Light Easterly wind. Clear skies. Force 1.
The barometer is still falling, but no bad weather yet. It is supposed to blow in overnight.

The Steller Sea lions are now all on the East side of Middle Rocks. There are about 10 California Sea lions around the jetty. It was a hot day for the Elephant seals. All of them except Scabby-molt went down to the water at some point. Scabby-molt just splashed in a nasty puddle for a while. The littlest seal spent some time lying in the shade by the Tank Shed.

I was told when I started out here that you have to run the generator when the desalinator is on, otherwise you draw down the battery banks to potentially fatal levels. However, last month the generator shut down without me noticing and the desal unit ran for another hour and a half with no problems. So today I decided to test running the desalinator without the generator. I made sure the PV panels were clean and turned on the desalinator at 1100. I checked it at 1115 and 1130, and every half hour after that until 1530. It ran no problem, with a good charge on the battery bank. The lowest voltage reading was 51.6V and the highest was 54.0V (bare minimum charge is 48V, we don’t usually go above 56.0V). So i was able to do 4.5 hrs of water production (~400 litres) off of sunlight. The success of this test is good news, because it means that on a clear day with 14 hours of daylight we can run our highest drawing appliance and still get the island through the night just off of the PV panels. I’ll have to try it out on a cloudy day, and it might need to be monitored closely on shorter days. But it means that we are closer to our energy sustainability goals than we thought.

-Prepared month end report
-Grease derrick and derrick drum
-Tidied wires on PV panels
-Worked on SOPs
-Started gathering things in the boat shed for a big garbage run