Coffee and Batteries

What do batteries and coffee have in common? Besides the fact that you can get a charge from both... Well, earlier today I got to experience both. 

Let me talk about coffee first, I am not a daily coffee drinker, but I do consider myself a bit of a coffee snob. I like dark roast, whole bean coffee, I found a good brand from Sam's Club, it can only be purchased online, which is fine with me as I live pretty far from my "local" Sam's. And as with anything purchased from Sam's, it's going to come in an extra large size. It does take me a while to go through a bag. I have been buying this particular coffee for a few years now, everytime I try another brand, I am typically disappointed and quickly go back to this one.

You can try this from Amazon (it's more expensive there, but worth it if you don't have a Sam's account)

Or you can buy it from Sam's (a much better price!) Dark roast (my favorite) or medium roast (I just saw this!!!!)

So today (yesterday technically), I finished the last few beans in one bag and got to open a fresh new bag! If you are a coffee person, you must know the delight in opening a fresh new container of coffee, the scent is heavenly, the beans are oily and shiny... Oh I must say that this coffee roaster is one of the best I've experienced, their beans are whole, not broken, consistent in size and roast (that matters!), it's a pleasure to make coffee from this roaster, and they seem to do some good things for society which is a bonus!

The other exciting thing that happened today (or technically yesterday) is, well lets go back a week, I ordered 2 more LiFePO4 batteries (lithium iron), they came in a couple of days ago and we just installed them. A bit of history, we are running 3 separate solar systems, the original one that we started out with, we call that one the SkyCastle, the second system that we call the Tower of Power, and the third one called the Island. We named them so we would know which system we were referring to when discussing them.

We were using 2 100AH 12 volt LiFePO4 batteries on the SkyCastle system, these are Weize brand and fairly new, just a couple of months old. The Tower has 2 100AH 12 volt LiFePO4 Battleborn and the Island also had 2 100AH 12 volt LiFePO4 Battleborn batteries. The idea I had was to take the Battleborn batteries out of the Island and add them to the Tower giving us 4 100AH 12 volt LiFePO4 batteries together in that system, and buy 2 more Weize brand 100AH 12 volt LiFePO4 batteries to put into the Island. I'm thinking that in the near future, we will get 2 more Weize batteries and add them to the Island to have a total of 4 batteries in that system too, but one step at a time.

The reason for wanting, needing more batteries is because we added 2 more large loads to our systems. We try to keep the loads on each system in balance, the refrigerator is running on the SkyCastle along with the water pump and a few lights. We run a freezer on another system, sometimes it's the Tower, sometimes it's the Island depending on how much power is on each one. Of course we are running more lights, laptops (mine and PB's), and various charging of phones, tablets and the such. 

Recently we purchased a small window unit air conditioner, and even more recently we changed our internet from a local company to Starlink. Both of those items use a LOT of power each. The AC is pulling a pretty constant 500 watts, and the internet runs between 50-100 watts constantly. We don't run the AC all the time, just a few hours during the hottest part of the day, the internet, well that runs from the time one of us gets up in the morning (typically PB) until I go to bed at night (or early in the morning). So between these 2 new loads being added to our systems, we really needed to upgrade our battery storage.

Yesterday, we ran out the Island using the AC, I didn't mean for that to happen, I just got busy and didn't watch the power close enough. It was starting to get dark so by the light of a flashlight, PB removed the Battleborns from the Island and installed the new Weize batteries. One thing he immediately noticed, the Weize batteries are significantly lighter in weight than the Battleborns. Fortunately these batteries usually come fully charged so I have all 3 of my current systems charged up for the night.

We took the Battleborns over to the Tower but decided to install them tomorrow. We need to charge up the ones that were removed from the Island, all 4 batteries need to be as close to the same charge as possible before hooking them all together. It may be a few days before I can get PB to work on the Tower system, I just had an idea, we can run the existing 2 batteries in the Tower down using the AC tomorrow, then we can hook them all up after the sun goes down, that will give them a chance to bottom balance overnight, then they can start charging once the sun comes up the following day.

Hope you are having a great week, how is your week going? Let me know!

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Wretha,

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