The Ranch

Thursday, December 2, 2010

The Ranch Lakewood New Mexico West of the Pacos River 32 degrees mostly sunny, to 77 degrees. (To enlarge pictures; Click on picture to enlarge, click return button (<) on your browser to return to post)

MEWS Men Eating Without Supervision, we meet at the Ranch House and at 8:30 we car pool (3) to The Paddock restaurant east of Artesia. This is a normal Thursday morning activity here for many years today eleven of us went to eat breakfast today.

House Batteries Shown

Today was water Buster's batteries day. House batteries for the twelve volt system, all of our lights are twelve volts. These batteries are located in the left rear compartment door. There are five batteries four are six volt paired to make two twelve volt batteries and one twelve volt battery. These batteries are "storage" for when Buster is traveling or dry camped without connection to electric. I added the one twelve volt battery for the additional storage capacity when dry camping. There was not enough room for two additional six volt batteries and additional electric storage was needed. The six volt batteries provide a larger storage and are deep cycle that are better at recovering from a large discharge. Buster's solar panels recharge these batteries, when sunlight is available. When dry camping or "Boondocking" all electric used for lights, water, pump, televison, satellite box/DVR, computer and c-pap comes from the batteries when the generator is not used. We do operate the generator for micro wave and hot coffee and tea making.

House Batteries (Exhaust Muffler below)

There are two more batteries in Buster just used to start and operate Busters engine and all other systems used for driving (like lights and horn). The chassis batteries are sealed and do not need water added. The chassis batteries are located under the closed door to the left in the top picture.

Battery Watering Tool

I purchased the watering tool last winter in Quartzsite, AZ makes the job easier to accomplish epically the batteries further in the compartment.


The boys won tonight (28 - 15 girls). We the boys (George, Don & Art & Jim) started winning losing the first round to the girls, (Bonnie, Doris & Sherry). We were ahead all night going into the double blank we were ahead by 400 (Mexican train domino's).