The Great Battery Refit

The completed deck with hatch covers in place

The battery compartment after the original box was removed

The new battery compartment ready to install batteries

The original battery compartment under the aft cabin cushions.

Over the course of the Spring, we noticed that our batteries were holding less and less of a charge.  On a few nights, the refrigerator’s repeated attempts to start would wake Gray up.  Firing up the engine for a few minutes or briefly paralleling in the start battery would provide enough power to start the compressor and then it would run under the house battery alone.  The volt meter would read very low voltage while the compressor ran, but but go back up above 12 volts when the compressor stopped.  By 10AM, the solar panels would have the house back up to 14 volts (suspiciously quickly considering they were reading below 12 volts before sunup).  Of course, when we had wind all night this was never an issue.

Once we got to Luperón, the winds died at night and batteries really became a problem.  In the 10 days between our arrival in the Dominican Republic and our summer trip back to the US, we had to rely on the start battery to keep the refrigerator running through the night.  We decided to rent an apartment for a couple of months to work on some boat projects including the battery bank.  After some looking around, we discovered that the batteries installed by Hanse were not only an odd size (a couple of inches shorter than a Group 31 standard battery) but that they had been discontinued.  We would need to replace the batteries with something else.  It turns out the only batteries readily available in the Dominican Republic are wet cell golf cart batteries.  They are used in many homes as the basis for a backup power system.  These batteries are a very different shape from the batteries provided by Hanse.  We would have to remove the battery box and build a new one.

Once we returned from the US and got settled into the apartment, Gray got to work on the battery system.  First, he pulled out the old batteries and attempted to unravel the the wire spaghetti in the battery box.  Even though we bought the boat new, the wiring was still kind of a mess.  The wires installed by the boatyard during commissioning were labelled, but the Hanse installed wires were not.  Wires were connected directly to one battery or the other.  There were no central buses to organize the wires.  Some of the Hanse battery connections were made with screwed on terminals instead of being properly crimped.

After clipping many wire ties and feeding the wires out of the battery box, Gray got to work on removing the battery box.  The box was very nice, made of fiberglass and shaped specifically for the space and the batteries.  Luckily, it was held in place by caulking so it was easy to remove.  The old box ended up in the flea market where a Dominican family bought it to use as a sink.  We sold the old batteries to the guy who sold us the new batteries.  Even though they won’t hold enough of a charge for our needs, they would power a lamp or other small electrical load while the power was out in town.

Gray built the new box out of pieces of marine plywood we had on board.  The sides of the box were glued and screwed together and then the seams were covered with fiberglass.  A battery box is a great first fiberglass project since nobody can see it.  That is fortunate since Gray’s work came out a little messy.  He’ll practice with more fiberglass projects later.  Before the box could be installed on the boat, Gray had to trace the curve of the hull and cut some plywood to build supports for the box.  He glued down these supports with epoxy putty, then filleted the edges of the joint with thickened epoxy.  Finally, he used strips of fiberglass cloth wetted with epoxy resin to “tab” the supports to the inside of the hull.  Once the supports had cured for a couple of days they felt very solid.

It was a while before the box went on to the supports.  Gray had to unravel and label all the wires running to the batteries, design the layout of the bus bars, fuses, shunts and other pieces of electrical equipment that he was going to add.  Of course, he also had to track down DR versions of all the parts he was missing.  Since the new battery box would stand 3 inches above the sole (floor) of the aft cabin berth, Gray also had to design a framework to raise the sole enough to cover the new box.  Finally, the new batteries vent potentially explosive hydrogen when they charge, so Gray had to install a vent system.

Gray added a 300 amp fuse on the positive wire coming from the battery box.  He used Power Post Pluses as bus bars.  A Power Post Plus is a 3/8″ stud with a round bus around the base.  The round bus has #10 screws for terminal connections.  Big wires like from the batteries and the engine go on the stud and smaller wires go on the bus ring.  On the negative side of the batteries, Gray added a large shunt for the eventual connection of the Trimetric battery monitor we bought years ago.  One day soon it will be connected!  All of this hardware was mounted on the side of the battery box with large wires running into the box.  Gray also added an engine room vent fan connected to the batteries with a voltage sensing relay.  When the voltage reaches 14 volts, the fan will run to vent any hydrogen emitted by the batteries.  The vent runs to a grille in the transom of the boat.  A new MPPT solar controller (a magic box that makes solar panels more efficient by modifying the voltage based on the state of the batteries) rounded out the new installation.

Since the new cabin sole under the berth was 4 inches higher, we decided to discard the cushion.  We sold the foam in the flea market and put the cover away.  We figured it would be easy to cut new foam to insert in the cover if we decided to replace the cushion later.  Initially, we tried splitting the cushion in two to make access to the batteries easier, but that was still too cumbersome.  Since we never sleep back there, we decided to do away with the cushion.

During the course of the wiring investigation, we discovered that our alternator had failed.  A local mechanic took it apart and reported that the stator was melted from overuse.  He told us (in Spanish) that a 60 amp alternator was not enough for the size of our old battery bank (our new battery bank is about twice as large).  Whenever the engine was running, the alternator was spinning at full load.  The small alternator that came with the engine is designed to keep a starting battery topped off, not run continuously at full load for hours (sometimes days) at a time.  We installed our spare 60 amp alternator and hope it will carry us to Puerto Rico.  Our final plan is to connect the small alternator only to the start battery (which we don’t have yet, we start off the house bank for now).  We will rely on the sun and wind to charge our house bank (with occasional help from a marina or worst case a small generator).  We will need to get a new battery charger with an “equalize” function to help maintain our new wet cell batteries.

Gray and Cindy

A Scary Halloween

The town of Luperón, as seen from Gringo Hill

Halloween this year fell on a Friday, one of the last days we were house sitting.  We had been having problems with power for days, getting only anywhere from 2 to 6 hours in a 24 hour period.  This was not really enough to keep the house battery bank charged, so we had been rationing our TV, internet and washing machine usage.  Fortunately, throughout the day we managed to have enough to keep the water pump running, which kept the housekeeper happy.

One of the last things she does before leaving for the day is to sweep the “ranchito,” a deck with a corrugated metal roof next to the house.  We saw her hurry from the ranchito to the house, very perturbed.  She grabbed Gray and insisted that he come with her.  He couldn’t make out much of her rapid-fire Dominican spanish, but the word “gato” (cat) was repeated several times.  We hadn’t seen him since early in the morning, but that wasn’t unusual.  The big 18 pound tabby typically only came around when he was hungry or wanted to come in from the rain.  He was normally a bit shabby looking, having lost all of the fur off his hind end due to some sort of allergy.  But what Gray found when he looked where the housekeeper was pointing was beyond shabby.  The poor cat was laying under a chair, clearly in pain, with flies circling around him.  A closer look revealed maggots digging into his inflamed bald legs.  It is no exaggeration to say that we were almost as distressed as the cat!

We bundled the cat in towels and placed him in the old empty battery box.  We quickly lined up a an appointment with Dr. Bob, the english-speaking veterinarian and Nino, the taxi driver.  Since Nino has a hard time getting his taxi up the hill to the house, Gray drove to town and met him for the 90 minute long trip to the vet.  The housekeeper left and Cindy settled in to man the phone, trying to reach the cat’s owner and fill her in on the situation.

One of the nice things about living on top of a hill is that you can see the weather approaching well in advance.  While big black storm clouds gathered, Cindy took care of the chickens and brought the dogs in to the house.  By this time, the power had failed completely – no TV, no lights, no water, no oven.  Cindy gathered all of the candles and flashlights she could find and got ready for a dark and stormy night.

Goats lounge on the sidewalks of Luperón on a much drier day

Meanwhile, Gray and Nino had reached the vet.  The vet said that even though the maggots were disgusting, they were not a big deal to fix.  The vet technician went to work on the cat.  First, he used a razor to shave the hair from around the wounds.  Next, he picked the maggots out of the wounds with tweezers.  Finally, he packed the wounds with gauze.  The vet was more concerned about how the cat got the maggots than the maggots themselves.  Usually cats groom themselves thoroughly enough that flies never get a chance to lay eggs in their wounds.  Other animals, particularly cows and sheep, get maggots in almost every wound.  Ick.  The vet recommended that the cat stay in his clinic for some additional tests and to keep an eye on the wounds.  Gray wholeheartedly agreed and left with Nino to get some groceries before making the trip back to Luperón.

The clouds were so heavy with rain, it got dark early.  And then it rained.  Hard.  Cindy picked up her flashlight and read a book while the dogs shivered in a pathetic heap nearby.  Around 7 the phone rang.  It was Gray calling with his report.

The hard rain was not limited to Luperón.  It hit Gray and Nino as they started back from Sosua.  In Puerto Plata, the largish city between Sosua and Luperón, traffic was bad but not unexpectedly so for such a rainy day.   Once they left Puerto Plata, the road conditions deteriorated rapidly.  They passed fields that were under several feet of water and several flooded homes.  Every bridge along the road was awash since the streams were all swollen above the level of the road.  Several times, water leaked in around the door sills on Nino’s taxi.  When they finally reached Luperón, Gray transferred his groceries and the cat carrier to the Burro Pass car and tried to make it up the hill.  A large group of Dominicans told him to turn back since the bridge to the hill (not the hill itself) was impassable due to a flooding stream.  Gray went to visit friends that lived on high ground and waited for the rain to subside.  About 3 hours later, the stream was only about 2 feet above the level of the road.  Gray watched tensely as another vehicle crossed the bridge without incident and then followed.  Once he was over the bridge and climbing the hill, things were much smoother except for a few deep ruts carved by the water flowing down the hill.  Gray and his groceries sloshed in around 10:30PM.

The bad weather really brought out the community to assist each other.  Large groups of people were out in the streets to help with stuck cars, assist elderly people and children on their way to high ground, etc.  Since government services are often very limited, the residents of the outlying communities really look out for each other.

Some time in the night the rain stopped.  When we went to check the rain gauge, we found that it had overflowed.  So there had been at least 5.5 inches of precipitation that night.  If the water in Cindy’s rainboots that she left sitting outside is any guide, it was probably more like 8!

The power was still off, but there was nothing wrong with the car, so Gray drove down to the dock to bail out the dinghy and start another day of boat projects.  The dinghy was full to the gunwales with rainwater.  Unfortunately, this made it much less stable, as Gray found out when he reached his bucket down to start bailing.  The dinghy flipped over, motor and all.  Submerging the motor did nothing good for it, and Gray’s subsequent attempts at repairing it did even less.  To make a long story short, we will be rowing the dinghy until we can get parts in Puerto Rico.

The story has a happy ending though – if you like cats.  Kitty will be fine.  The vet found that the infected wounds had been the result of a dog bite (probably not one of the house dogs – who knows where the cat goes on his evening rounds?) and were easily treated.  The cat is now being coddled by his owner, safe at home on his hill.

–Cindy and Gray

Luperón House Sitting Adventure

The view from the front porch.

One of our many new friends from the Luperón gringo community asked us if we could house sit for her during the month of October.  We jumped at the chance since the boat projects weren’t done and the house offered such fabulous amenities as satellite television and dial-up internet.  The views from the hilltop location were also spectacular.  The house itself is pretty small:  one bedroom, one bathroom and about 750 square feet of total space.

The house also came with four dogs, a cat and 19 chickens.  There were also extensive gardens with lots of herbs and tropical fruit including papaya, passion fruit (actually a local variant called chinola), bananas (another local variant called rulo) and limes.  Maintaining the house and garden were pretty easy since there was both a housekeeper and a gardener that came twice a week.

Maintaining the animals was a bit more challenging.  The dogs are trained as watch dogs so they bark at any person, donkey, cow, bird, butterfly, etc. that passes by.  Although the house is out of town, up a dirt road on a hill, there is a lot of traffic since local farmers drive their herds (usually a dozen or so cattle) by the house a couple of times a day.  Some locals also commute (on foot) to town on the same road.  It could get quite noisy at peak commuting/cattle driving times!  Fortunately, there is a pen out back to put the dogs in.  The pen is away from the road, so they can’t see as much traffic and away from the house so we don’t hear them as much.  The dogs are also ridiculous scaredy cats.  When it thunders (for example, during the daily summertime afternoon thunderstorms), we had to let them in the house so they could pile into a shivering heap under whatever piece of furniture could accommodate them.  On another occasion, a rat got into the house.  Gray saw it take refuge in one of the lower cabinets and tried to recruit one of the dogs to deal with it.  The dog that saw the rat go in the cabinet cowered in a corner away from it.  Another dog that is usually game for anything, approached the cabinet with great enthusiasm but retreated with her tail between her legs after the first sniff at the cabinet door.

Bananas growing in the backyard.

The cat did not warm up to us.  He would occasionally come in and demand tribute in the form of dry cat food, but spent most of his time outside.  We tried to get him to take care of the rat, but all he did was stare intently at the cabinet for a few minutes and then wander off for a nap.

The chickens stay in their coop and are pretty easy to take care of as chickens go.  Cindy was in charge of their care.  Twice a day, she would feed them vegetable scraps, dry corn and food pellets as well as give them new water.  She would also gather eggs (which were ours to use or sell, CHA-CHING!).  One hen was not sure Cindy was authorized to collect eggs and would try to defend the ones in her nest.  After getting pecked a couple of times, Cindy started bringing a large pot lid to use as a shield when she did battle with the hen.  Eventually they reached an understanding and the pot lid stayed in the cupboard.  If we had a lot of rain (during hurricane Omar, for example, 8 inches fell in the space of a couple of days), the chicken coop was pretty nasty.  Cindy had to walk through a slurry of chicken droppings, old food and mud to feed them and collect the eggs.  Gray fetched her sea boots from the boat and that helped immensely.

The domestic animals and the rat were not the only animals we got to deal with.  We have already posted an entry about the world’s largest spider (or at least the largest we had ever seen).  In addition to the big spiders, there were big toads (like dinner plate size) and lots of bugs at night (mostly moths, some HUGE beetles, a praying mantis and some kind of jurassic grasshopper).  Eventually, we learned some tricks to help with the bugs (turn on outside lights, leave off inside lights) and it got cool enough for us to tuck ourselves under the covers at night.

Cindy collects eggs.

Taking care of the house gave us some insight into the lives of the gringos that live in houses here.  Houses need to have back up water and power systems since the municipal systems are unreliable.  It is difficult to have climate control more sophisticated than fans without a hefty back up generator.  Most houses use a large bank of golf cart batteries for back up.  With the high price of fuel, generators are not a very affordable option.  All the houses have cisterns for water.  The house we took care of had 16000 gallons of cistern space with a roof top rain catchment system and 16 golf cart batteries for back up power.  In addition to the normal house maintenance, the batteries need to be monitored to make sure they are taking a charge (when there is city power available) and that they have plenty of electrolyte in them.  The cisterns need to be kept fairly full so if the water service goes offline for a few days there is plenty of water.  Filling the cisterns from the city water was surprisingly complicated.  The process involved three valves, a big pump and lots of walking all over the yard to make sure the water was flowing evenly.

One day, near the end of our tenure as house sitters, the power was out for so long that the battery backup ran out.  In addition to the normal electrical appliances, the water pressure was also out of order.  The pump that pulls water from the cisterns (under the house) is electric.  We had to haul buckets of water up to the bathroom for washing and flushing the toilet.  Fortunately, the recent rains had filled the cisterns all the way up, so dipping the buckets into the water was easy.  The locals were so annoyed by the extended outages that they showed their feeling in true Dominican style:  with a heap of burning rubble piled on the street in front of the electric company office.  The power service continued to be sporadic for the next few weeks, but we were able to cope with it by carefully monitoring the state of the back up batteries and rationing our TV and internet usage.  We could use the water heater and washing machine during the random intervals where the electrical service was working.

The Land Cruiser parked in front of Burro Pass.

One of the features of Burro Pass was the owner’s awesome red 1986 Toyota Land Cruiser.  Don’t be confused into thinking this is anything like the modern Land Cruisers sold in the US.  This diesel workhorse bears a stronger resemblance to an old fashioned army jeep.  We were allowed to drive it around town, which was great since the unpaved road up the hill from town was a challenge in dry weather and a menace in rain.  Alas, two weeks before the owners were due to return, a short in the ignition switch caused the starter motor to burn out.  (We had to stop the engine by disconnecting the battery!)  On inspection, the interior of the motor housing was filled with a foul smelling black dust and many of the motor’s internal components were either missing or much smaller than they should have been.  In the US, this situation would have been resolved by replacing the part, or replacing the car.  We took the starter to a Dominican mechanic hoping that he would know a source for a replacement.  To our surprise, he looked at it and said he could fix it!  Sure enough, a couple of mañanas later, he had it going again.  He said the parts were very hard to find and required many trips to the big city to locate them all.  He therefore had to charge us the extraordinary sum of 3500 pesos for the whole job.  (That’s $105).  In our opinion, this is the perfect kind of car for the Dominican Republic, where people take a lot of pride in keeping their equipment running.

The view from the back porch.

In addition to managing the house, we had to manage the staff (i.e. the gardener and the housekeeper).  We knew the gardener since he was also the gardener at the apartment we rented for August and September.  He kept the yard in nice shape and brought us any mature produce he came across.  The housekeeper was a bit of a character.  Imagine a five foot tall, sixty year old Tasmanian devil with bright red dyed hair.  It seemed that she thought of us as employees of the owner, just like her.  Since she had worked there longer than we had, she considered herself the senior employee.  She was often sharply critical (judging by her tone of voice anyway, she never slowed down her Spanish enough for us to understand more than a few words) of us on issues we never quite understood.  We got along well enough given the language gap.

Although it has been fun to have television, freely available (although slow) internet and a big oven for a while; we don’t think we are going to settle down in Luperón.  We really missed living on the boat all summer (between the trip to the US, the apartment rental and the house sitting) and hope we can live aboard for a while before anything else major breaks down.  We had plenty of fun and enjoyed the distractions in Luperón (as is evident by the incredibly long time it took Gray to repair the electrical system on the boat), but are anxious to move on.

Onward,
Cindy and Gray