My last post was last Friday. This is Monday. The gate battery had an exciting weekend.

Late Saturday morning, I finally got the official Renogy Solar Panel Mount Brackets deployed.

It is adjusted approximately to the theoretically ideal angle, which somewhat understandably matches the latitude of the location, in this case 33-ish degrees. That doesn’t account for the few degrees off level where it is thrown on the ground, but its more of a rule of thumb anyway. Longer term, I think I will attach it more firmly to the ground than with the gravity afforded single cinder block cap. Also, the cabling is still far from safe from any mowing implements.

For the rest of Saturday, we did unrelated stuff. Sunday, however, I set up our usual fence Christmas decorations, which is modest, but enjoyable. Lighting on the fence and gates, plus a couple of inflatable elfy dachshunds.

One nice side effect of these decorations is that I run a extension cord from the house all the way out to the gate, so for a couple of months, I have mains power available at the gate. So, once I had the basic power distribution in place, put my smart charger on the gate battery and left it.

I deploy a Home Assistant controllable switched outlet for these decorations, along with automations to turn them on a sunset and off at 2:00AM. Since I wanted to leave the charger running, I disabled the automation to turn off the decorations.

Leaving the charger on overnight definitely had the desired effect.

There is a lot going on here. Click on the image below for details.

Of a mildly entertaining nature, the outlet switch I run these lights on reports power use. Right now, with just the lights and the dachshunds, it is drawing a little less that 200 watts. Interestingly, it varies quite a bit, between 170 to 192 watts. I suspect some variation from wind affecting the inflatables, but I would have to care enough to investigate to know for sure. However, while the smart charger was connected, it ramped up to 420 watts peak around 10PM, then back down to baseline 180ish by 5AM or so, including a decided bump down at 5:20AM that corresponds with a bump down in Gate Battery voltage, which I presume to be the Battery Full mark notated above.

Of a even more mildly entertaining nature, when I installed the Shelly UNI on Friday morning, I apparently knocked one of the Triplett clips off the battery terminals and didn’t notice it until Saturday when I was attaching the mounts to the solar panel. The two logs are otherwise very close, within their respective limitations.

Since I now have essentially live logging on the gate battery, I redeployed the Triplett onto the gate opener battery, which is a separate thing. The Mighty Mule gate controller has its own small solar panel, probably 12-15 watts, to maintain it’s rather modest requirements. The opener draws nearly nothing until called upon to open and close the gate, which doesn’t happen very many times per day, often not at all some days. Upon connecting it, it was reading 12.89 volts, so it’s probably pretty healthy. I will try to leave that logger on there for several days to see what that battery does.

Speaking of gate opener, this is what I will probably connect one of my Shelly UNI outputs to, to be able to open the gate from Home Assistant.

I need to nail down the behavior of these outputs. It sounds like I can have it momentarily close with a button push, but the verbiage is not stupid clear 🙂