One of the first nights where it gets dark enough for a moment to see the stars. With a clear sky I took some pictures of the firmament above the cabin. The best few to come out are in this video, and I added an annotated version of each so you know what you're looking at. I end the video with a pretty cool shot of a shooting star (Perseid meteor shower peaks around the 12th). These are definitely not the best pictures; can't wait for winter when it gets properly dark and get some better shots...
This is a 14kWh LiFePO4 battery made out of individual 280Ah EVE cells before final assembly. It has my DIY flexible bus bars and compression frame; the entire battery with compression frame fits into an insulated box.
Last June my family went on a road trip from Finland towards the Lofoten district in Norway. The videos of the trip have been sitting on my computer for some time now and I didn't have the time to do something with it except one SlowTV type video I put on this channel of the Tjeldsund bridge. I now finally strung some shots of the Lofoten area together and made this short video which hopefully captures the road trip feeling in combination with the beauty that is Norway. Unlike most of my other videos, I put a soundtrack on it, in part because no one wants to hear chatter in a foreign language mixed with screaming kids :)
Credits for the soundtrack used:
Wanderlust by Nomyn https://soundcloud.com/nomyn
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/wanderlust-nomyn
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/Q66WFX4eeVw
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ry8_MLyyQI
The Moose came back, and we had a few other animals visit. Winter came fast, and temperatures soon dropped all the way to -30 C. Perfect time to make a stew in the masonry fireplace oven.
Audio: Checkmate by Nathan Moore
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3PY02-hgus
Progress on the off grid log house. Staining the outside done last summer. Over winter we'll work on the technical aspects such as solar, heating, etc.
So after spending way more time arguing than I should have with people in the comments section of a recent video by @Off-Grid Garage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypzNH56_aWE) about the need to keep cable losses in mind when doing battery capacity testing in Amp-Hours, I decided to put the matter (hopefully) to rest with this video.
I start by showing a typical discharge curve of a 20Ah LiFePO4 battery. Then I build a test set-up with an 8 meter cable between the battery and a CBA IV battery tester. I use alligator clips and undersized wire to push the current draw to the maximum it can handle with that mess in between. It could pull 8A and the voltage at the tester dropped to 0.5/0.6V (the lowest the CBA IV will allow) and ran this for almost 2.5 hours until the battery was depleted. I then show the results of the amount of Ah and Wh drawn at the end of the test.
In the end, this shows that even with massive losses in the wires and connections (80%!) the Ah rating at the end remains the same and is a good indicator for the capacity of the battery. In other words: voltage, losses, etc. don't matter when you test Amp-Hour capacity - the current flowing is the same everywhere in the circuit. Naturally, the measured Wh at the end of the test are not, because of the losses in the set-up - if you want to measure Watt-Hours, you need to account for losses. This is one of the reasons why battery capacity is given in Amp-Hours: the amount of current a battery can push in a circuit for a given amount of time.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfTWO-yf3BU