Building The New Igloo: Mostly indoor testing.

I felt like crap on Saturday, but still managed to drag myself out for a couple of small tasks. I had actually forgotten about the lawn mower. But the wheel is back on it. I had to manually flatten all the parts back out. I also greased up the front end. The blade on it looks fine, so I didn't sharpen it. It also has some weirdo valve thing (similar to the Cub Cadet) for the oil drain which I couldn't get to drain (it isn't the push and turn type and I didn't have a hose), so I am not going to worry about that yet. At the very least it is mobile again.

It started right up and ran, but it isn't running well. It might be in need of a tune up.

I drove it around for 5-10 minutes to try to get everything working and to make sure my cobbled washer and stuff for the tire was fine. I saw a bunch of prints in my yard.

I did a bit of cleaning and a little bit of packing on Saturday, but not too much else.

Sunday was cold wet and miserable. I didn't do much of anything outside on Sunday, but did some testing on the power center. I ran a high load test at roughly 1kW (my space heater). It took 1 hour, 37 minutes to drop from 100% to 20%. It is marketed as having a 2kWh battery in it, so while it is perhaps a little shorter runtime than I would have liked, it is really close to expected.

One odd thing I noticed is that when I plug the space heater into a kill-a-watt type thing, it read far less than 1kW (790W), but both the Jackery and the manual for the space heater say the middle setting is 1kW of heat. Not sure what to make of that.

I also timed the recharge on it. The recharge took 1 hour 21 minutes. This is in line with the the claimed times, and maybe even a hair better.

Just because I was curious, I turned on the light it had. It draws 3W, and is brighter than I expected.

I also did a low load test (running just the fan on the space heater, no heat), which is the most likely to expose any inefficiencies, primarily in the inverter. Unfortunately my phone (which I was using as a stopwatch) decides to reset apps periodically (thank you Google) and when it did that it reset the timer, but I ran it all night. When I got up this morning, it was sitting at 81%. The timestamps on the pictures suggest that this roughly 10 hours 45 minutes.

According to the power meter, the fan only mode stabilizes at 12-14W. The Jackery came in at 13-15W. Using 14W as the actual, 14W over 10.75H is 150.5Wh. 19% of the capacity of the unit is 410.4Wh (2160Wh rating * 19%). That is not great efficiency (the inverter itself is drawing more than 2A it would appear) and even in the world of inverters is rather poor (the inverter I used on my power center was 1A idle draw). To be fair, this is precisely why I bought the 2kWh model instead of the 1kWh though. And to that end, this unit at first glance would appear to be fine.

Once I have all the components in, I will probably do more real-world testing.

I also leak checked my water jug. It doesn't leak, but you really have to reef on it to get it closed tight enough.

I ordered the fridge that I commented about from Lowes. The one at Home Depot still hasn't come back in stock, and it has been several weeks now. It was cheaper, but oh well, the one from Lowes checks all my boxes.

Before the site work:

Build prototype cap/camper
Preliminary packing. Get the excess largely unused stuff out of the house.
~~Set up the portable garage. Cut down the tree that fell down.~~
Pack up carport. Easily movable lawn equipment should be all that remains after this.
Empty slab. Get the grill, ~~storage bin~~, clothesline, bug zapper, and other junk off the slab.
~~Remove skirting.~~
Replace tires on tiny home trailer
Level and put down gravel in the turnaround spot
~~Cut down trees at bottom of hill~~
~~Flatten parking spot. Spread the pile of rocks~~.
~~Remove the driveway markers.~~
Determine where to and move carport
Acquire the missing truck camper pieces