3/1/22 2:01am
I just woke up from a lot of beeping from our inverter, so I reached over Zak to turn it off. And then as I laid back down I was thinking, “Oh man, our battery might be low…” and lo and behold! Our fan turned off immediately afterward. Zak is stressed and I am sure is trying to Google something now. I am also stressed, but I suppose there’s not too much we can do until the sun comes up so that we can start charging the batteries again.
I will say that we have NEVER cooked at under 100% battery (granted, it’s only been 10 days…) Today we were around 80% when we used the induction stove. I think that the stove just takes up so much energy and we have to be really good about making sure the batteries are sufficiently charged before we cook with the stove.
I think that this will take maybe 2 full days to fully recover from… not what we were hoping, huh!? I should probably check that out tomorrow. Of course, our B2B charger isn’t working currently either so we’re gonna have to make sure we can get that going and also make sure we can get sufficient sun tomorrow. Oh the joys of leaving before everything is 100% ready! Honestly though, I do stick by the decision of leaving when we did. If we waited to go, we might have been there for another month? Another 2? It’s important that we have our own space. Plus, we told Keith and Kathy that we’d be out no later than early February, and we STILL left Feb.19. In addition, it’s really good for us to be able to fix these types of problems on the road. It makes us stronger, more adaptable, more independent.
9:48am
Okay, so our solar charge controller is also error-ing out because our battery is over discharged (E1 error on the Renogy Rover MPPT charge controller). We’re gonna have to figure this out ASAP… Also it’s cloudy out today (of course!) and the people of Vero beach are not terribly welcoming…
9:46pm
Okay, so not world’s best day… our battery is almost back up to snuff. We also put in the gas struts for our cabinets today! So that was awesome. It gives us a lot more space in our Game Cabinet too since they were just sitting in there taking up space. The struts might be a bit too strong though. They are rated 100N, which is a bit much, like 22 lbs per strut I think.. But that’s fine. I love not having to hold up the cabinet doors with my head!
We ended up having Italian tonight because our batteries still aren’t quite where they should be in order for us to cook. We split chicken parm and meatballs from an Italian place called Bellini’s in Jupiter, FL. It was FANTASTIC! The sauce was out of this world.
I found an infographic today from Renogy about how voltage relates to battery life. It turns out that our battery monitor had been resetting back to 100% even when it was not supposed to! How annoying! Anyhow, I think we are going to start looking at the state of charge of our batteries based on voltage reading, not based on percentage.
Anyhow, I’m exhausted and I need to call mom tomorrow, and I would like to call Jackie tomorrow too. Now we are sleeping in between two work/ construction vans in a Publix parking lot. There’s a dog beach and park right across the street so we can wake up and go right there. Hopefully no cops knock tonight. It would be cool to track how much money we spend on parking over this trip.
