We made it back up to the ranch early Saturday morning, a beautiful day once again. First thing, of course, I check on is the solar…wha wha wha…and it is bad once again. Found a bad connection on the DC input of the charge controller…where I had melted wires/inputs on former charge controllers. Same thing here…tried to put the wire back in and found it was fried.
Kinda had enough of that. What a disappointment. I have been chatting with Renogy solar people off and on today, and think it is more than likely where my DC voltage is connected on the battery bank. I will be getting a new charge controller and changing the DC input (battery charging side) termination on the battery bank, to a terminal all on it’s own. Hopefully this helps it and helps our future charging.
Enough with the bad, decided to move on to other things. I had to continue the water tank plumbing that I left off last week, due to my leaving the pex crimper at home. ha.
I started again with making the connections that I had already cut and sized.
After the connections were made, we started making some water runs to get some water in the tank to ensure nothing was leaking. We needed to be about 200 gallons, above the outlet to test the valve is working fine. It took us 3 trips, one on Sunday morning, but we were able to finally get above the outlet and test the connections were good. I then proceeded to wrap up the pex in insulation and insulation tape.
After I wrapped the pipes themselves, I insulated the irrigation box that will house the valve. Then I filled in and packed the dirt/ground around that irrigation box and the underground pipe that runs to the center valve (to be installed later).
I also worked on the water intake from after our downspout first flush diverter. I wanted to add our Banjo line strainer to filter even more of the water flowing into the tank.
Before
After
I still have one more PVC/PEX connection, but overall I am happy with it and it is ready to roll.
On to the rock star of the weekend. The final two coats of polyurethane on our new wood flooring. After applying two coats last weekend, we came back to a good lucking floor, well that needed sanding…per the instructions. Sheralee sanded the floor Saturday in preparation for the Sunday double coat application.
While I was off making the final run for water, Sheralee started with the floor. It went really well, but then we had to wait some four hours until the next one could be put on.
While was applying the last coat, I got some pictures….and yes the polyurethane is wet, you can already tell it is going to be awesome!
We are pretty sure this is our flooring method of the future. Just seems so good, and easy enough to replace one flooring panel.
Almost forgot the pretty cool phenomonon we saw on a nice quiet Sunday morning. Sheralee and I were up on our deck enjoying a cup of coffee when all of a sudden, we thought we saw campfires, her in one direction and I in another. What was going on? I thought we were going to have to talk to be people about ‘Private Property’ and what not…but alas it was something totally different.
By that time the wind and picked up to a breeze and it turns out that during this time of year, and seems to be a certain temperature, the male Juniper trees pollinate the air! I guess this happens every year, but this is our first time noticing it. It was just incredible to see, looked like little explosions…and it was only the male trees. I tried to capture it best I could.
Pretty cool!
We are off a weekend, for a true joining of two people, but up again the weekend after that…well until maybe forever! ha.