Noticed today that all the piers are nearly empty of ships. Freewinds had left after being here for 3 days. Dona Luisa and Don Andreas, the ships that transport most of the goods between Bonaire and Curacao, are also gone. This is probably in preparation for the two cruise ships, Noordam and Sea Princess, that are due in tomorrow.

Before devotions this morning, I had a few minutes and looked into why Joe had stated that the power plugs on the large UPSs we not interchangeable. Discovered that the 60 amp receptacle of UPS(A) and it mating plug are mounted upside down compared to the other three places. The ‘hot’ wire was connected to the right blade in all cases, but, if the plug is upside down, it will find a ‘cold’ slot when plugged into the other receptacles and vice versa. When I emailed Joe to have my observation on record, he replied, “Sounds like a task we can put on your list for your next trip to Bonaire :).”

After devotions, with the encouragement of Rich West, I checked into the possibility of using a programmable thermostat control, from an unused room at the office complex, to ‘turn-off’ the site 6 ton air/co when no one is there. I wanted to make sure it was compatible before ‘borrowing’ it. After reviewing its installation manual on the internet, it looked like it would work.

After rounding up some tools, connectors and the thermostat, I headed to the site.

My first site project was to test the pager feature of the security system. After ‘erasing’ the ‘primary’ phone numbers, the ‘pager’ number was entered to ‘call’ my cell phone. After disconnecting the ‘sirens’, an alarm was purposely triggered and my cell phone was called — almost 4 minutes later! Another test was done and the time was about 8 minutes. It doesn’t look like this will work for use as the ‘first’ alert. I suspect the system is ‘attempting’ to contact the ‘primary’ phone numbers (even though they are erased) 16 times before beginning to contact the ‘pager’.

While installing a backup battery for the security system, I took a little too long, because the terminals of the old battery were different size spade connectors than the ‘new’ one. The system ‘beeped’ and displayed an error message of ‘battery voltage low’. In this case, the ‘pager’ number was called immediately!

I checked the ‘sensitivity’ settings of all the motion detectors and discovered that the two in the big rooms were set to least sensitivity. I changed them all to highest sensitivity and they seemed to work much better. I assume that when the manual states to set for least sensitivity for harsh environments, it is not referring to temperature range. If there are any false alarms, as a result of these changes, my assumptions will have been proven wrong!

Next, my focus was on the thermostat for the 6 ton site office air/co. I quickly discovered that there are only three wires with 24 volt AC control voltage. The thermostat must handle 0.74 amp to energize the air/co. The programmable thermostat will work, but, since only one side of the 24 volt supply comes to the thermostat, the batteries will need to be replaced yearly. [As an after thought — since this air/co will be off much more than it is on, would it be possible to provide power to the thermostat from the fan or compressor control line through a resistor to the C (common) terminal? The batteries would only need to supply power when the unit is actually running. Will have to think about this some more, but won’t implement it this week. Of course and easy to say, the best solution is to run a common (C) wire from the air/co to the thermostat.]

To complete the thermostat installation, new batteries are needed, holes drilled and tapped for mounting it, and a revised program entered. Decided to do some of this tomorrow at the office/studio where the user manual is stored on a computer. Hopefully there are also some new batteries there. Joe would like the thermostat to automatically set itself to 85F at 9:00 am (after getting tools to work outside), 2:00 pm (after lunch), 4:30 pm (after work) and 6:30 pm (after working late). The temperature can be manually lowered any time, but will automatically revert to 85F should the building become unoccupied. [This sounds kind of strange when most Americans think of setting the thermostat lower to save heating costs.]

I now began to install the wiring to install a door switch, instead of a motion sensor for monitoring the entry door. The motion detector will be moved to another location that should be protected. I drilled and tapped the metal door frame and door to mount the magnetic switch and magnet. The wiring was run above the ceiling in preparation for connecting it to the line currently going to the motion sensor. It was getting too close to quitting time to make the final changeover. Planning to do this tomorrow.

Before leaving the site, the primary phone numbers were reprogrammed into the security system. The ‘sirens’ were reconnected, then the system was ‘armed’.

This evening we went for a swim to ‘cool off’. The current temperature is 80F and ‘feels’ amazingly good!

Since we had our dinner at noon (chicken and rice), we cleaned up the peanut butter and jam jars to make sandwiches this evening. It was nice that they emptied at the same time. I will have to go without my PBJ sandwiches until we get home :-(! We also had bacobas (small sweet bananas).

No pictures in this entry, but should get to bed earlier tonight as a result.