Monthly Archives: September 2018
This Doesn’t Bode Well . . .
This time next week hopefully we’ll be happily ensconced at Poche’s Fish N Camp in Breaux Bridge, LA, having just had dinner at Crazy ‘Bout Crawfish.
At least I that’s the way it goes. I guess we’ll see.
With the cooler weather coming in, and the days dwindling down until we leave for Florida, I’ve pretty much put any more work on the rig’s generator on hold. And it raining pretty much every day for the last month hasn’t help things either.
But I still find myself checking out some of my backup plans. If my Onan diesel proves to be impossible or uneconomical to get running again, I’m thinking about replacing it with a portal gasoline generator like this Harbor Freight Predator model for $600.
It’s 8750 starting amps / 7000 running amps with a 90 day warranty.
But I recently came across this Champion model.
It’s 9375 starting amps / 7500 running amps with a 3 year warranty. The only downside is that it costs about $200 more. But that might be offset by the much longer warranty.
I did recently find this Consumer Reports article comparing a Honda EC2000 Inverter Generator and an equivalent Predator model from Harbor Freight. Turns out that CR thought that the Predator compared very favorably to the Honda, and it costs half as much.
My new house batteries that I installed a few days ago, Got’er Done, are perking right along with no problems. I’ve noticed that my house battery voltage runs about 0.5 volt higher than the previous battery set.
Then a day or so later, I turned off my power converter for an hour or so and monitored the voltage. As expected, the voltage dropped to the normal steady-state of 12.6 volts . . and stayed there. Running several rig lights, the fridge, and the AC thermostats, the voltage never even dropped a tenth of a volt.
I guess that’s what 2280 Ah will do for you.
Tomorrow I’ll take two of the old batteries back to Lowe’s tomorrow and get my $20 core charge back. Then I’ll check with NTB to see if they will take the other two.
Also tomorrow I’m going to start working down my list of things that I want to get done before we leave next Wednesday. At least between rain storms.
Thought for the Day:
This Doesn’t Bode Well.
What does it mean when you have no fortune?
fghdfgh
Another Day, Another Kludge . . .
As I mentioned last week, after I got Jan’s Viking #1 sewing machine out of storage in one of our bays, I found an intermittent problem that I finally traced down to a broken wire in the connector where it plugs into the machine.
So my first thought was to find a replacement plug, but that proved harder than I thought.
The plug on the left is the power cord for the sewing machine and the one of the left is the one for the foot pedal. First off, the foot pedal plug pins are closer together than the standard power cord.and shaped differently.
I spent a couple of days trying to track down this connector with no luck, even though a couple came close. I guess it might be that these are custom made for Viking to prevent anyone from accidently plugging a power cord in and blowing it up.
So my kludge was to get a standard power cord and then use my Dremel tool to eat away all the plastic, leaving only the bare pins.
I then found that I could squeeze the pins together so that it plugged into the receptacle perfectly.
So, to finish it up, I put heat shrink tubing on the exposed pins and tried it out
A perfect fit, and a kludge well done. And before anyone comments, there is no power on this. It’s merely a varying resistance coming from the potentiometer in the foot pedal, that governs the speed of the machine.
Later, about 1pm, Jan and I headed up to Webster for an afternoon of fun and frolic . . . well, lunch and errands, anyway.
For lunch, it was once again our favorite King Food. We wanted something light so we each had a big bowl of Hot & Sour Soup,
and an order of their Honey Glazed Garlic Chicken Wings.
Really delicious and crunchy.
Out first local Costco is opening Oct. 19th and I had noticed yesterday that they had a kiosk set up on Bay Area Blvd. advertising memberships. So we stopped off for some info.
We did join back in 2010 while we were out in Tucson, but weren’t really impressed so we let our membership lapse at the end of the year. It didn’t help that there wasn’t a location anywhere near us in Houston.
Looking over the info, a basic membership is $60, so with one now nearby, we may give it a try again. We’ll see.
Then it was off to WalMart for a few things, and then a drive-by of our old house to see if anything had changed. There was work going on, but nothing stood out.
Then I dropped Jan off at the Friendswood SuperCuts while I doubled back to Estrella’s, nee Lou’s, Barbershop to get my hair cut. And I pretty much mean ‘hair’, as in singular.
Then we zigged over to Kemah so Jan could pick up an order of her Neuropathy mixture at Bodhi’s Essential Oils.
Finished there, we zagged back over to the HEB on FM646, mostly to pick up another bag of the Lola Savannah Texas Pecan coffee that we first tried about 3 weeks ago and wanted more. But they were out.
Bummer! But online says they have it in stock at the Friendswood HEB, so we’ll have to try there.
This is the only Texas Pecan coffee I’ve found that actually has pecans in it.
Really good and tastes great.
Thought for the Day:
ffdgsf
