my parents came back after i finished watering the front lawn, and was in the garage moving the two containers of compost so i can put them into plastic bags. i continued watering in the backyard. the pump didn't work at first, but it was because my father switched in a better PWM controller; this one has a power button that needs to be turned on in order to draw power from the battery. i also watered some parts of the garden, and noticed that all the reliance grapes are now gone, eaten either by birds or squirrels. all that remains are concord grapes, and i see a lot of diseased mummy grapes, which is not a good sign. despite my spraying for the past few seasons, i still can't get rid of the fungal disease(s) affect our grape trellis. the reliance grapes do seem to be better disease resistant though, next year we'll trim back the concord grapes and give the reliance grapes more space to grow.
i patched the lawn just last tuesday (6 days ago), and already i see some grass seedlings already germinating. i can't be sure whether that's from the seeds i recently sowed or from my lawn reseeding back in june. whatever the case may be, it's a good sign. we just have to be vigilant about watering, but the forecast shows a very wet weekend starting from thursday night.
for lunch my mother made some rice porridge with chicken and flat beans, along with some salted duck eggs and other preserved vegetables.
i showed my father some pump options i found last night. i came across a 1/2HP 120v centrifugal industrial water pump ($35), with watering capability of 10 gallons per minute, which is equal to a strong pressure garden faucet. it has a 5A draw, which isn't a big deal for our 100A LiFePO4 battery. to get this to work, we'd need to connect the pump to a 120v inverter which in turn would be connected to our battery. somewhere in the middle there would also exist a smart plug that we can turn off and on remotely. we also thought about using a sump pump,
we left around 1:30pm for a waltham market basket supply run. we took a new route, that went by bentley university, but detoured onto lyman street then taking several local roads parallel to waltham main street to get to market basket. the supermarket was packed, we noticed it right away as there was a convoy of cars leaving the parking lot. speaking of which, parking was hard to come by, and we parked by marshalls. i'd never seen the waltham market basket this busy before, feels like somerville crowds. thankfully this store has much wider aisles, so it doesn't feel as claustrophobic, though there was still a sea of people. we also toyed with the idea of a sump pump. the cheapest one we could find on amazon (that doesn't use a float) was $60 (DEKOPRO brand). it too is 120v but just 1/3HP. despite the lower horse power, it can pump 2450GPH - or over 40 gallons a minute. at that rain, it can completely drain a single blue rain barrel (55 gallons) in just over a minute.
we went to the cafe via route 95 route 2 to drop off the supplies. i brought along my spare google chromecast and set it up on the new samsung HDTV. we returned to belmont a bit after 3pm.
the front lawn grass patches were starting to look dry so we watered them again. afterwards my father and i tested out the minimax adjustable sprinkler using our transfer pump. it worked remarkably well, much better than the sprinklers i tried in the past. it was able to completely cover the square patch of lawn between the driveway and house entrance. this area requires the most watering because it doesn't get any shade. one issue we noticed is even after we powered off the pump, water still continues to dribble out of the sprinkler just from gravity. this might work differently if we used an on-demand pump (like the one we have for the backyard). one solution would be to pair an on-demand pump with my smart sprinkler timer. then to turn on the watering we remotely turn on the sprinkler timer. the sprinkler timer has a built-in valve that turns off the water after it stops watering. anyway, it's just a proof of concept, something we can do if we need to, but currently we're fine just manually watering by hand through the remotely-controlled 12v transfer pump.
i assisted my father in crimping some new t-type 2-pin power connectors. the way he made the connectors in the past was to crimp the tabs manually before soldering. though the pins are firmly secured, sometimes the solder gets too hot and melts the rubber/plastic casing, or too much solder gets applied and there are big globs of it all over the pins. but my father is finally coming around the the advantage of using a crimping tool to attach the pins. we're still trying to get the hang of it, but no soldering and the crimps come out perfect each time are good selling points.
we crimped a t-type connector upstairs before crimping another downstairs. the one we did in the basement was because the pins in the terminal had reversed polarity, so our wattmeter wouldn't turn on. originally my father thought we needed to redo the MC4 connectors, but just redoing a t-type adapter was the much easier solution. after we did that, the wattmeter started working, showing how much electricity was coming from the 100W solar panel to charge the 35Ah sealed lead acid battery.
before dinner i was outside collecting hops from the bines. it's pretty fun despite requiring to balance on a ladder to reach the hop cones. the flowers are super pretty - like green pinecones - and afterwards my hands smells like beer (usually not a good thing but in this case it was nice). each flower had these little yellow pollen grains on them which actually wasn't pollen but slightly-sticky lupulin oils.
for dinner my mother made xuelihong noodles with the mustard greens i bought from chinatown a few weeks ago.
after dinner my father tried connecting a device to the DC load (output) of the MSQT MPPT controller. unfortunately it didn't work. bluetooth had suddenly stopped working, and now DC load doesn't work either. the only thing the controller can still do is charge the battery, but the only way to use the power is to directly connect to the battery itself, bypassing the controller. i'll need to contact HQST this week to activate warranty service on this device.
i finally returned home by 8:30pm. with labor day long weekend winding down, all the neighbors are back, as well as their cars, so there was hardly any parking spot left by the time i got home. i had to circle the block one time before finally a small spot to stash the motorcycle.