Crank that bus

Well...I had every intention of moving on today.  But my battery has lost the love.

As I have written in previous posts, I have been having issues with Old Man Winter and his attempts to sabotage my travels.  The tactic that my new arch-nemesis is using is remarkably cunning, because it is a three prong attack, sinking to new lows with his frigid cold.  The arctic weather he spews thickens the oil, it gels the fuel and zaps the power from my battery.   The bus is temporarily paralyzed after the bitter attack.
I deploy my best countermeasures.   First, I boil up a pot of water.  Then I remove the primary fuel filter (about the size of a half gallon container), pour the green tinted nectar inside into a small, steel bowl. The steel bowl is placed into the half full pot of hot water, safely warming the combustible liquid to the temperature of baby's milk.  The warmed fuel goes back in the filter and the filter is reattached.

I turn my focus to undoing the damage to the battery.  I have seen this condition before but my preliminary diagnosis was inconclusive.  I was able to treat the symptoms with only partial success.  Time to prepare for all possible contingencies.  Frozen battery?  Dying Battery?  Weakened battery but not primary component in system failure?  Replacement is not an option at this time.  It is a $350 battery.

I needed to remove the crippled battery and bring it inside to allow it to thaw. I would rather shave my nether regions with an axe.  The 8D battery is a beast of lead and acid.  The size of two car batteries molded into one.  I had previously estimated the weight at 80-100 lbs but research revealed the true weight to be a whopping 130 lbs!   I chalk up the innocent miscalculation to my Herculean blood line. (Or maybe it was that radioactive spider bite...)

To get the battery onto the bus is a carefully choreographed maneuver.  Although, to the untrained eye, it might appear that I was about to engage in some bizarre tossing event.  The kind you find at Scottish festivals...toss a boulder, toss this telephone pole, etc.   You see, in order to aid in the lifting of the battery, the manufacturer was thoughtful enough to put two rope handles on either side.  This means I straddle the battery, lean over, grab a rope handle in each hand, heave it up half a foot, and waddle walk to the side door of my bus.  Have I mentioned it is a 'wet cell' battery?  Meaning it has caps on top to add water as needed.  These caps just pop on and off, rather easily.  They are designed to vent the gases emitted during charging and they have a nasty tendency to leak acid, especially during waddle walking.  Standing outside the side door, the floor on the inside of the bus is chest high.  I chose this entry method instead of the impossibly narrow front steps.   To get the battery onto the bus I must lift the behemoth of dead weight to chest height.  I would love to tell you that, through my previously mentioned gifted genetics of strength, I was able to lift the small car, I mean battery, neatly and horizontally through the door.   The truth is, I lifted the battery waist high (previously dormant back muscles began to curse), tilted it, placed my knee under the bottom end and heaved the top half up just enough that it could reach the floor in front of me.  This caused the acid that had leaked out to spill onto my knees and sweatshirt.   I felt the first itchy sensation of an impending chemical burn.  I immediately shoved the rest of the battery all of the way onto the bus and grabbed the baking soda that I had brilliantly, and with great foresight, positioned just outside the door.  I dusted the spills the best I could, creating a soft hissing from my clothes and a dramatic bubbling from the puddles of acid that were on top of the battery.

I have to explain here that the confined quarters of my living space isn't a place I like putting something that bubbles up highly explosive hydrogen gas.  Especially with an open flame propane heater, a propane stove, and the red hot coil of the electric heater.  But I do like for my bus to crank when I turn the key.  So I make sacrifices.
I ponder the time it takes to thaw a 130 pound battery.  I thought of ice sculptures and they seem to take a long time to thaw in room temperature.  But they didn't have an acid center.  I figured two days would be safe.
After two days, I began slow charging the battery.  I could hear the bubbles starting up and popping causing little acid droplets to sputter onto the top of the battery.  My mind wondered things like What is the minimum amount of hydrogen needed to be problem?  Will the acid eat the flooring?  Could a pocket of hydrogen be collecting in one spot, waiting until a little stream drifted off to make contact with an open flame?  How much hydrogen does it take to go boom?   I couldn't keep worrying about.  I just minimized the risk the best I could and pushed the potential bomb on the bus to the back of mind.
After I went to sleep, my carbon monoxide detector shoved the issue back to the front of my mind.  The alarm spits out 3 staccato, high pitched, skin crawling chirps, followed by a computer woman's soprano voice saying, with a deadly calm urgency... 'Warning: Carbon Monoxide'...over and over again:  CHIRP, CHIRP, CHIRP... "Warning: Carbon Monoxide"...CHIRP, CHIRP, CHIRP..."Warning: Carbon Monoxide".   I wake up in a bolt of panic, process the message being delivered in about 2 seconds, frantically search for a flame on the propane heater (the most likely culprit, even though I always turn it off), then I really get nervous.  I go through a mental checklist of things that might try to kill me.  The engine wasn't running, the stove was turned off, nothing seemed to burning.  The Carbon Monoxide detector is still obnoxiously going off and unlike smoke detectors, you can't just push a button to make them stop. Burying it under my blankets didn't really help.  The only thing I could do was to remove the batteries.  "Safety third."   I finally determined that the cause of the alarm was the charging of the big 8D battery.  I have confirmed this on 2 other occasions while charging the house batteries.  I just unplug the battery charger, disconnect the clips from the terminals and go back to sleep.
All my hard work paid off in the end.  I got the bus started the next day.  But my battery is permanently damaged and loses its charge overnight in the sub freezing temperatures.  Since it only gets down to the 20's now, I don't suspect the battery is frozen through.  I do have to charge it for 2 hours and wait until the warmest part of the afternoon before I attempt to crank it.   I am going to tough it out a little while longer before I buy another battery.   Spring is around the corner and Old Man Winter is retreating.

Let's not count all the things wrong with this picture.  Battery charging inside, next to the bowl of diesel, next to the 5 gallons of diesel, next to the diesel filter, next to the heater.  Oh yeah, and my pet's water bowl next to all that.  Desperate, last minute attempt to make sure everything was warm enough to start the bus.