Tag Archives: data logger

Tuesday 14th April 2015 – THIS MAKES DEPRESSING VIEWING;

plasterboard taken off back wall in shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, if you look very carefully at the back wall of the shower room, you’ll see that the plasterboard has been taken down.

And that’s not all either, for half of the plasterboard on the side wall has gone too. And when all of that is sorted out, half on the other side wall will be coming off.

You may remember that I did the plasterboarding in a hurry in 2013 in between trips to belgium, and I really wish that I hadn’t, because firstly, it’s a total mess, and secondy, the studding is all wrong.

I have to fit a variety of shelves in here, and it would have been ohh so easy to have fitted them and then done the plasterboarding around it like I did with the stairs, but that’s far too simple an idea. When I was looking this morning at how to fit the shelving in, and not seeing a satisfactory solution, I thought “sod this for a game of soldiers”. It was quicker to take off the plasterboard and start again.

I don’t know how I’m going to find the space to cut it down to the new shape, by the way, but I’ll worry about that in due course.

shelving bracket for composting toilet shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis is what I should have done before I fitted the plasterboarding.

Here’s the shelf mounting for the top of the composting toilet and it took me about an hour and a half to make it, including searching for the wood and changing a few light bulbs in the barn. However, it took about 5 hours altogether given all of the messing about. And that’s sad news. You can see what I mean about having done it first rather than last.

There needs to ne another shelf bracket fitted to the adjacent wall and I’ll finish that tomorrow – I’m well on my way to doing that already.

blossom on trees les guis virlet puy de dome franceIn other news, the blossom has finally arrived on the trees. 3 weeks later than usual, but it’s here nevertheless. And it does look pretty too – well worth the wait.

And you can see how nice the weather was – another beautiful blue sky all day long.

199.3 amp-hours of surplus solar energy (and wind energy too because we’ve had a nice windy day) went into the dump load – the home-made 12 volt immersion heater. The water temperature in the dump load was off the scale (over 70°C) by 15:00 and when I went to fetch hot water to do the washing up at 22:00, it was still not back on the scale again.

I’ve finally fixed the data logger too – the new one that I bought a few months ago. And this is what I call accuracy. I checked it tonight with a 1-watt bulb and it showed a discharge of … errrr …. 1 watt. I rigged up a few other low-powered items and the discharge was 9 watts. Switching everything off again went straight to 0.

I’m well impressed with this.

I was back in Crewe on my travels, with some people who figure more in my nocturnal adventures that they do in real life which is just as well as they aren’t people whose company I would appreciate for real.

We were in one house – a Victorian semi with waste land at the side that was a zone of special scientific interest – a marshy wetland. A car driven by a woman went past, did a U-turn across the marsh, went across the drive behind my car, and out across the lawn and back onto the Highway. This had caused a huge pile of light-grey gravel to be pushed into the marsh and had totally dried it up.

Then, I had to take one of these people to see his father, and he gave me directions. When we came to what he reckoned was the house number, it was an empty plot of land in Delamere Street where the little old school used to be. Now it’s been 23 years since I last lived in Crewe, and yet I could tell the difference between Delamere Street and Flag Lane, even when I’m deep in the arms of Morpheus.

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Thursday 20th November 2014 – I’VE BEEN TO PARIS TODAY

And Terry came with me too.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have recently bought some huge 200 amp-hour batteries for my solar system here and I’ve been rebuilding the battery box and I’ve gradually been installing them one by one as the battery box takes shape.

I’ve been so impressed with these as you know – almost as impressed as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin. But anyway, my wholesaler sent me a circular the other day to tell me that they were having yet another battery sale. The price for the 100 amp-hour batteries was extremely interesting and my ears pricked up, especially as the batteries in the barn are struggling along on their last legs as you know.

Having a decent secondary solar system in the barn is of course very advantageous for many reasons, and so I bit the bullet and placed an order.

There is also a new range of data loggers that look much better than anything that I have around here and so I ordered two of those so that I can give them a whirl.

I would have had all of this delivered, except that the company is now starting to sell solar water heaters and they had an exhibition model on display. This is what I want for here, and Terry is very interested too, and so we decided that we would go, pick up my batteries and so on, and have a lengthy chat about solar water heating.

And so at 06:00 Terry phoned me up to wake me, and at 06:45 we were on the road to Paris.

We arrived on the edge of Paris at about 10:00 and then spent 90 minutes covering a distance of just 20kms to our destination. Not traffic queues and not roadworks either, but my satnav has a fetish with the A86 autoroute. No problm with that in itself, but there’s a height limit of 2 metres on that road, and Caliburn is 2.17 metres. Every road that we took brought us back to the A86.

After a wile I gave up, headed for the centre of Paris and then the road out underneath La Defense. But of course the sat-nav can’t pick up a signal in the La Defense tunnel and so I missed the exit. It was certainly not my lucky day today.

Eventually we arrived and spent a good hour or so there. And the upshot was that I have now come home with a solar hot water system. I couldn’t miss out at this price, even if I don’t have any running water yet.

On the way home, I took a different way and of course in the end after much binding in the marsh, we came to the A86 – not once but three times. This was totally beyond a joke and so I headed west on the A14 to Le Havre and came home via Rambouillet. And if that wasn’t enough, I hit a part of the kerb with a hell of a whack at some speed and I’ve smashed a wheel trim (and probably a few other things too)

The rest of the journey was incident-free but we did come home via Brico Depot in Montlucon, where I bought the insulation for the battery box and a few other things, and then the LeClerc for a bit of shopping.

So, what a day! Nearly 900kms and spending all that money but my renewable energy system will leap ahead in spades if all of this works out.

But I do need to work out this route. It’s doing my head in.

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Tuesday 6th November 2012 – HORRIBLE, GREY, WET AND MISERABLE.

But that’s enough about me – let’s talk about the weather.

That was miserable, dark and overcast, and it has done nothing but pour down with rain all day.

This morning I finally finished off putting the data logger statistics onto the computer. It’s taken me ages to do that and it would have been so much easier to have done it day by day.

I’ve also finished off writing the web pages for the Pionsat football matches at the weekend. You can see them here if you like.

That took me up to lunchtime, and this afternoon I carried on with the shelving.

Now, both the rails are now finished and assembled, and I’ve started to cut and shape the shelves. And that’s not the work of 5 minutes to cut them precisely to shape either.

And that’s it, really. Nothing else. It’s not been the right kind of weather to do much or to go far.

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Sunday 14th October 2012 – THERE WERE NO …

… hunters shooting off their guns in the neighbourhood, no low-flying Air Farce jets, no driving rain beating down on the windows in the roof, no mice doing clog dances in the ceiling, none of the neighbours using a chainsaw .

And so to disturb my Sunday morning Day of Rest, some b****** rang me up on the phone at 09:00. Makes me thoroughly sick.

And seeing as how I started my day in a bad mood, that’s how I carried on.

I watched the odd Bulldog Drummond film. It’s amazing what is available to download on www.archive.org – before I went to Canada I downloaded tons of films from there to watch out there in my car at night.

Who needs DVDs?

I also continued to catch up with registering the data that I collect from the various recording instruments around here.

Every night I write it all down but I’ve been very lax in entering it on the computer. I need to organise myself much more.

fcpsh fc football clermont foot auvergne puy de dome franceThis afternoon, braving the howling wind, the driving rain and the freezing temperature, I went off to watch Pionsat against Clermont Foot Auvergne

And a quick glance across the car park tells you exactly what you are going to be up against. When was the last time that any football club has had a team coach in order to bring its players to Pionsat?

But still, a match is never over until the 90 minutes has been played, and this driving rain and howling gale might be a great leveller.

fcpsh fc football clermont foot auvergne puy de dome franceClermont Foot Auvergne sent their under-21 team for the match and even so, it was still no contest. Pionsat were simply swept aside, as everyone was expecting.

What made it worse was that FC Pionsat St Hilaire had no recognised goalkeeper again.

Michael bravely volunteered once more as you can see in this photo where he brilliantly saves from a Clermont attacker

fcpsh fc football clermont foot auvergne puy de dome franceBut despite Michael’s heroics between the posts, neither he nor anyone else could do anything about the relentless Clermont Foot Auvergne side.

If I remember correctly, the opposing goalkeeper just had one shot to save during the entire match.

As is usual in matches such as these, most of the damage was done in the final 20 minutes when the benefits of full-time “proper” training pays dividends.

Pionsat’s players were run into the ground whereas the Clermont players hadn’t even broken into a sweat.

fcpsh fc football clermont foot auvergne puy de dome franceBut hang on a minute – what is this?

Yes, the referee this afternoon has stopped the game and held up play so that a Pionsat player could tie up his bootlaces that were trailing everywhere and risking tripping him up.

Contrast that with last week when the referee allowed play to continue with FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s goalkeeper flat-out unconscious on the edge of his own penalty area, and you will see exactly what I mean about just how much of a poor decision that one was last week.

So with the football over and FC Pionsat St Hilaire well-out of the cup I came back home and, believe me, I’m not going anywhere else tonight. The weather really is atrocious.

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Wednesday 26th September 2012 – IT WAS ANOTHER …

… day today where I heard the alarm go off properly but the accompanying cloudburst made me turn back over and … errr … wait for a while before arising.

So after the usual while on the computer I went outside and started work.

And in another major change to my usual lifestyle, I was still out there at 20:00.

First plan was to fit the new handles that I had bought the other day to the gardening tools that were lying around. The rake and the binette worked fine but this sledgehammer handle won’t work at all.

But anyway, using the newly-repaired tools, I hacked my way through a huge pile of undergrowth, ripped up piles of nettle and bramble roots, and laid a big tarpaulin on the floor.

Onto this tarpaulin I collected up all of the scaffolding that I’ve been using and laid it out on there. That was followed by all of the leftover plastic slates, and then I cleaned out all of the wood and the breeze blocks from where I had been working.

That gave me some more room to move around there and I could then hack out another pile of brambles.

There’s probably only about 30m² of land to clear back there and I reckoned that it wouldn’t take long, but I’m being rather optimistic about that. It’s going to take a while.

But it needs to be done because the next phase is to clear all of the stuff from where I park Caliburn and it’s there that I want to put it.

That took me up to about 19:00 and there was still a little job that I needed to do. The charge controller for one of the banks in the barn packed up ages ago and so I’ve been wiring the panels directly to the solar bank – not that there’s enough energy produced over there to worry the batteries too much.

But I need to measure the energy that’s going in, and so I disconnected the remote ammeter off the other bank and wired that to it.

Not so easy as it’s pretty cramped in there so I hope that it’ll work okay.

Still, we’ll find out tomorrow, won’t we?

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