" in diameter.

Guess we need to put the game camera back down there!

I think we may call both a big moose and a big elk "Big Boy". Or, maybe Lynne has a different name for the big elk we are now seeing on the game cameras. (Would love to see him in person!) Is this the same elk that we saw a couple of years ago with a large herd walking through our meadow?

Big Boy the elk at the salt lick.

Maybe the same elk from a few years ago?

We have all game camera shots that we think are worth keeping in one of our photo galleries. You can see it here, or link to it from the links on the right side of this page--just scroll down to "Photo Galleries". The most recent shots are on the second page, including three nice shots of Big Boy.

Yesterday morning was a bit magical. We had rain and a little bit of snow overnight. Not much, just enough to make the ground crunchy. As we sat drinking our coffee a big bank of fog rolled in and enveloped the cabin like a white fluffy cocoon. That good old Colorado sun came out and the fog bank retreated to linger along Bull Mountain.

It shifted and changed on our walk with the dogs. Fascinating.

When we returned from our walk the little aspen grove beside the cabin was glittering with drops of water from the melting snow. I soon became caught up in trying out different focuses and came up with some pretty cool photos of the sun through droplets of water. You may or may not agree, but here they are!

The clothesline.

I became fascintated by the prisms and how each droplet seemed to reflect a different spectrum.