Finally getting the car in the garage..

 The pre-spring clean of the garage is (mostly) complete. I've had the car in the garage overnight most of the week - last night withstanding.. possibly due to conflicting priorities around a night car race and some beer. 

Overall, it's been a pretty good process. Expensive, but worthy. Some new shelving and cupboards went in, so now it's reasonably organised. 

I also cleaned out the little garden shed, somewhat retrofitted the gravel floor with concrete on account of the rodents having burrowed in there. I hit the walls with commercial disinfectant via a bottle on the pressure cleaner - which seemed to remove the smell just nicely... After a week to set, I cut up the pallet the solar panels came on (nearly 2m long x 1.1m), and turned it into a tool holder and fitted it into the shed. The shed is only around 1.5m x 0.75m so it's tight. The lawn mower needs to have the handle folded down and I need to pick it up and put it into position. Still, it's out of the garage and I'm not dropping clumps of dying grass everywhere. I found a couple of brackets I screwed into said tool holder and managed to get the whipper snipper in there as well. Again, it's tight, but it fits. 

My radio bits from Pirate Camp Co arrived. That stuff is solid. Looking forward to having the vehicle to put them in. 

The LiFePo4 battery arrived and I've completed my battery box. What an upgrade from the old sealed lead acid deep cycle. Half the weight is just the beginning. My first major test was my CPAP machine. In the past I've always used an inverter. It has a 12v input (with the polarity reversed for some insane reason) and I decided that I'd hook into that just to be a little more efficient. Using a power meter though, the overhead of that inverter isn't great. 

In the past, using a 10A charger, we'd have to run the generator for hours trying to get the old SLA battery recharged after a few hours of using the CPAP. If it ran for 5+ hours, it might have achieved "charged".

On my first run - 4 hours of running it on the bench, the new KickAss battery controller was still showing a runtime of 99.59 hours (effectively its full state). The battery charger kicks it to "charged" at around 96-97%, so that was the bench mark. After 4 hours, it was down to 94%. Running it overnight, I wound up down to 90%. I used it for a second night, and the battery dropped to 86%. 

I decided to test charging; I came back 40 minutes later to a full battery using a 20A power supply. 

I ran it last night from 97%, and it was at 94% this morning. I tried a charge test at 6.15am. I got out of the shower and checked it at 6.30, and it was charged. 

So far, it seems that this battery is very capable. I can't wait to get it out into the shed and hook up the fridge for a day or two and just see how much it draws. I'm fairly keen to get an idea of its capability if we were to go camping for a weekend without having to lug a generator or solar panels. 

The radio itself is still in transit. Annoying, but such is life. No doubt it's been drop shipped from China. 

Airband: I'd never really played with Airband before, until I needed to take the XYL to Tullamarine airport last weekend. I discovered that the IC-208H installed in the Falcon receives it, and was quite excited to be hearing more traffic the closer we got to Melbourne. Unfortunately, everyone in the car insisted on talking over the top of it. 

Other things - the APC UPS on my reef aquarium died. One of the batteries was low. I brought new batteries. It still faulted. After serious consideration, I sent it to the ewaste container at the transfer station. 

I have a 6kVA UPS in the garage that is in need of all 20 of its 7.2AH batteries replaced - not a "cheap" job. Spending half of what I can do that for on a UPS that has the uptime I need for the reef doesn't seem viable. It's far easier to get a feed directly from the garage to the tank and just spend the money on that monstrosity. Also, given that 1kVA+ UPSes are noisy, not having the noise directly across from where I work will be a plus... and we get some space back. Under normal load,  it should run for about an hour. That assumes I have things like my 42 and 27" monitors on. Once they're off, the numbers improve. Hopefully when I replace the 3RU box full of spinning disks, I'm hoping to get another 100w out of it. 

I may replace the batteries with 9AH just to improve the runtime. It's old enough to lack any serious magic tech that is going to care. Will make that decision when it's time to fund them.