Off-grid living consists of a never-ending list of to-dos, which in turn get prioritised by urgency – or sometimes by the looks she gives me!
Over summer, I’d been avoiding the list to concentrate on sailing, so there was a bit of a backlog. That wasn’t helped by my back ‘going out’ in response to tackling the list – a recurring problem; the wings of my L5 vertebra never formed properly. So here I sit at the computer, dosed with anti-inflammatories, to record progress thus far.
New, smarter batteries
First on our list was installing our four newly bought 100Ah LiFePo batteries. We’d run second-hand lead-acid units forever; mostly gel, all deep-cycle, but it was time to try this longer lived, more forgiving storage format. Their ability to discharge down to 20 per cent; their ability to only lose three per cent charge if left unattended for a year;due to their location in an external metal cupboard.
