Rock 'n Roll done rocked and rolled

7/24/25:

 

Just for grins, even though the scooter didn't need a charge, it got one anyway. For comparison purposes, the fully charged battery clocks in at 41.7 volts. Before the solar powered charge, it was under 34 volts. It works on 36 volts, btw.

 

The indicator on the display showed 20% discharge, but it's probably more than that. Distance so far is about 2 miles. Not as impressive as it appeared to be at first. The display is not going to be much use, I'm afraid.

 

7/23/25:

 

Rain was in the forecast yesterday, so no go on a trip. Today, I ran it around the place a bit. Still worried more about ME than the machine. This may take awhile to get in enough shape to really try it out like I want to. Cut it short because of fatigue.

 

7/20/25:

 

The scooter is now prepared for a real trip, but I am not... I want to practice with it some more, but I woke up with a sore foot. I will take it easy today, and hopefully the foot will stop bothering me.

 

I'm not as sure about its range as I should be. The last thing I want is for this thing to run out of juice before I get back. I may have decided to get an e-bike instead. It would've cost more, but I would have the option to use muscle power to get back to the comforts of home. Water under the bridge, as it is said.

 

7/18/25:

 

Things get disorganized around here sometimes. Focus gets lost, and things get started and not finished. Well, not this time. I re-read the manual, and I'm getting more familiar with the controls. Therefore, there's something to report. Most likely, I haven't used 20% of the battery, as earlier indicated. The readings "bounced" back up. It's a 36 volt set up, and there's a reading that shows 38.4 volts. My guess is that this is another way to read a discharged state.

 

The trip odometer reverts to zero on every new trip. There's a history odometer too. But you have to jump through a few hoops to find it. It doesn't show but 1 mile. I know I've done more, but since it doesn't show tenths of a mile, it could be close to 2.0 miles. Once it exceeds that, it will show 2 miles and no more. Still practicing with it. Until I feel a bit more confident with it, the trips will be short.

 

7/15/25; 1:47 PM:

 

Yesterday was rainy, so I stayed inside. Today is sunny and dry, so it was time for further tests. I made some adjustments to my ramp and to the scooter, and gave it another whirl.

 

This trip was longer. A total of 1.4 miles. It still has a good charge on it, according to the indicator. Very impressive. My adjustment made the speedometer too hard to see. Therefore, there's no speed to report. Seems like I got another comment from the locals. We met at an intersection at the same time, and he said, "go ahead, Bart". I got a kick out that, so I went on ahead.

 

It looks like it has discharged about 20% over about 2 miles on that last full charge. It may extrapolate out to 10 miles on a charge, which is a lot better than anticipated. It's already beyond my expectations as is.

 

7:38 PM; continued:

 

Some more adjustments were on tap, and now these are done. More adjustments to the ramp, but these are not yet done.

 

There's a chance I take her out for another spin tomorrow.

 

7/13/25:

 

That was so much fun I forgot to post about it. The ramp was completed, and off into the breeze did I go with my new scooter. I got a compliment on it as I breezed on by one house.

The seat may be hard on my achy breaky butt, but I may be able to tolerate it. I'm getting a little worried about a spill. I have enough trouble standing up. If I fall down, I may not be able to get back up. That would not be good.

Don't have any safety equipment. Shoot, I used to ride a bicycle all over the danged place, and never wore a helmet, but I did wear clothes.

These days, they may give you some shit about anything you do. Besides, it's probably good safety practice to have a helmet and guards for the elbows and knees.

The thing says it will go over 15 mph. That's faster than the electric scooter I had in the fairly recent past. When I rode that thing in Houston, there was a lady who went out of her way to laugh at me. I don't give a hoop. If I did, would I have bought another one of these things. I'm worried about other things.

Can you ride your motor scooter, Billy Boy, Billy Boy

7/12/25:

 

Making the ramp now. It's almost ready to be tested. If that test works, then I can get the scooter outside and try it out. I tried it inside a bit. Everything seems to be working, and I'm nearly ready to ROCK n' ROLL!

 

But do I ever get tired easy. Maybe if I am lucky, I can rebuild myself while I'm doing this. This is embarrassing.

 

By the way, did I mention that I found the missing bolt? However, the other wire basket between the seat and the handlebars, and is actually large enough to carry some cargo, is IN THE WAY. So, I had to take it off. The seat feels okay for now, but I'm not bouncing up and down on a bumpy road yet. We'll see.

 

7/11/25:

 

The scooter came, I saw, but it did not conquer me. Not yet, anyway. There was some assembly required--for the scooter, that is. The cursed thing arrived late afternoon. I got the bright idea to take it out of the box while outside in the sun. By the time I got it out of the box, I knew I was in for a battle.

 

I fought this thing for the rest of the day, and retired for the evening in a very tired state. In theory, the assembly should have been easy. Among the issues were that the handle bars "quick disconnect" mechanism would not go on properly. Fortunately, this feature is not necessary. The status of the assembly was mostly finished by bedtime. But I was still in the fight.

 

First thing this morning, the battle raged on. The parts of this scooter have a very annoying tendency to want to fall to the floor. I have a strong tendency not to want to bend over and pick things up off the friggin' floor all the time. So I battled this thing for another hour before finishing up the assembly. That is, what I could do of it. A part went missing when it hit the floor. I spent another hour looking for it with no luck.

 

The original idea was to build it outside because I wanted to store it in the van. But it is too hot to store it outside, says the manual. So I have to keep it in-friggin'-side. So that is the current state of this adventure. The question being, how to I store this thing inside, and move it outside where it can be useful when I want it to be? I will build a ramp. There's some stairs to traverse in order to get it back down to ground level.

 

More assembly required. I'm getting too old for this shit.

 

7/10/25:

 

Amazon and UPS needs to get their heads wired up to their asses. They are giving conflicting information. It's not a problem so far. We'll see.

 

7/9/25:

 

The scooter is still on its way. Not due for a couple more days.

 

I tested the battery by using it to power the weed eater. The weed eater pulls about 700-800 watts estimated. It will drain a battery of this type in a relatively short time. It will run a dehumidifier for 3 hours continuous if it is in as good a shape as last year. It has seen little use since I stopped that experiment. Now there's this experiment.

 

There's always something, said Rose Ann Rosanna Dana.

 

7/8/25:

 

The repairs are complete, but there may be some tweaking ahead. Still in testing phase, but it appears to be working as intended.

 

Still waiting on the scooter to arrive.

 

7/7/25:

 

The solar panel system has been acting up. When I moved the trailer recently, I may have pulled a wire loose. I forgot to unplug everything, and while pulling the trailer, I notice something was being dragged along behind me. Oopsie.

 

It's been a slog to figure out what got messed up. It's charging the battery again, so that's good. I want the switches to shut it off and on to work, but these aren't cooperating at the moment. No biggie. I'll figure it out.

 

7/5/25:

 

Awaiting my moto scooter, and it is no ring-tail tooter. (Ref: Slick Willy Update of the Rush Limbaugh show dating back to 1992's election campaign ) Getting my stuff ready, as preparations are needed.

 

The following video is a little closer to the update version, but it isn't quite there. I can't find it on YouTube.

 

 

 

 

07/03/2025:

 

Got an idea about buying a mobility scooter. The one that would seem most handy would cost over $3k, and can be obtained on Amazon.

 

It is electric, and would have a 30 mile range, or so it says.

 

Having experimented with an electric scooter before, the range would seem be inflated. It all depends upon battery capacity. This one has a 48 V, 20 AH electrical setup. That's about 1 Kwh. If it is anything like autos, it may get 4 miles.

 

Even so, it would be sufficient for ample mobility.

 

The price is high, but not beyond me. What about a golf cart?

 

07/04/2025:

 

Here's what I did: I got an electric scooter. It is pretty much the same thing I had before, so it won't cost much, and it can't do all that much, but it can do a few things ( I hope ).

 

Back in 2003, I bought one for $150. It is now $450 on Amazon. Now that is what I call "progress". Free delivery! Like wow, man.

 

I'll use my solar panels to provide electricity for charging the thing. Maybe this idea will actually work. Most of my ideas don't work worth a sheet, main.

 

 

Tried to cook on battery power

I tried cooking on the egg cooker, which draws about 300 watts. This was back at the old place, more than a year ago. Maybe two. By the way, there was success in cooking a meatball, if memory serves.

This was a step up, but it doesn't work well. Electricity does get to the hot plate, but it draws about 1200 watts ( if memory serves ). Quite the voltage drop at the inverter, and it started to whine loudly.

There was also a smoke rising from the wires. Uh, oh! I had to do a quick shutdown.

Hopefully, no damage done. But that may be wishful thinking. I will inspect it a bit later. There's a lot of food waiting to be cooked.

Update, 9/26/24

Since I stopped with the dehumidifier, I haven't used the solar panels for anything.

Today, I moved the small battery close to the door, and hooked up the small inverter so that I could use the computer with the power off that battery.

Cool.

This involved moving the raspberry pi computer from the bedroom to the living room area.

If I get insomnia again, I'll have to go to the living room to use the raspberry pi computer.

That's an incentive to get my butt to sleep. Won't be fiddling around with the machine for too long and then there's a problem getting asleep.

Took down the water filtration

It's pretty rainy lately. There's not much sun to power the dehumidifier.

So, I took it down the water filtration. Some of the set up for the solar power to the dehumidifier was taken down too. In other words, there's no power connection to run the dehumidifier, except from the grid.

The solar power station is still there. But there's not much reason to use it. It doesn't put out that much power. The dehumidifier was the only thing worth running, but it has no real job to do now.

I'll have to think up something else.

Trying the new schedule

9/1/24; 3:45 PM

It didn't last for the full three hours. The battery wasn't fully charged, and it was too discharged to continue for the last half hour.

There was plenty of water in the bucket, and it is still being consumed by the evaporative cooler as I type this. It was about as much as I had predicted.

Today was mostly cloudy, so the battery may not get fully charged. Tomorrow, I've got other things to do. So nothing tomorrow on schedule. That didn't last long.





7:13 AM

Gonna run it from 6:30 AM to 9:30 AM. Didn't get started early enough to do the 6 AM time schedule.

There were nearly 2 gallons in the bucket this morning. Happens every time I run the evaporative cooler. That proves it is mostly coming from inside. Add that to the half gallon I collected yesterday while making the run. Nearly three gallons total. By the way, I saw another way to treat water with reverse osmosis. It looks like a good deal, but it costs a lot. There's always a catch.

Anyway, with this schedule, the solar panels will get nearly an entire day's worth of light to recharge. It doesn't get enough light earlier because the sun isn't high enough to stop casting shadows over the panels. It gets light earlier, but not very much.

Integrated the system

Another 3 hour run. This time with the new inverter, which didn't make a difference.

By integration, I mean that the water goes into a closed loop. It is collected and reused, over and over. At least that is the goal.

Problems along the way have interfered with the system being implemented on an operational basis. It is still experimental. It may always be that way because this really isn't worth much, as we'll see.

There are only a few hours each day to gather the solar power that will run the system. It may be best to start before daylight so that the amount of water collected is maximized. Perhaps 6 AM to 9 AM would be best. The ending time is about the beginning time when the solar power can be collected in order to recharge the battery.

The condensing part will continue with the mini-split after the dehumifier run in the morning. The mini-split can collect more water than the dehumifier because it is more powerful. The evaporative cooler will run with the water that will come from the previous day's collection from the mini-split, plus any water that was collected from the dehumidifier run early in the morning.

All together, I may collect close to three gallons of water per day. That will run the evaporative cooler for several hours. The late afternoon will probably not have any assistance from the evaporative cooler. It will dry out the inside, and it will go into the collection can outside where the mini-split works, to be used the next day.

So there's the system, for what it is worth. What's it worth? Probably not much. It may not save but a few pennies worth of electricity each day. It's not at all economical. But it's "green". How lovely. The water gets used over and over. How admirable.

The water would be worth more with some other use, but this is sufficient for now. Water on the desert is priceless. Or the same if the water service is disrupted in the city. So there's that going for it.

The weather really is changing

8/30/24: I did a Joe Biden/Kamala Harris. Oh no! Had to cover up my mistake.

10:54 AM:

It was shut down about 30 minutes early due to threatening looking cloud cover, and a forecast of rain in the morning. This forecast had been changed. Since then, the clouds have cleared. Oh, well.

Something I hadn't been noticing until now. There's a big voltage drop at the inverter. The controller will say 12.9 volts, but the inverter says 11.5 volts. I wonder if there's something amiss with this inverter. It is an old inverter now. Bought it in 2015.

This was about 2.5 hour run. I'd say the battery held up well.





7:16 AM

This looks to be an early fall. The forecast is for rain chances for the next 10 days. Quite the change over the weather pattern just 10 days ago.

I'm going to make a solar power run this morning. That means powering the dehumidifier for at least 3 hours depending upon its state of charge at the end of that time ( or before ), it will be shut down. Then I'll switch modes to recharging the batteries.

Time for a little thinking

8/29/24, 6:47 AM A bit of fine-tuning needs to take place while the weather does its thing. Got a bit windy yesterday. The seasons are changing. Instead of very hot and dry weather, we've entered a period of sudden thunderstorms and rain.

I've built some structures to keep things dry. It won't do to have electronics get wet. This has worked mainly, but it could be better.

As for running the dehumidifier, I am beginning to wonder if that is a total waste of effort. But I haven't built it the way I need to, so that conclusion is a bit premature.

To repeat, the dehumidifier and evaporative cooler are intended to work together as a type of climate control. The principles are the same, but instead of chemicals, I am using plain old water.

For instance, in any cooling system, there is an evaporating unit and there is a condensing unit. The cooling effect comes from the evaporator, and a warming effect comes from the condensor. The idea is to remove heat from an area by having the evaporator cool an area down, but the water has to come out, which heats things back up. To actually get the heat out, the hot air is sent out a window through a ventilation device. The problem is that my ventilation device is not working properly.

Such an arrangement with water isn't very effective, but it is low energy. Probably can be considered low-tech too. The advantage is that it is lower hanging fruit, so to speak. Any yahoo can do this, so here I am doing it.

1:08 PM

Just completed a re-work of the ventilation for the dehumidifier. Checked it out, and it does seem to be doing much better. There won't be any use of the solar panels, so it will run on grid power to test out the dehumidifier, and there's a change in how the mini-split will work, too. Perhaps I can find out something useful in this exercise.

Experiments are hitting a snag

8/26/24, 7:01 AM



There haven't been updates for the last few days. Writing a blog has to be a habit, otherwise, the outcome is like before. The blog gets neglected.

Let's not make that mistake again.

Work continues, despite the lack of blogging. It seems that my mosquito control needed a part, so I got it. However, I noticed when I put it in, which is a screen, that my plastic water receptacle broke. The trouble is that it was leaking all over the place, as opposed to leaking into the bucket like I wanted it to.

I tried repairing the old Frisbee. The Frisbee is turned upside down, which allows it to collect water. I cut a notch into the side of the Frisbee, so it would leak out and into the bucket. Alas, the Frisbee cracked. That's what happens with plastic. It gets old, and it cracks easily.

I used some Flexiseal to repair the crack, but it didn't work. This morning, there was water all over the place again, as the Frisbee is leaking where I don't want it to.

I may have to engineer a new receptacle that is like a Frisbee if this thing isn't repairable.

Thing is, I need it to rest on two by fours that the weight of the sand and pebble mixture that makes up the bulk of the home-made water-filtration device. It sits on top of the 5 gallon bucket which collects the filtered water. This is one heavy mother with all that wet sand and pebbles inside of the other 5 gallon bucket being used to house the filter.

In short, this isn't going smoothly.

As for the solar power aspect, I am running another experiment. That's not going like I'd like either. It seems that I gather plenty of power, but there's not enough ways to get use out of it. Dehumidifying and collecting the water will use up the battery for sure, so that leaves out climate control. Now I'm just gathering water with the excess power. And not much water at that. Power is only "excess", because there's not enough power to run the mini-split.

10:43 AM

The fix using flexiseal is working after an adjustment in its position. A four hour run with the dehumidifier on and the swamper off produced NO WATER. It doesn't seem worth it to use it in the summer. Maybe the winter.

Another run with solar powered dehumifier

8/20/24:

Running this again, but it looks like the same thing. So, I need to make a change.

It needs a ventilation tube custom built to attach to the dehumidifier. Then, the window needs to be fixed up so that the ventilation tube connects directly with it. Otherwise, partially opening the window in order to let the hot air out isn't going to work very well. This is very inefficient, I suspect.

The battery is holding up well. At 4 hours, it was still going strong. I'm going to go for 5 hours this time. The test is still ongoing as I write this. About 9 minutes to go. Incidentally, this easily could be the hottest day of the year so far. I saw a forecast for a high of 106. Don't know if we're there right now, though. Quick update: Nope. It's 104.

8/18/24: This time I ran it over 4 hours. The dehumidifier didn't pull out that much water inside, so that may explain the long lasting run.

I monitored the battery, expecting it to run out of juice after about 3 hrs, like it has been doing. Since it lasted a lot longer, and seemed far away from being fully discharged, I have to scratch my head and wonder what was the difference this time?

If it didn't pull out much water, then maybe it was because it wasn't running the compressor. If it wasn't running the compressor that much, then the battery would last longer.

Not too sure why it wasn't pulling the water out. I collected but a small amount during the 4 hour run.

The read out on the dehumifier said low humidity. But the evaporative cooler, aka swamp cooler, was running. The fans should have recirculated it back to the device, so it should have pulled out more.

Mainly, I'm just happy that the thing didn't run the battery down fast like the last time. The solar panels have been charging that battery for several days with no load on the battery. Maybe it hasn't been fully charged until now.

If it isn't fully charged now, then it will never be. Perhaps that explains the long longetivity. Like I said, I don't know why it lasted 4 hours plus, and could have lasted longer.

Dehumidifier and swamp cooler

8/16/24:

Emptied the "evaporative cooler" to find mosquito larvae. Well, there won't be any of that anymore.



8/15/24:

No swamp cooler today while I use the mini-split to run off all that excess water in the cooler. I guess I could have used the dehumidifier. Too lazy I guess. The mini-split can do it better, but it will use a lot of juice in the process.

3:50 PM

Ran the swamp cooler along with the dehumidifier again, but this time without the solar power. It collected 150 oz. of water, which went back into the cooler.

It got warmer in here, alright. But it wasn't all that bad. About 84 degrees. With a nice wind off that swamp cooler, which includes a bit of evaporated water that cooled the air to about 78 degrees, made it all seem like not such a big deal.

There's likely to be a lot of water coming off the mini-split. I'll check that tomorrow morning.

8:44 AM The idea was to limit the amount that the mini-split was needed so as to economize upon its operation. The mini-split uses 1200 watts when the compressor engages, and that is a lot. On the other hand, the dehumidifier uses only 300 watts, and could conceivably be powered with the solar power resources I have available.

But there's a problem with the solar power end of the deal. At present, I don't charge and discharge at the same time. Therefore, if the battery is being used to power the dehumidifier, the solar panels are on stand by. This is the prime part of the day, so there's a problem right there. The solar panels are being lost all during that time.

That could be as much as three hours. A way to improve upon this state of affairs? I could run a pair of wires from the main battery to the lead acid battery, and let the big battery charge the little battery while the big battery is also being charged. This would be no problem to set up. But the little battery could discharge faster than the big battery can charge it back up.

That's another conundrum. The obvious solution would be to add another big battery, and do the same thing. It could work for at least the three hours and maybe a couple more since it is constantly being replenished.

The problem here is that I don't want to keep buying this stuff.

I've got to choose quickly. Time doesn't stand still. Before you know it, the seasons will change.

One hazard to look out for

Mosquitoes. They are attracted to standing water, and will lay their eggs in it. I found some mosquito larvae in the filtered water, which is not good. I wonder now if I have imported any of these into the swamp cooler inside. After today, I will drain the cooler, and then there will be no doubt. Too bad I didn't think of this first this morning. The cooler is filled to the brim with water collected and filtered outside. Woof.

Perhaps a screen will keep them out. It is hard to see how they could get in, but they are small and resourceful little critters.

Yesterday, the experiment resulted in over 3 gallons of water collected. That's amazing.

However, no solar power was used. In order to gather this much, the batteries and the number of panels must be increased. Not interested in spending more money on this. That leaves me with a problem. There's enough power to do this much, but it isn't enough to make the whole thing solar powered.

It would cost hundreds of dollars to get it to that point, and I'm just not that interested.

Update 8/12/24

8:15 PM

Nope, not enough power to do anything really. Indeed, I may be pressing my luck to go much further with it. I have to say that this move is not recommended.

6:28 PM

The latest run just completed, was from 3:00 PM to a little after 6:00 PM. I'd say it ran for nearly 3 1/2 hours. It powered the dehumifier to produce a little over a half gallon of water.

At present, I'm guessing it has enough power to run a charger that will charge up the lead acid battery. We'll see. I haven't checked on it since it conked out on the dehumifier. I will mention it if it does, but not now. Cuz I just don't know yet.

11:46 AM The solar power system is starting to become mature, as I work out the details one-by-one. Today, I extended the weatherproofing of the system, since certain parts need to stay dry. In the meantime, I am running the system through its shakedown and getting to know its capabililties. For instance, the dehumidifier can be run about three hours before the battery runs down. I may be repeating myself, so I'll stop here. There's another run to do today, and that will begin in the late afternoon.

RV power setup

Comment:

Very nice, but expensive power system set up.

Lithium batteries with 10 year warranty.  Eight 180 watt solar panels.  Didn't price out all of them, but the panels alone are nearly 2k bucks.  Way too much money.  Does it really need this much power?  Looks like 6 to 8 lithium 100 ah batteries.

This dude has a serious system there.

Cheap lithium battery

Comment:

Want to keep this idea in mind.  Batteries are expensive.

"Solar" mini split a/c

Comment:

11.8.19:

Here's a second take of the video.  He believes it was necessary, but I don't think it was.  Nevertheless, I'll put it up. 





11.7.19:

I've seen mini-splits before, but this one seems better for some reason.  Actually, it is very efficient in terms of energy use.  According to this video, it never uses more than 500 watts at a time, and can run on a lot less.  It can start with a 1000 watt inverter, which is also nice.

It is available on amazon for under 1000 dollars.  That part seems a bit expensive, though.

RV batteries

Comment:

He said some pretty nice things about lithium ion batteries.  He didn't say some negative stuff about lithium ion batteries.  One thing is don't let them get too hot.

Lithium ion batteries can catch on fire.  Too enthusiastic about these bad boys.  Still, it is all about judgment.  The more you know the better.

Idea for a post

This idea came into my head just now.  Or is it a rehash of something previously thought up?

I once had an idea to use an electric car to get around, and solar panels to recharge the batteries.  That would be on the property out in west Texas.

If somebody used a system of deep charge batteries to power both home and transportation, that would be an idea worth pursuing. Or so it seems.  I actually had that idea once, but it seems too far-fetched at this time with my resources.

I'd have to get help.  Where to turn?

So maybe you go to this program I saw advertised.  That may be a risky idea by the way.

Anyway, if you were to get solar panels for FREE ( as the ad suggests is possible--- there is gotta be a catch ), then you could get power for both home and transportation by using an electric car.  Use the panels to charge the batteries for both home and transportation.

I was thinking the Volt.  But I may not want to spend the money that would entail.  Then you have to convert a vehicle to electric to try to do it on the cheap.

The commercial units use 360 volt systems.  Now if you were to put 30 12 volt batteries in series, you'd get 360 volts.  Then if you discharge each of the 30 batteries at 12 volts and 5 amp hr, that would give you 1.8 kw power available.  Not much.  But at 360 volts at 150 amp hr gives 54 kw power.  You can run something with that.

I don't have the expertise for that.  It would be easy for me to screw it up.

Just a thought.   Like everything else.

Small trencher for geothermal concept?

Comment:

This might be somewhat useful, but I am not so sure.  It only goes down to 18".