Hello update from the modular shed. It's going to be quite a quick one cuz it's extremely cold out here as you can see from this circular piece of ice which came from my uh, bucket of mud and water. door stop. But anyway, let's head inside the shed and check the temperature on my display here.

Ah yes, it's 0 now I Know that this um thermometer thing doesn't go below zero de it never shows temperatures below that so it could be below 0 de there's no way of knowing. Oh and see my little cable time mod which holds the display on because this display sticks onto the plastic uh holder with two tiny little strips of double-sided tape and they've long since lost their sticky so yeah, that cable Tire now holds the display in place. Okay, let's turn the lights on. and they're currently running from this big Uh 100 amp life Po4 battery which quite frankly is massively uh, over the top for this job.

So I'm going to run lights in this shed probably in several zones using sodium ion. uh, going forward. Okay, so here is my Uh give and take energy transfer system from the 25v battery one there to this 12vt battery, but it will be to the sodium ion battery. Um, this is in full winter mode now.

Um, because there's a condensation problem. What tends to happen is the underside of this Roofing Um, this is very cold at night and the moisture the the warm moist air course Rises up condenses on the underside of the roof and then it drips off in big Globs and this stuff is bitching in impregnated. So what tends to happen is Brown Mck drops down so you can see that over my 25v battery and the electronic uh voltage controlled relay. The buck converter and the Ant Miner I've got this uh, sort of temporary shelf which I put up last winter when I discovered the problem.

It's just pieces of um. hardboard and that's protected the electronics cuz the previous one of these water dripped on the switches and because there's voltage across those switches, it all started to oh, what's the word? electroly? Now there's a problem here. Um, this relay is on. So the give relay is saying I can give you some power, but the buck converter if I switch it off, it's set for 15 volts because this battery goes up to about 14.6 um, and 1.2 amps because this was getting actually quite hot.

More than that, this is supposed to be um I think a 6 amp butt converter. but yeah, you'd have to enhance the cooling for that. So 15 volts. so you switch it on and what do you expect? 15 volts? No, we're getting 26.2 which is the voltage on the 25v battery.

It's coming straight through the butt converter and to the output. so the butt converter has failed in some sort of pass through mode and I think it's one of these little XL semi chips. Uh, it's on the back actually so you can't see it. I think it's gone into effectively failed short so it's passing the input voltage straight to the output.

So as soon as the take relay switched on the fuse and it's a good thing I did fit a fuse. There's a fuse here. That fuse just instantly blew. you might be able to see that it's blown.

possibly there. Um so yeah, this has failed and I suspect it's just the XL semi uh chip. and I think the reason it happened is I wanted to fit this terminal block. this is a 25 amp terminal block and so I cut the solar wires and crimped on um Fork Terminals and put them in this block because eventually I want my little Amita thing up there.

Um when I did that? I I Kind of thought. Well I last thing I want to do is short that out because that is fed through this thing and this thing is effectively short on the positive and a short through the shunt on the negative. So this just is a pass through and then down to the battery. So I took this fuse out.

Now the problem with that is I did it during the day and that means that on this system, rather than getting 25 volts from the battery, it was getting about 30 volts or possibly more, maybe even 35 Vols from the solar panel outside. So this shot up to 35 Vol And that of course means that 35 volts came into my give relay and came into the buck converter. and I think this thing's only speced for an input of up to 30 volts. So probably the XL semi chip has just gone pop and now it's passing the input voltage straight through to the output.

so this is effectively doing nothing. Now it's um, it's broke, it's broken. So what I need to do is um, take all this indoors with its roof I might cut this roof down a bit cuz I made it a bit overly wide haven't I doesn't really fit in there very well and um, yeah, try and find another XL semi uh Buck converter chip and replace that and see if that fixes it I don't think it's the second Buck converter. There's normally a little Buck converter which provides 5 volts or something for the microcontroller and the display.

but I mean as you can see, that's all working fine so no, the problem is the the high power but converter um which makes the whole but converter module work now I need to move my um flashing LED supercomputer board there off here the little um super capacitor module which is charged up which actually runs all these LEDs I need to move that off here I need to get the ant Miner and move it down onto the bottom shelf with the other ant miners and that means that I can then get this uh new battery my all 768 wat I think it is Uh battery with all the at a glance Voltmeters which has been sitting there patiently waiting to be hooked up to the second solar panel I can move that over here, put it on this shelf alongside my 614 Wat battery. they're both um 8 cell so they're both 25 volt and and then they'll sit side by side and then the ant miners will be down below. um to empty these batteries whenever they get too full. and um also I want to get the second solar panel currently the all black solar panel the far one there is connected up I want to get this uh, blue 240 W solar panel connected up so that will also come uh through a little hole in the roof there and onto this terminal block.

I'll use the other two connections for the other solar panel and then there'll be another pair of wires coming uh across here I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with this yet because I got those two new Uh Voltmeter ammeter wat meters and then yeah, the cables will run down uh into the second battery which will be on that side of the shelf and then there'll be more of these relays and so on now. I Think what I'm going to do with these big Um life Po 4 these are 1280 WS I Think what I'm going to do is connect them and I have done some tests of this recently directly to ant miners now I Know some people said well, why don't you do that and I wanted to test whether these ant miners will happily run off sort of High 13 volts starts at about 13.6 volts these life Pro 4 batteries and then when they're completely depleted, they're down at about 11 volts and I just wanted to know if the ant miners were happy with that voltage range and they do seem to be happy. The controller board has but Converters on it to get down to sort of 5 volts, 3 volts, 3.3 volts that sort of thing. The hashing boards I think but convert the 12 volts down to something even lower.

I mean I have heard stories of the has hashing chips, the As6 running off one volt, um simply because they run so quickly. So really, the only issue is the fans because they take um, the 12 12 Vols directly in and then they've got a Pwm and a taco signal on this four wire cable. and so really I've been testing whether these fans behave themselves over that voltage range of high 13s down to sort of 11 volts and they do seem to be fine because of course, the Uh controller board here varies the Pwm signal on blue or yellow whichever it is um and controls the speed of the fans and measures temperatures on the hashing board so it's all feedback loop controlled so even as the voltage drops or droops, um, of course the controller can compensate for that by increasing the Pwm to the fan so they seem fine. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the three of these Big Life Po 4 batteries just as heaters.

So I can come out to the Shar switch on three ant miners on these three batteries. they'll be slowly charged uh from these batteries gradually over time. Um, and get the temperature in here up a bit so that I can actually spend some time out here when it's extremely cold which it is now. So that's the end of this video cuz I'm freezing now I'm going to go back inside.

Um so for this video, Cheerio!.