Pitufa.at

Last Monday we thought it’d be a clever idea to quickly add another battery to have 500 Ah instead of 400. The batteries live under the pilot berth which serves as storage, so all those boxes went into the saloon. It turned out that the additional battery didn’t fit into the plastic box we had intended for it, so Christian decided to custom-make a fiberglass container.

In order to reach the fiberglass kit we had to empty half of the forecabin (our second storage space) into the saloon and he didn’t quite finish the project on Tuesday.

On Wednesday we had a long before reserved rental car, so we went shopping and added a car-load of shopping bags to the saloon chaos.

On Thursday I stowed away the provisioning while Christian wanted to finish the battery project. When he turned on the soldering iron, a crackling sound and smoke announced the death of our inverter (the device that turns 12 V from the batteries into 230 for electric devices). I hitchhiked to town and visited all chandleries searching for a new inverter. I finally found one, but it was too late to do the paperwork in order to get it taxfree (for a yacht in transit), so I was told to ‘simply’ come back the next morning.

On Friday I hitched another ride to town, while Christian got the old inverter out. In order to install the new inverter (under the nav-table, not exactly easy to reach and work there) we had to take out all drawers from the nav-table, so 3 drawers filled up with tools ended in the saloon and we spent the rest of the day fiddling with cables in places that only a midget on a stick could reach.

Today is Saturday and we finished the inverter installation (drawers back in, hurray!), closed up the battery bank (yippieh, two matresses and 10 boxes out of the way), turned the forecabin back into storage space (yeah, there goes the rest of the boxes), vacuum-cleaned and wiped the floors and now we can finally sit down in the saloon again!