199: Thursday 21st July 2011

Not much to report at the moment. I have spent the last 2 weeks charging batteries up. I ended up with 2 chargers and my neighbours one died, so now I need to buy him a new one. My cheap charger is still soldiering on and I now have 14 charged batteries, at least charged enough to make them usable. Generally they are all above 12 volts now. I have decided to go with 10 batteries and not 20. I know this will give me a smaller range, but with my new battery monitor I can see a battery failing early and swap it out. In theory I should have 13 spare batteries now and if my source gets more I can swap them for a nominal fee for nice fresh ones. He is only interested in the weight of lead for recycling and not whether the battery has any usable life in it. The last batch he had in was about 100 batteries. I bought 23 with the intention of mounting 20 and having 3 spares. I think at 580kg this is just too heavy. I have also worked out a different way of mounting the batteries on their end and getting a large boot space back. There are so many advantages with having 10 instead of 20 on board. The sacrifice is range. I rarely go any large distances and I have my little Fiat if I need to. Now this is truly a hobby mule and I can do lots more upgrades in future. I am looking forward to giving the paint a freshen up as it is really faded now. I am going on holiday soon, so I shall be having a week in Spain and 1 week at home. I expect to have sparkie back running again before the end of this second week of my holiday.