#Thegreatpoolpondconversion - 210516
Solar:
This week we got a proper battery.
We fried the last one - it wouldn’t hold a charge or recharge.
We were really limping along there for quite a while.
Everything works now the way it should and the way you’d think it should.
On with the sun. Off an hour after the sun goes down or the clouds roll in, etc.
And when it’s cloudy or dawn or dusk the third solar panel gets us a lot more juice than just the 2.
There will be one more big addition we’ll mention below.
And we still have some bits of the system to clean up.
And in our spare time we’re going to redesign this, the current (ha ha) distribution panel:
into something a bit cleaner, more logical and with the proper monitoring meters.
We tried to do this in the beginning but we assumed too much and have since learned a lot.
Pumps and hydraulics
The waterfall pump died. No big deal.
These are now cheap, easy to acquire and a snap to replace.
We hope that now that the power to the pumps is a stable 12 volts and with a good battery it doesn’t flutter on and off too quickly, they should start to live longer.
Still some fine tuning left to do with the pumps and hoses as well.
And the ‘big addition’ below.
The frog got a plant:
This theme may have come up already.
Reviewing our to do list we seem to be nearing the end of the core pond project.
There is this one ton batch of rocks that we will get onto the top shelf to cover the rest of the liner.
So if we designate the solar, the remaining growing bed, trellis and fence as ‘pond adjacent’, there’s not much else left.
Balancing, plants and filtration are ongoing maintenance really.
Normally you’d design all this in advance, but we’re making a lot of adjustments as we go.
We’re lucky the choices we made let us do this.
And we can because we chose flexible hoses, small pumps, and 12 volt wires, instead of rigid, hard pipes, 120 volts, etc.
So we’re gonna make one more big change that involves both the pumps and the solar.
We can’t add another pipe to the filter system.
We can add another pump. We’re going to connect two pumps with a Y connector to the one feed hose that goes to the filter.
The idea was if one pump died, we could switch over to the other one.
But wait.
We can’t really do that with the waterfall pump and hose.
Now remember back a few months we thought we might have to change over to multiple very small pumps.
We bought two to test out. One died in a day. The other is still going.
But since the waterfall pump died we didnt want the water to sit stagnant while we waited for the replacement.
(From now on we’ll keep a spare even though we hope the start to last longer).
So we ran the tiny pump hose over the rocks to the little pool and it trickles just enough to be legitimate.
We’re going to bury that hose and make it permanent.
So now we have four pumps.
Two connected to the same hose going to the filter.
Two that will separately feed the waterfall.
We’re going to connect the second filter pump and the big waterfall pump to a spare low voltage disconnect switch.
But instead of setting it ‘low’, we’ll set high voltage thresholds for it turning on and off.
We’re doing all this because we just happen to have all the parts, it’s not too difficult, we think it will work, and it’s not critical - we can do it in pieces in our spare time.
One filter pump and the small/trickle waterfall pump will run all the time - especially when the battery isn’t fully charged; at dawn, dusk, and cloudy days.
So the battery and solar won’t be taxed when conditions aren’t optimal but there will always be filtration and some waterfall.
On sunny days, when the battery is fully charged, the other two pumps will start. There will be more filtration and a stronger waterfall.
If the sun drops or the battery weakens, those two will stop and the main two will continue on.
If all this comes off, we think it’ll be pretty clever.
Stay tuned.
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