Posts Tagged ‘bad batteries’
Season Swing
The pendulum of spring weather has swung decidedly in the direction of summer in the last few dry, sunny days. The forecast for our area was in the upper 70sF, but the reality yesterday had us well into the 80s. There are still plenty of tree leaves that are still in the bud phase but it felt like summer is considering an early visit.
Did someone mention trillium? It is an extra thrill whenever we spot some on our property in places where we definitely didn’t transplant them.
Yesterday morning, I noticed one right beside one of our busier trails. Way to go, ants! (Ants spread the seed pods.)
The higher daytime heat has our grasses growing significantly from one day to the next. Mowing is once again becoming an almost daily activity for me. On Monday, when I parked the riding mower and pulled the six batteries for charging, I was shocked to find that one of them gave me a flashing red LED of failure. I called the service number to report my problem, and the recording on their end said the call center had closed early for the day. I wonder how many days that message runs.
As Asher and I were on our way back from feeding horses yesterday morning, I stopped to grab the battery from the shop. However, before doing that, I plugged it in one more time to confirm the failure still existed. Good thinking, John. This time it worked! I’m pretty glad the call center went home early on Monday.
While I did some much-needed mowing in the heat of the afternoon, I left Asher in the house on his own. Cyndie was visiting her mom in the Cities. When I finished, I gave Asher a chance to go for a walk. We made it about halfway around the property, and he decided the shade of the evergreen tree at the end of the driveway looked too good to pass up.
I chose not to join him on the ground because I have had wood ticks crawling up my legs much too frequently for my liking over the last few days. The ticks must be enjoying the arrival of this warm weather. There was no reason to rush Asher because I knew a secret that he didn’t.
Cyndie was going to be coming over the hill within five minutes or so, and knowing how much Asher loves riding in cars, I figured Cyndie would be happy to give him a lift back to the house. This time of year, the house holds the cool evening air nicely throughout the day while the outdoor temperature heats up.
Every day without new rain brings us closer to putting in posts for the shade sail in the paddocks. Our current target day for the work is next week on the 14th.
I have a feeling the horses will be wishing for more shade every day until then.
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Simplest Solution
I don’t know how many times I am going to face this lesson before I comprehend it well enough to no longer be fooled. It’s batteries. Apparently, I know just enough to fall prey to a key misperception. My understanding of electronics is deeper than many others, having attended years of technical school and working in high tech firms with engineers for most of my career, but batteries seem to be a repeating weak point for me.
The problem preventing the diesel tractor from starting which I had come to suspect was related to a missing safety interlock signal turned out to be the most obvious and likely cause of a bad battery.
Sure, the “fully charged” light came on when I connected a charger to the battery. Sure, the instruments on the dash lit up deceivingly bright when I turned the key.
It was all a facade. There was no “oomph” behind that initial twelve volts that allowed my ‘too smart for its own good’ brain to wander off after several much less likely possible component failures.
With essential assistance from Cyndie, who rose to the occasion to provide tenacious problem-solving brainpower and impressive muscle, we extracted the heavy battery from the very difficult to access front end of the tractor.
I’m particularly pleased with our simultaneous insight to use blocks of wood tucked under the unwieldy battery after lifting it just inches at a time in order to get it up where we could finally muscle it clear of the multiple obstructions.
After reversing that process to drop in the new battery, starting the tractor was easy. The afternoon project of chipping branches turned the area beside Cyndie’s new gardens into a lumberjack camp of cut branches, sawed logs, and flying woodchips.
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Turning logs into split firewood and branches into woodchips are two processes I find most rewarding for getting greater value out of the material left over after the initial project of needing to remove trees.
It isn’t necessarily a simple solution, but it is a wonderful achievement of making full use of our resources.
I can only hope that I will now find it easy to recognize future occasions of weak batteries being the simplest solution in my troubleshooting of equipment failing to start.
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Relative Something 