Diesel Heater.

The Fuel tank used to feed the old petrol generator which was heavy and loud and way too high VA. 

It is 200 x  450 x 600 = 54 litres  2 x 20 litre jerry wont quite fill.

The Heater burn / litres per Hour 1.2 - 2.4 

The fuel sender is 3 Ohms to Negative / Earth when nearly full and also when nearly empty;  so the sender is toast. To get at it I would have to remove the fuel tank which would involve getting under the chasis and removing 4  bolts with nylocks nuts...  easy .. 

Bolts removed and tank is ready to slide.

Will wait till the tank is empty again before recommencing. 

UPDATE : Inspected the sender and it looks fine  - 170 Full  - 3 Empty Ohms

I quite like the look of those old round dials. So if I go say 50 mA and thought of it as litres? 

The diesel heater has been largely trouble free for a few years now. 

It would be nice to engineer it into a IOT system. 

November 2019 Fault

Symptoms:  blows smokey unignited fuel vapour out of the exhaust. Last time this happened I disconnected the fuel and ran it thorough a cuppla start cycles to lean it right out. That was about 4 tanks of 24 liters of fuel ago. It worked.

My initial (wrong) diagnosis was that I had been running it on a low setting. I thought maybe it was running too cool and not de coking the combustion chamber.  I have never run it one any setting but 100 percent since the last failure.

Problem solved. The connector that takes the start up current is not up to the job. Inadequate current gets to the glow plug to start combustion but a credible voltage drop still exists.

Fix:  involved breaking out the conductors to a more robust connector lug / bus style system.

New Computer

LG 32 inch Monitor 32MP58HQ-P Switching between HDMI ports will be fussy.

ASUS - PN60 Mini Computer  Manual.   ; This thing is blisteringly fast.

OS : Ubuntu

Raspberry Pi 3 OpenHab. 

Rebuilt OS. 

Raspberry Pi 3 OpenHab Spare. 

Needs  building.   Is it possible to incorporate headless torrent box ? 

Raspberry Pi 4 Media Centre / NAS :  Raspbian. Works plenty fast enough for a desktop.  Needs building. 

Fault ; Will scan to the Bluetooth speakers but "Connection failed - Use audio menu to connect to this device. 

Fix :  You have to right click on the speaker symbol in the top right corner that way you can choose the audio output device. Have to rediscover device.  

Uberboltonhauswagen

iiNet Website 

Solar Hot Water System

@ 32 degrees S - only effective in Summer.

 

140 liter party ice box. It will hold the heat reasonably well over night. NOTE the silicone hose placed in the centre of the tank. I have the hose drawing so as to be able to keep dirt out of the system by placing a cotton glove finger filter over the inlet and an inverted plate over the top to prevent it floating up and drawing air.

 

100 metres of 1/2 inch PEX hose is loosely coiled in the sun.

 

30w 3 l/min diaphragm pump. The white plastic base is trivial.

 

The pump circulates the water through the PEX hose and goes into and out of the reservoir through the one hole. 

 

The silicone hose fits snugly inside the garden hose to form a reasonable but not perfect seal. it then goes through 90 degrees and into the reservior about 18 inches to create effective scavenging in the body of the water mass. 

The Old Summer Palace she aint what she used to be.

This is where I waited until the fire had passed so I could walk back out through the "black".