Thursday morning had us firing up cranky and unwilling trucks in the early cold of the dawn at the Paulden job site.
On this day we would be revisiting a previous installation to add some more batteries and an automated back up generator.
The road in to this location is steep, winding, narrow and rough. Once again, pictures don’t do it justice, but here it is anyway.
When we got there, we discovered road wind had gotten to my bucket of blow line due to a broken lid and dispensed a thousand feet or so of itself all over the back of the truck. 😄😄🤷♂️
Once that mess was cleaned up, it was time to get to adding batteries.
First, we had to get all the batteries to the same state of charge-it’s a bad idea to connect batteries that are at significantly different states of charge due to the high current levels that occur when they are connected and attempt to equalize.
This process can become deceivingly time consuming, especially as the battery count goes higher.
Then comes the process of making battery cables, installing buss bars, loading the batteries into their cabinet, and a bunch of other details.
At the same time we were bouncing back and forth to the work that had to be done to install the generator. That ment finishing conduits, pulling in power and control wiring, connecting all those wires, setting up the generator and performing a two-wire control conversion on it. I somehow didn’t get any pictures of the generator or its work-but it’s a fair pile of work.
Normally at this stage it’s just a matter of reconnecting the batteries to the inverter and double checking settings and functions, then setting generator parameters and testing/commissioning the generator.
But this day had other plans in store for us.
For some reason, the inverter decided to stop communicating with the batteries, and nothing we did would restore communications.
Finally we gave up and got SolArk tech support involved.
We ended up spend hours on the phone with them attempting to resolve the issue and tried everything under the sun-but to no avail.
We all had to throw in the towel and let the system run in an open-loop/no communication mode. We’re still not sure what is going on, and will have to involve the battery manufacturer next. 🙄🤷♂️
That issue took so long and was so complex, we didn’t have a chance to finish the generator installation, so once we conceded to run in open loop mode, we shifted gears to getting the generator up and running.
That took us pretty late into the night, and finally by 9 pm, we had everything up and running and the trucks loaded up and ready to start the three hour run home. 😬😬
Here’s what the inverter room looked like when we rolled out.
And with that, we began the long trip home.
It had been a long, frustrating, and tiring day, and at 10 pm, we had gotten as far as the Paulden job site we had left from that morning.
With over 15 hours on the clock, and another two hours of driving to get home, we made the decision to call it a day and stop at our camp for the night rather then risk an accident driving the rather dangerous and notorious 89 highway as exhausted as we were.
We would have to catch a couple hours of sleep, then get up at 3 am and haul ass home in the wee hours of the morning to make our next appointment…