I do not have much to report this week…. unfortunately.

(I’ll still try and find a way to talk about something ) 

Can’t catch a break with the excavator.  I had a hydraulic hose spring a leak 😦 .. not sure how much hydraulic oil I lost. The good news was we got up there decently early on Friday and the hose only broke 1.5 hours into my day. That meant it was still 20 minutes to 5p.m., and now that I know who to call for maintenance I was able to make a few phone calls and we got a new hose on order.  It’s a 2 foot, 3/4″ diameter hose, and comes in at a whopping $200 for a new hose. (Hopefully … I really hope that this machine doesn’t sink us!.. for its age I do think it is a pretty decent machine, maintenance would have to be expected)   

It was very hot on Friday, not sure if that helped facilitate the failed hose. Who knows.  It was in the middle of the road when I found out what happened so I had to quickly get off of the road before the hydraulics quit working. Otherwise we would have been stuck. The worst part of the whole deal is we finally decided to get serious with moving dirt and based on Andrews recommendation we brought in reinforcements to move dirt, didn’t get to move much dirt with it though (see pic)

We still camped out Friday night and we ended up “playing” a bit by scratching the rest of the floor plan into dirt.  I also parked the trailer and our yukon in the “garage” to get a feel for the size. Without the Yukon and the trailer it didn’t seem like a very big garage. Which was weird cause I was pretty sure I designed it to be oversized. With the trailer and car it did help give a better idea for the size. Really hard to get a feel from just lines in the dirt.

 

(nerd alert, skip this paragraph if you aren’t interested in solar)

On the solar front I did purchase an inverter finally!  I am excited about that.  I found one that does 5,000 Watts but only converts to 240VAC.  But it only cost $850. In the end I’ll need to have 4 of them for a 19,800W system. Which is pretty cheap for battery charging and inverting all in one. I did have to buy a $60 transformer as well to make 120VAC. Kind of a roundabout way of doing it all but the inverter doesn’t need a battery to work. Which is good cause it only works with a 48V battery set up.  But my camper is only 12V. So…. how it will work with my camper, I’ll have AC power coming out of the inverter only when the sun is up.  I will run that power into my normal AC trailer plug, and the trailer has its own inverter which will then charge my 12V trailer batteries…. lol  So that should keep my batteries topped off and give me AC power during the day.  Should be fun!

I may or may not shoot a quick email out next week.  We will be out of town picking up Lydia finally after 3 months!  So there won’t be any time to fix the excavator. 

That was about it. We came back early Saturday morning after breakfast and spent some much needed attention on our home projects that have been totally neglected 🙂

Until next time!

Mark