Category Archives: Rob_Julie

Thursday 17th December 2015 – ANYONE WOULD THINK …

… that it was me doing the tiling today, not Terry. Half an hour after lunch I was well out of it – two trips to Terry’s van and back with some stuff for here had finished me off. And back here, I was crashed out on the sofa at 18:00 and in bed by 19:15.

I’ve clearly seen better days – that’s for sure.

But a lot of this could be put down to the efforts that I had made during my nocturnal ramblings. I’d started off with something like a huge contemporary discussion about the qualities of different Roman emperors – and I can’t remember now with whom I was having this discussion. But from there I drove back (it’s good, this time-travel lark) to Stoke on Trent. None of the usual Clayhead characters out in an appearance unfortunately, but I do remember at a roundabout (it might have been one of the newish ones at Longton) I was confused by the exits, took the wrong one, and ended up on the road to Tunstall (a fictitious road of course but one that has featured on my travels before). It then occurred to me that there was one of these old-time sweet shops (just like there is in Longton) somewhere on this road and so I kept my eyes open for it. I ended up walking through this decrepit shopping centre-type of place to try to find it, to the accompaniment of jeers from several people lounging around – and what was that all about?
But back home I ended up chaperoning a young Shirley Temple-type of girl (as if I’d ever be asked to chaperone anyone of the female sex?) who was taking part in a singing competition that was to last all of the weekend. I asked her what would happen if she had to wait right at the end of the competition before it was her turn to sing, to which she replied that there were tons of things that we could do while we were waiting – have a party, go to the zoo, read stories.

No wonder I was exhausted!

So after my blood sample and a painful breakfast, we went off to Pionsat and the bank. I need to build up the fighting fund with all of this going on. Shopping at Intermarche was next, and there we met Clare, Julie and Anne who were off to Clermont-Ferrand for a fun day out. I fuelled up Terry’s van, seeing as how I had some money for once, bought my stuff for lunch and then shot off to the house for the tiling

When we arrived, the batteries were fully-charged already and the water temperature in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the surplus charge was slowly rising. That tells you everything that you need to know about the weather that we have been having just recently.

We had a visitor too! In the jungle that is Lieneke’s field opposite my front door we had a sanglier – a wild boar. We couldn’t actually see it but we could hear it grunting away and see all of the shrubs and bushes moving around as it prowled its way around. Magnificent beasts, these sangliers – I remember being up on my scaffolding when I was pointing the eastern wall and watching those two herds approaching each other and the eventual confrontation.

And while Terry carried on with the tiling, I did some desultory tidying-up. But my heart wasn’t in it and I couldn’t even cut straight today. In some respects I was glad when Terry decided to call it a day.

We’re a long way from finishing (I like the “we” bit, don’t you?) but the most difficult bits have been done. And I know that I promised you all a photo but Terry closed up the house while I was outside washing off the tools, so you’ll have to wait until next time.

And now back here, I’m in bed having an early night but I dozed off for an hour, woke up, and now I can’t go back to sleep again.

This looks as if it’s going to become a regular feature. I wish it didn’t, though, and I could have a decent 8-hours sleep.

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Wednesday 12th August 2015 – AT LAST!

This Hyundai has finally gone.

But it’s not gone far – about 400 metres to the wide grass verge.

Terry turned up tonight with his Jeep Cherokee 4×4 and that made short work of moving it. Unfortunately, Terry’s trailer is just too small for the Hyundai so there’s no possibility of putting it on there. And with me closed down for my holidays, I’m going nowhere tonight with my Brian James car transporter.

Consequently the Hyundai sits on the grass verge and there it will stay until the owner has come up with a Plan B. What this will be will be a depanneuse – a breakdown truck. And had a breakdown truck been summoned on Friday, this Hyundai would have been gone long ago with no stress and no bad feeling and no nothing.

And of course, the question of the degreaser for this oil slick. The car’s owner “didn’t have time” to pick any up. Why am I not surprised? But at least, Caliburn is back home where he belongs.

All of this is an object lesson in how doing things “on the cheap” rebounds with a vengeance because I’m never ever going to be doing anything coming from over there ever again. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!”

But last night, I had a bad night. I was still awake at 05:00 and I woke up again at 06:30. Clearly the stress was getting to me and I really didn’t need that with what I had to do today.Nevertheless in between the bouts of sleep this afternoon I’ve managed to do such a lot of what I had to do and I’ll be finishing the rest in a moment when I’ve eaten my pasta.

And I had a stroke of luck too. I’ve been hunting high and low for my Vox Bass amPlug – the one that you plug into the jack socket of the guitar and plug earphones into it so that you can hear what you are playing. It’s never come to light.

And then there I was, I suddenly had a brainwave, remembering what bag I had taken with me to Belgium and Germany a few months ago. And sure enough, there scrunched up in the bottom of the bag, was my amplug. That cheered me up. On the downside, with sorting out this Hyundai, I missed my shower window. I was looking forward to that, with new bedding and new clothes waiting for me. I’ll have to wait now for Lyon tomorrow night. I hope that no-one on the train complains.

So now I have something like a tidy attic, some bags all packed (and I bet that I have forgotten hordes of stuff) and just a few more jobs to do before I go. I’ll try to have an early night – I need it after last night to be sure, and I’ll be fighting-fit for tomorrow.

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Monday 10th August 2015 – MY PATIENCE IS NOW THOROUGHLY EXHAUSTED …

… and my good humour has now totally disappeared. I am never ever going to help anyone out ever again.

hyundai trajet leak oil on concrete drive les guis virlet puy de dome franceJust look at my beautiful concrete hardstanding.

I worked on old wrecks for years at Gainsborough Road in Crewe, and despite everything that was thrown at me, my drive there never ever looked anything like this.

But here I am, having spent a fortune on concreting my drive last summer so that I would have somewhere nice to work in my dotage, and this is what I get for helping someone out.

The guy who owns this old wreck came round to try to finish it off, but forgot to connect up the oil pipe. As a result, when he turned over the engine, I got the contents of his sump all over my concrete.

And if that isn’t enough to be going on with, he wandered off to think of a plan B, not only leaving his car in my drive but making no attempt to clean up the damage. That’s all over where people walk into my property of course, and it’s all soaked into the concrete and thoroughly ruined it.

Consequently tomorrow, as soon as I come back from Gerzat, his Hyundai is going out into the street regardless of whatever else happens. I’ll tow it out with the Kubota, get it as far away from my premises as possible, and then just leave it for whoever wants to remove it.

and if you are wondering why I waited until Tuesday to publish this, had I published this last night before I went to bed, as I usually do, there would have been nothing that would have been fit to print.

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5th August 2015 – ANOTHER THING THAT I HATE …

… is people who say “seeing as how we have the injector seals, why don’t we fit them?”

Still, the client is always right and so at 15:30, having wandered along slowly but steadily towards the end of proceedings, we stopped to fit the first injector seal.

At 19:00 when the car came to pick up the aforementioned client, we were just on the point of taking out the first seal. And had we not taken the seal out, the car would have been gone by then. So one rather unhappy bunny here.

The worst thing about this is that by 19:00 I had suddenly twigged how to do it, and it was a job that could have indeed been done in minutes. But when you don’t know about these things, you have to learn by experience.

During the night I was on the prowl around town with one of my friends off my social networking site – a woman probably about 15 years older than me and she was behaving like a kid of 8 and it was most embarrassing. We ended up in a luxury hotel with another group of people and we ordered coffee, which took about an hour to arrive.

I was told that we would be restarting work at 10:30 as the car’s owner had to go to Montlucon for half an hour. So it was 12:30 when he turned up – I thought that 10:30 was rather optimistic.

And we made steady progress too – head torqued down, timing belt fitted and covers fitted, fan belt fitted, turbo coupled up, engine mounting fitted and a pile of other stuff done too. And then we ran aground on the injector seals.

After we finished, with the water in the solar shower at 40°C, I had a gorgeous shower.

I might have another one tomorrow too!

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Tuesday 4th August 2015 – AS YOU MIGHT HAVE GUESSED …

… seeing as how we have been working on this Hyundai today, we’ve had 29.5mm of rain today.

Luckily most of it fell during the night but there was still sufficient falling down to postpone our start until 11:00.

So Rob came round and brought back the cylinder head and I finished dismantling it – using a hammer and chisel on the reluctant nuts. Luckily, it’s all standard metric threads so I soon found all of the bolts that we needed.

But the cylinder head is as bad as the bores, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impact damage, maybe a broken piston ring and that would explain the slack in the bore. It’s not a broken timing belt because there’s little damage to the valves and stems, which is what you exepct in that case. But whatever way you look at this, it’s ruined.

With the cylinder head being dismantled, it went on comparatively easily and the manifold was much less of a struggle than I was expecting. I got 9 of the 10 bolts onto the manifold at the cylinder head, but everything else is properly bolted up, which is a surprise. The bracket that caused us all of our problems the other day – that was a 2-minute job to reattach it. New nuts made all of the difference. The old ones were cheap and nasty, clearly not made to be taken off once they’ve been fitted. I could tighten up to infinity the new nuts using the open end of a spanner. With the previous nuts, even a 6-sided socket would just round them off.

Rob had to leave early so we called it a day. Tomorrow we need to fit the timing and fan belt, refit the turbo controls, torque down the head refit the water pipes and bleed the diesel system.

I had to shave my head too – I’ve been lying for three hours in a pool of oil and my hair (such as it was) was ruined. At least I can wash it easily now.

And Rosemary was on the phone for a good hour or so for a chat, so I missed my tea. But I don’t care.

Having crashed out this evening, I’m off to bed now.

See you in the morning.

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Monday 27th July 2015 – I HATE CARS

Especially mass-produced monsters made in Korea.

I had to take the cylinder head off one today , a job that normally takes about two or three hours at the very most. And so we started at 10:00 and finished by … errr … 19:30. And that with no break, no stopping for lunch, no stopping for a drink, anything. Working non-stop.

timing cover bolts grounding out on bodywork hyundai trajet diesel les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe issue with these cars is that the engines are all assembled and mounted onto a subframe, and the body is lowered on top. And this leads to all kinds of complications – the most astonishing of which was that in order to adjust (or slacken in order to remove) the cam belt, which you need to do in order to take off the cylinder head, you need to take off the belt cover. But the bolts of the belt cover ground out on the inner wing of the car so you can’t do that.

And take the exhaust manifold. It can be removed in about four different ways, each one of which involves the removal of a pile of nuts and bolts. And in every case, you can take out all but one, and then you are stuck.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

We finally removed it and the horrible thing about it all is that we have to put it all back together again in a couple of days time. I’m as black as the Ace of Spades, just as I used to be when I was pulling Ford Cortinas to bits all those years ago, and I’m never going to get myself clean.

And, of course, it was raining this morning while we were doing it, after all these weeks of glorious weather. Isn’t that typical?

But I was worn out before I started, having been awake since 05:00. I’d been on my travels, back to school in fact. And I had no shoes – I’d left them downstairs in the main hall but there, when I went down to retrieve them, was a three-piece rock band playing, right by where I had left my shoes. I chatted to the guitarist/singer in the interval to ask him that if he knew of anyone looking for a bassist, to let me know. “But I have a bassist” he said, indicating a young boy playing with him. “And I can sing” I said – “but my sister sings with me if I need a singer”. “But I don’t mean you – I mean anybody” but he was so negative that I quickly picked up the hint – that it was too much trouble for him and that he was not going to do it

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Friday 31st October 2014 – THE TIDYING UP …

… didn’t happen today. I’ve been doing much more interesting things instead.

I actually started on some more tidying up but it didn’t last long as Terry and Rob put in an appearance at the door. It seems that they had finished a contract a day earlier and so with a free day they had come to concrete the rest of the hardstanding where we had run out of ready-mix in the summer. This was to be Rob’s payment for me having gone to pick up his car from Rouen in August.

And so I dropped everything and went to give them a hand. And it was just as well that I did as we had a whole succession of equipment failure. Although we are having a dramatic late summer here, there wasn’t enough power to run Terry’s big cement mixer (my small one needs some attention at the moment) and so Terry had brought his big generator. After about an hour, that gave up the ghost. I couldn’t start my ancient generator (it’s not been run since 2000) and we couldn’t get to the huge diesel one that I have hidden away in the back of the Luton Transit.

Next step was to repair my cement mixer so we could use that. That worked for a while and then packed up again. It’s thrown the Woodruffe key out of the pulley on the crankshaft. In the end we found a bolt and squared it off on the angle grinder and then hammered it it. That seemed to hold and so we could progress – until the sun started to go down and the sunlight went off the solar panels.

It was then that I had a brainwave.

I have some heavy-duty plugs and sockets, the kind that fit on flying leads and I’ve been using them here and there around here, mostly to plug in the power board with the electric meter and the 600-watt inverter in various places around the barn. What I did was to wire up one of the sockets to the battery on the Kubota B1220 (that’ll be useful for the electric winch and all kinds of other things too) and plug the power board into the circuit. And much to everyone’s surprise, at 2500 rpm the Kubota produced enough power to run the inverter to power my small cement mixer, and it worked an absolute treat.

concreting car park area les guis virlet puy de dome franceHere we are. The finished product. That’s the last of the cementing for this year, I reckon. And it’s a good job too.

Unfortunately we ran out of material yet again which means that it’s about an inch lower than it should be, but that can’t be helped and it doesn’t seem to be worth getting another small load just to skim the top. It’s not as if anything really heavy is going to be driving up and down on it.

I was thoroughly exhausted after all of that – completely unexpected but welcome nevertheless – concreting session. I struggled off to the Intermarche at Pionsat nevertheless and bumped into Nan on the car park, so we had a long chat. I treated myself to a sorbet at the Intermarché – I felt that I’d earned it – and then came back here to crash out. I was in bed by 22:30 and I’m not surprised. All of the alarms are disconnected and I’ll sleep for a week.

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Saturday 23rd August 2014 – IT’S NOT EVERY DAY …

… that I’m up and out of bed at 06:30, but that was the time that Rob rang me up. And consequently, by about 07:30 we were on the road, fuelled up, tyres on the trailer inflated.

It was heavy going on the Autoroute northwards. It’s the last-but-one Saturday of the holiday season so there were piles of traffic heading towards Paris.

At Orleans we came off the autoroute and headed cross-country via Chartres, Dreux and Evreux to Rouen and then northwards towards Amiens and Abbeville. But Rouen dismayed us. There were major roadworks on the way into the city from the north and the queue was enormous, stretching for miles and miles. Travelling northbound, we had no troubles but it didn’t look good for coming back.

caliburn ford transit car transporter trailer rouen franceAbout 30 miles out of Rouen, round about 14:30, we located Rob’s car and loaded it onto the trailer. Strapped down at the back, but I chained it down at the front. Going that kind of distance (over 600kms), I wanted a chain holding the car to the trailer just in case.

We set off on a very scenic trip back. Avoiding Rouen isn’t easy as the River Seine is in the way and so it took several hours to rejoin the main road down near Evreux, but at least we were moving for most of the time.

Heading back towards home we were stopping every 100kms or so to check the strapping on the car – we didn’t want the car falling off the trailer – and we couldn’t go very fast anyway and so it was about midnight when we were finally back at Rob’s and unloading the car.

I was back here by 01:00 but I couldn’t sleep – just like in the old days when I could never sleep after doing a long shift on the taxis – and so I watched a film for ages.

Tomorrow I’ll have to uncouple the trailer and park it up properly.

But the irony of all of this is that we travelled almost 12OOkms without a hiccup and without attracting any kind of attention whatsoever, but at Evaux les Bains, just 10 kms from our destination and at 23:30 at night, we were stopped in a gendarme barrage, looking for drunk drivers and the like. They had a good look around, a good inspection of the trailer and then a length chat, and waved us on our way.

It was just 1km after that that the retaining strap that was holding the rear of the car snapped. I’m glad that I had chained it down as well.

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Friday 20th June 2014 – WE FINISHED THIS CONCRETING TODAY

Or was it the concrete that finished us? One of the other anyway.

concreting car park hardstanding les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut in fact the concreting isn’t finished because, strange as it is to relate it, we ended up not having enough. There was 60m² of surface area at 150mm depth, which relates to not quite 9 cubic metres. Take off the surface area of the pit but add on the depths at the side of the pit, I calculated about 10 cubic metres. And as a result, se are about 1.5 cubic metres short.

And it doesn’t look very pretty either. But there’s a reason for this. I planned to have 2 lorry-loads, one coming at 14:00 and the other one oming later in the day, each one having 5 cubic metres of concrete. And so when we finished the shuttering and fitting the grillage at about 13:30, Terry suggested that I went and made my butty.

concreting car park hardstanding les guis virlet puy de dome franceMy reply was, of course, based on past experience, that the moment I turned my back the concrete lorry would pull up.

And so as I turned my back, the concrtee lorry did indeed turn up, and there was just Terry and me to receive it. Rob turned up shortly after and we were shovelling and barrowing like mad. 7.5 cubic metres on this load instead of the 5 that I asked for, so we had to move quickly. And even more so when the lorry came back, just 15 minutes later with the second load.


Hottest day for a couple of weeks to and so it was drying before we could lay it properly. And so with all of this, it’s no wonder that the job doesn’t look very pretty. Still, it’s down and that is what counts. I’ll have to finish it off some other time – probably with the cement mixer.

The water in the solar heat exchanger was a healthy 35°C and so I took the opportunity to have a nice warmish shower. So now, just for a change, I’m all clean and dry. I came up here and crashed straight out. And I’m hardly surprised.

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Friday 13th June 2014 – WHAT A WAY TO START THE DAY.

hanging cloud les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, I woke up this morning at 07:30 and peered out of the window at the top of the stairs to see what the weather was like.

Here we have a good example of one of our typical Auvergnat weather phenomena. Here’s a hanging cloud coming drifting up the valley in this direction.

And in mid-June tpp. The weather is completely bizarre right now.

After breakfast I went off to pick up Rob and we set off to Montlucon to rescue his car. It was at the Renault garage near the centre and it was quite tight to negotiate with the trailer and the narrow streets and the tight turning into the yard of the garage.

chrysler PT cruiser car trailer transporter caliburn puy de dome franceAnd when we had the Chrysler on the trailer I noticed that we had a tyre right down but luckily there was an airline handy so I put some air in all of them. And then we set off.

The drive back to Pionsat was uneventful and we reached our destination with no trouble and dropped the car off. But this trailer tows nicely and I’m quite pleased with it. Then I took Rob home where Julie made coffee and gave me some vegetable plants

This afternoon I caught up with some work and then went out for an hour or so in the garden, weeding the cloche planting Julie’s plants and the tomatoes that I bought the other day.

So tomorrw I’m back in Montlucon buying the cement and some more pillar blocks for the concrete.

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Thursday 5th June 2014 – WHAT A SHOCK!

Yes, there I was in the middle of the night at Dorval ready to pick up mu hire car when the company told me that it no longer had any Dodge Grand Caravans. The last one had been sold in the middle of the week, and there was now no longer ay car to offer me. Consequently they offered me a refund but that was no use whatever to me. I wanted a car and I would never have one over the counter at the ame price that I could book one in advance on the internet.

I was all of a clammy sweat when the alarm went off.

Rob turned up at about 08:45 (I’d alrzady been out working for 20 minutes) and Terry turned up at 09:00. By 09:30 we were sitting there waiting for the cement mixer which, true to form, didn’t turn up until 11:15.

It wasn’t anything like easy to come down here in reverse in his lorry but he managed it and 20 minutes later he had gone, minus 5 cubic metres of concrete.

ready mixed concrete car park les guis virlet puy de dome franceTerry and Rob had left by 13:00 by which time we had done all we could. We were about half a dozen shovelfuls of concrete short.

Nevertheless we had the first row of breeze blocks of the retaining wall in poqition, the first row of concrete pillars and all of the reinforcing pylons in position.

This was a work and a half though and I’m pleased that I had two good friends to help me do all of this.

Hottest day of the year too (the water in the dump load was boiling) and I had a solar shower – I needed it too, especially after spending a couple of hours in the garden planting my aubergines and weeding the onions.

Now I’m having an early night as I’m having an early start tomorrow.

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Friday 2nd May 2014 – I’M CLEARLY …

… in the wrong line of business, that’s for sure.

I went round to Rosemary’s and loaded up her old zinc guttering and downpipes into Caliburn along with the btteries and aluminium and then after having given her a hand with a few little jobs we set off to St Ours les Roches and the metal factor.

We didn’t have enough to be put on the weighbridge so we had to unload it and sort it by hand, which took about 45 minutes, and then weighed it on some smaller scales.

And then off to pick up the money.

And then to pick myself up off the floor and walk out waving a cheque for … errr … €363:23. Yes, I’m clearly in the wrong line of business.

Mind you, we were lucky to get there because round about St Angel I head a rumbling from the front end as if a tyre was about to go. The noise worsened, without the loud bang however, and the steering didn’t seem to be affected, but at the first available opportunity I stopped for a look.

At first I thought that a wheel bearing had given up but in actual fact the wheel had worked loose – nothing more than that. So I tightened it back up.

I also checked the other wheels and about half the wheel-nuts had come loose, so i’ve no idea what was happening there. So they are all retightened now and I’ll check them again in early course.

Back at Rosemary’s we had home-made soup and a chat, and then I nipped off to do my shopping to save me coming out tomorrow. In the Intermarche at Pionsat I met Rob and Julie and then Keith and Clare.

It was all happening today again.

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Tuesday 25th June – HOW LONG IS IT …

12 volt dc domestic electricity circuit shower room les guis virlet puy de dome france… since I posted a photo of work that Ive been doing round here at Pooh Corner?  I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all of 6 months.

If you look carefully you’ll notice a pile of new trunking, cabling and wires as well as two new (temporary) wall sockets, one to the left of centre and one just lower than centre right on the back wall.

I’ve been extending the electrical circuits ready to put the next sheet of plasterboarding on the stud wall.

Mind you though, I’m lucky that I got that far. After being away for 6 months, I sent the first three hours looking for all the tools and the second three hours looking for all the cables and accessories.

The third three hours was spent trying to work out how it was that just 6 months ago the wiring that I was in the course of doing was so simple and straightforward that I didn’t need to label everything to say where it is to go.

So after my exertions I went round to Rob and Julie’s to give them the tea and marmite and to pick uo everything from there, including Terry’s super-duper lawn mower with which I’ll be attacking Cécile’s lawn one evening this week.

And I didn’t use the weed-killer either. I have two watering cans here and I was going to use them, but it was rather silly of me to have thought that I would have been able to find them in this jungle here right now.

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Thursday 9th August 2012 – WHAT A GLORIOUS DAY!

And I’m not just talking about the weather either, although that was certainly superb.

This morning was an early start and that found me in Montaigut-en-Combraille with Terry and Rob where we spent a pleasant 90 minutes visiting a semi-derelict building in the town.

We have big plans for this – well, actually we don’t, but the whole purpose of being there this morning was to measure it up and then draw up big plans for it.
Never mind a cunning plan, we will have several cunning plans for this place.

While Terry and Rob went off to chat amongst themselves I went off to the mairie to have a chat with the mayor of Montaigut-en-Combraille about what our intentions are.

Surprisingly (or maybe not, because times are changing in France when there is a question of foreign money being invested in these small semi-abandoned rural towns) she was quite co-operative and gave me loads of help, even introducing me to her deputy who was the kind of person who would really take an interest in this kind of project.

Back home, I started to turf out of the lean-to all of the accumulated breeze blocks, large stones and so on that I won’t be using again up there so that there would be plenty of space for me to move around.

But then the weather intervened – in the sense that by 13:00 the batteries were fully-charged and the water was heating up.

With all of this surplus energy around, out came the big drill and YESSSSSSSSSSS I finally pushed the core drill right through the wall and into the house.

I’ve even managed to feed the plastic pipe through the wall and so now, next time that it’s too wet to work, I’ll be running three sets of cables through the tube – a 230-volt power line, a 12-volt power line and a 12-volt light line, and then starting to wire everything up

This afternoon I was round at Liz and Terry’s doing the rear brakes on her car. Pretty straightforward of course but I was having issues with fitting the springs what with a lime burn on my thumb – how I managed that on Monday after all this time without one is another one of those total mysteries.

So tomorrow I’ll be fitting the woodwork for the windows and painting it all (I still have tons of this excellent LIDL wood treatment stuff), and then sorting out some wood to make a fascia panel across the exposed ends of the roof chevrons to keep the weather out of the ends of the chevrons.

That wood will be painted too.

I’ll measure up for the glass fit what guttering that I have lying around, and then on Saturday I’ll go into Commentry to buy the glass and the rest of the guttering.

Coming on in leaps and bounds now!

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Monday 16th July 2012 – BLIMMIN’ ‘ECK!

Yes, and for many reasons too. Probably the most important was that it didn’t rain today and we had bright blue skies, with just a few clouds passing by – the first time since I can’t remember when.

It didn’t take long for the batteries to be fully-charged, and then the excess solar charge was diverted into the dump load.

home made 12 volt immersion heater solar energy dump load overcharge les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd with the data panel that I installed on the overcharge controller, I could see how it was doing.

28 amps – or 382 watts – currently going into the home-made 12 volt immersion heater. Already, 23.4 amp-hours have gone in and by the time that I took the statistics before going to bed, we’d have a grand total of 122.2 surplus amp-hours – over 1.5KwH.

By the time I was starting to slow down – at 18:00 – the water in the dump load was up to 58°C and still rising. And so cue a load of washing. That’s all hanging out on the line now.

I even changed the bed linen, having to peel the pillow cases off the pillows and the quilt cover off the quilt.

It won’t only be clean bedding tonight – it will be a clean me too, for the temperature in the solar shower reached 33°C and a couple of litres out of the 12-volt immersion heater pushed that up to a respectable temperature and so I had a nice warm shower – and how I enjoyed that!

Pure bliss!

That’s made me feel like a new man – although where I might find one around here is anyone’s guess.

But that’s not all.

The benefits of going to bed early saw me up and about and breakfasting at 07:40 and that was really astonishing. That meant that I had a good 4 hours on the website and I was still all done by midday.

So I mixed a load of mortar and made a start on rebuilding the stone wall on the lean-to. That kept me busy for a few hours.

Rob came round to borrow my 100mm hole-cutter so we had a chat for 15 minutes, and then I had another task to attend to.

Hardly any water seems to be entering the water butts so I also stripped down the home-made water filters. And as I suspected, bunged up to the eyeballs, they were. and cleaned out the water filters. No wonder there wasn’t much water reaching the water butts.

Anyway, they are all ready for the next torrential rainstorm.

And me? I’m ready to snuggle up into my nice clean bed. I’ve been looking forward to this for ages

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