Good Morning!!!! 76F @ 5:45AM. Plentiful sunshine. Hot. High 107F. Winds light and variable.
Yesterday's high was "only" 102F, but we should beat that today and tomorrow. If the weather guessers are right, it'll be the weekend before we "cool down" back into the high 90s, then right back up over 100F for the rest of the 10-day.
It was a relief yesterday to see that the solar panels are keeping up with the A/C demand, and the system was able to sell a few more kWh of power back to the grid than it used overnight. No more six hundred dollar power bills for me, thank you very much!
Yesterday I got a weather tight box mounted to the steel gate post, then trimmed the conduit and lines up there in preparation to making the connections. It seems I couldn't find a sharp drill bit to save my life, and made several trips back down to the garage sharpening the dulled ones, then finally just bringing up the whole set to get the two holes punched. Then twisted off a sheet metal screw in one hole that was just a bit too small and had to run back down again for some Vise Grips to get it back out. Just lucky there was enough screw left sticking out to grab.
Found a nice heavy gauge piece of steel tube and cut a chunk of old motorcycle tire out to act as a bumper. The little 3/8" blade on the upright band saw zipped right through it, steel belts and beads and all. In the past, I've broken several of those blades just trying to make one cut, so Fortune smiled on me yesterday. Only needed a four pound sledge to drive it a couple feet into the ground, and more sheet metal screws to hold the tire in place. It'll be interesting to see if the banging of the gate into the stop is hard enough to egg out the hole so it stops working. Might have to auger the hole and concrete it in.
Still finding devices that hadn't made the change over to the new network controller, so got those squared away, a nice inside job for a hot afternoon. Also updated the network controller software, and it was reporting one of the runs was "blocked". Turns out that a pair of the wireless access points had decided to mesh together, completing a loop through their Ethernet connections back to the controller. The software update included a more comprehensive topology view that showed the mesh connection, and disabling the automatic mesh "feature" in the access points fixed the problem. Sometimes stuff like this is too smart for its own good.
