Electrickle Trouble

Sunday  10 April 2011

Sunday morning we woke up early to an excited squealing from the inverter in the shed.  It gets alarmed by low power in the battery bank, and we had run down overnight.  It’s interesting to investigate the power you use almost without realising it.   We were running the fridge; lights the evening before; the internet was on, powering little lights on the wifi unit; the telephone we’d brought from the apartment was a handsfree, and needed power, a mobile transformer was left plugged in and taking power even without the phone attached.  Ever since we’d turned on the power system the shed had been humming and buzzing like a scene from Young Frankenstein.

So we turned everything off.  Luckily the day was sunny, and powered the batteries back up.  The evening turned cold, though, and we went to bed early.  This was good, as it turned out, as at 9.30 sharp the power died completely.  With a torch, Dave checked the batteries and found them too low again.  We turned off the inverter to prevent squeals and fell asleep.

We turned it on again in the morning and those lovely batteries attempted to charge up through another bright but cold day, but by the time we were back from the yard they were still too low to get us through the evening.  We’d turned off everything non-essential and they were still draining faster than they could recharge.  A mystery!

We’d brought the battery charger from the yard, with the intention of running the generator for a while to boost them, but the charger turned out to be too low powered for the job.  We rang Dieter, and went into Lefkas town to buy a heavy duty charger.  Another 500 euros invested. 

We turned everything off again, and went to bed by torchlight.  In the morning, Dave couldn’t wait to wire up the new charger, so he set to work in the battery box while I did some interior stuff in the camper.  We wanted some textiles on the walls to cover up the mock-wood veneer.  We’d recently watched some stuff on Mongolia and fancied a yurt look – which just meant hanging anything we could find by any means possible.