One last trip up the mountain. The weather was simply lovely.
Luckily Matt bought a HUGE tarpaulin when he and the guys were picking up the supplies for this site that we used to build the great wall of Asau. The tarp was large enough to cover the whole site which was handy since it was raining all over the whole site and all over us.
A last check of the equipment showed that the charging system wasn't keeping the battery charged up as much as I thought it should have. Even with the days of rain that had been drifting through the region the two solar panels should have been able to more than keep up with the power consumption.
Looking over the wiring showed that one of the wires from one of the solar panels was broken right at the connector. These connectors cannot, stupidly, be repaired in the field unless you have a bunch of little parts and some special tools with you, so I chopped the connector off, cut a hole in the upper left-hand corner of the power box, and wired the solar panel directly into the charge controller circuit board. You can see the wire entering the upper left-hand corner of the box. It was held in place with, what else?, duct tape.
About 80% of the way through getting the fencing material nailed to the fence posts it stopped raining and began "sauna'ing".
Not too bad for a bunch of city-boys. We put a bunch of rocks around the bottom of the fence to try and keep the animals out. Three and a half stations finished. One half to go.
2014-08-03