OK so the batteries on the scales have been no end of a pain for the operation. Taking the hives off the scales to return the full set of the scales to home, to open the box with it’s tiny screws and plug it into a USB for charging is no end of FAF, especially when the batteries last about 6 months.
My solution is to hard wire the scales in this gives me 6 non-movable stations on which to put the hives which is a bit of a pain but nothing compared to the above.
Job 1 is to set up my battery station. For this I used an old hive on a hive stand with a lid. I screwed a base board onto the hive as it’s base had rotten. You can see this with the light blue hive in the middle of the picture.
This hive holds a battery pack containing some replaceable batteries. These can last as long as they last but are easily changed without having to take any hives off their stand.
It also acts as a convenient shelf for stuff.
Job 2 was to wire in the first hive. I had an empty station so this was the place to start. BE REALLY CAREFUL with the polarity. I bought nice thin wire in two strand and some connectors from amazon. The idea is to feed the wire through the feed through on the scales into the box and connect it via block connector to the battery plug. This now effectively connects the battery to the scales at a distance. Making sure that the positive terminal always connects to the positive wire you can then wire in the battery into your box. Hey presto the scales are then all hard wired. Finding a big enough battery set up so that you don’t have to change the battery too often is then the challenge. I currently have to change the batteries every month or so but this is a really easy job so not too bad.
This while effective was a bit of a mess. There were wire connectors everywhere and the tiny thin wires were really fiddly and easy to loose the connection.
Whilst changing the battery, I nudged a connection and lost the hive scales for a day.
I therefore found a couple of earthing bars from screwfix and set about using them as bus bars. Black for negative and silver for the positive. Everything can now just wire into these and hopefully the connections will be a bit better.
Now I just need to find a solution for the hive heart battery issues they seem to be going all the time too!!!
UPDATE: All the stands are now done except for the Station B. this one still has 65% on the internal battery so I am leaving it till it needs doing. Chaining all the batteries together has been an absolute faf so i replaced the battery system with a 4V battery that I found online and this has reduced the number of switch overs significantly. The switch over is also really easy.
UPDATE: I have a spare old solar panel that operates at 6 V so this should be good enough to charge the 4V battery this will reduce the charging cycles and mean that I only need to charge over winter. On the first day when it wasn’t really sunny the power went from 60% to 100% very quickly and I do not want to over cook the electronics. The usual running is 4 V is 100% so over 4 V is not great. I think that I may have over charged the battery and killed it. It is no longer holding charge and loosing 25% in a single day.
I have therefore bought a little voltage regulating device that now limits the power of the solar panels to 4.2 V. Perfect for charging the battery but not too high that it fries the electronics in the scales.
In hindsight the better setup for this would have been a 6 V battery feeding into the voltage regulator to drop the voltage to 4 V for all the scales so at some point I may change this around to that structure. I could even go for a 12 V battery with a 12 V solar panel, making the most of readily available technologies.
NEW Setup:– So the solar panel that I have does 6-7 V and the Voltage regulator needs 1.5 V to work properly. I have therefore gone for a 6 V battery and the solar panel directly connected to the battery and the battery connected to the Voltage Bars via the voltage regulator set at 4 V. This should give me a self charging battery set up that uses all the available power from the solar panel that i already have and gives a 4 V consistent output to all the hive stands. The advantage of this is that the 6V battery holds a lot more charge than the little 4 V batteries and will charge properly throughout the summer. I could end up in a situation when the system is self sufficient and can just be left on it’s own. Regulating the voltage after the battery allows for more of the solar potential to be harvested and gives a bigger reservoir of charge for operation.
Interestingly the 4 V registers very differently on the different stands with the green stand at the longest distance showing 45% while the Yellow stand at the shortest measuring 73%. I’m not worried as the % indicator is no longer a measure of the % of battery left so as long as it is over 0% and under 100% on all hives then I am happy.