DMV ~ Truck Gone ~ Melanie Update ~ Deal Of The Century

I spent most of Thursday, Friday and Monday at the DMV taking care of vehicles. The truck is gone, the Jeep will stay. I got an awesome deal at the metal scrap yard yesterday.

I had to register the Jeep Thursday so that I could get it on the road and bring it home Friday. I then spent quite a few hours Friday working on the Jeep. Monday I had to go back to the DMV because I deregistered the truck.

I traded the truck for a brand new oven for Melanie and for a trailer plus some credit on small engines later on. My neighbor, who I work with a lot, got the truck.

He bought me an oven that I had my eyes on for a while now in partial trade for the truck. He also brought me a 4x8 trailer with a tilt bed. The trailer needs new lights, of course, but I will fix it up.

I plan to remove the old wood deck. Wire brush the trailer frame and then paint it new. Then put on a new exterior grade plywood deck. Put on new lights and it is ready to go. The trailer will be used in place of the truck for hauling building materials for the homestead.

Melanie and I are still engaged and talking daily. There are a bunch of rumors being spread around about us. But none of them are true. We turned in our Fiance Visa application paperwork to the government 4 weeks ago and they have not done anything with it yet. We are waiting and praying that our visa application is approved quickly.

We are hoping to have her home by Christmas.

On the way home from the DMV Monday I went to the metal scrap yard to see what they had available. Often I get some very good batteries there for scrap metal price.

I got lucky on this day and got three batteries rated at 200 AH each. I paid the going scrap metal value for lead on this day and got a very good set of batteries for my off grid homestead.

I took the batteries home and tested them out. All three tested good checking with a volt meter.

I put the matching two batteries on my off grid solar tiny home in place of the solar forklift batteries to see how they work out in the next few days. I want to give them a full workout.

I fired up the HF 800 watt generator and connected an automatic 20 amp battery charger to the new/old batteries. Not long after, the current slowly dropped down as the batteries were topping off.

I plan to run these batteries for a while to see how they compare to the other batteries I have used on the tiny home in the past year.

In the morning the batteries were down to 12.3 volts at rest. This is odd because they were at 12.5 when I got them. I charged them up for a few hours and then in the morning they were lower. This means I must have a vampire drain somewhere in my tiny house on wheels. I have to find the drain and fix it asap.

A nice new 100 Watt solar panel arrived in the mail. I am going to use my 12 volt PWM solar charge controller and max it out with solar panels. I have an MPPT solar charge controller which takes the 24 volt solar panels I already have but I accidentally bought a 12 volt PWM solar charge controller the next time.

I get some money each month from my websites and I am going to use this from now on to expand my solar power system. Melanie is coming home one day soon and this will double our power requirements in the off grid tiny house.

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Troy
http://www.thedoityourselfworld.com
http://www.theoffgridproject.com