Anon and Ross have given me some good advice on batteries and a few other things. You guys will be happy to know that I separated my starter and deep cycle batteries today.
A starter battery is designed like the one in your car. An engine starter needs a lot of power in a short period of time to get the engine started. A deep cycle battery is meant to trickle out lesser amounts of power over a longer period of time. Don't ask me the engineering or physics/chemistry involved. I don't know. Maybe someone else can answer that question.
But apparently it's important to separate the batteries. Because they are differently purposed and sized, having them connected can lead to overcharging. In my experience, the water in the smaller starter battery boiled off over the course of a couple months. I was beginning to have troubles with starting the engine, and keeping other devices like my computer charged throughout the day.
The WTF is that there is a battery selector switch on the boat. But it was installed incorrectly so that you could select either both or neither battery. It reminded me of the plumbing on the boat. There is a y-valve that is to divert sewage either overboard, or to a holding tank. It was installed incorrectly, so that sewage could only be fed overboard, or nowhere at all.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Gotta Keep Them Separated
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Cap'n..... I can't find any contact info for you here or on Nautig. Would like to email you some info that I hate to tacky up your blog with. I can understand you don't want to publish your real email. Got a workaround?
Anon, I just set up an account on NautiG. B and then an l, o, g with the usual character following, then nautig and then the other traditional character, ending with com.
If anyone wants to send me something, they can send it there. But please let me know in advance, because it's not linked to my email reader or anything, so I won't get automatic notification.
Scott
That should stop the robots and .......you have mail.
The webcam this PM looked like you were just North of Mantanzes Inlet. If so, you could sneek up to the North side of the bridge (on the inlet side) and ram right up on the shore just after dawn. Walk under the bridge on the beach North. About a half mile shoud be fun. Go back in time to get the boat off before he tide starts out.
.......A change-of-pace morning.
Scott -
Congrats on problem solving and repairing the battery & plumbing stuff.
I've got another suggstion about the electrical hook-up but I too don't want to busy up your site with too much tech talk. I'd write you directly but can't figure out the clues to your e-mail address.
So how about dropping me a line directly? I guess that you and anon don't want to put your addresses on a blog in the open because there are spiders that comb bloggs looking for e-mail addresses to spam - yes??
So, assuming that is the case then I'd better follow your lead and not put my email address in the typical form. Here's my Yahoo.com e-mail name - but in reverse order - iiiressorw. That should keep the spiders at bay.
Bill, I would have done the beach walk this morning, but I was busy trying to do a tune up on my generator and had to go ashore for a new spark plug. I should have bought it the other day when I was at the anchorage you suggested. The auto parts store was right there.
Hi! Trying to figure out your location from the webcam. Are you looking SE toward the 206 lift bridge???? Where did you get off to find spark plugs?
No, I'm in the same spot off St. A. That's the 312 bridge. I parked my dingy at the restaurant next to the city marina. Gypsy told me I could do that for free. There were a bunch of other dingies there. Walked over to Auto Zone, which is right by the Oyster Creek Marina.
Post a Comment