Here’s the new Joel’s Goddam Law…

Never blog about how good everything’s going.

Nemesis follows hubris every goddam time. And around here it doesn’t take long.

There’s this gadget that’s been hanging around Landlady’s powershed. I don’t know where it came from or who owned it originally, but it’s pretty much Landlady’s now through squatter’s rights. Which, since I’m the only one who uses it, means it resides in MY powershed. Follow the logic? Tools do that a lot around here.

Anyway, this is an electronic gadget called a hydrometer that measures the specific gravity of the electrolyte in the cells of flooded lead-acid batteries. Trust me, this would be a more interesting subject if you had a solar power system and had to maintain it yourself. And you’d love this gadget on sight, were that the case, because the standard hydrometer is a thing like a turkey baster with a float inside, which is available at any auto parts store and doesn’t work worth diddly. This thing, you just stick it in a battery cell and it gives you a digital readout, presto.

And my neighbor J has been going through some changes with his batteries, and I offered to come over and use said gadget on them. That was day before yesterday. And yesterday after wood-splitting – and after yesterday’s self-congratulatory post about how well everything’s going – I got to thinking it had been a while since I’d used the above-mentioned gadget on my own batteries, and maybe I should get some practice before doing it in public. (I equalize my batteries every couple of months, sunshine permitting, but that doesn’t mean I actually take the time to test them afterward. ‘Cause I’m a guy.)

And you know where this is going, don’t you?

I’ve got a dead cell.

Which means I’ve got a bad battery.

And in a bank with any age on it at all, you shouldn’t replace just one battery – though that’s probably just what I’m going to do.

This didn’t come completely out of the blue. I’ve been getting some suspicious behavior from my batteries just in the past couple of weeks, behavior I’d have paid more attention to if I didn’t live on the banks of Denial. They seemed to be charging awfully quickly in the morning – and discharging awfully quickly in the evening. But I figured it was…well, I made up excuses. Now I know the real reason, and it’s not a complete you’re-out-of-business disaster but it’s not good. In a full-size system with a full-size battery bank, a single dead cell isn’t a very big deal. In my free sample of a battery bank, it’s one/sixth of the total and non-trivial.

But that’s life. Which brings me to the real Joel’s Goddam Law: In a life off-grid in the boonies it’s always going to be one goddam thing after another, so you may as well relax and embrace the chaos.