… I can’t really have a day off and stay at home as there is so much to do here and I feel guilty about not doing it.
I can have a pretty good lie-in though, and it was 10:35 when I heaved myself out of my stinking pit. And if I hadn’t have had to get up to go to the beichstuhl I would still be in there now.
It was clear, blue sunny skies with a wind strong enough to send the AIR403 wind turbine spinning round. That can only mean one thing – WASHING.
So after breakfast I put the machine on and did a load. It made me think that here I am living like this with just my solar panels and a very part-time wind turbine, yet we have a fridge, a washing machine, loads of heavy DiY tools such as circular saws and the like. And the other week we had a cement mixer.
One of my friends at the time I was setting up all of this used to have quite a laugh at me behind my back and posted some pretty awful stuff about my plans in a newsgroup of which he was a member – so much so that one of the other contributors was quite offended and copied them to me. I bet he’s laughing on the other side of his face now.
While the washing was going round I tidied up my room and had a very pleasant 25 minutes chatting to Liz and Terry.
After lunch I had the afternoon off and read a book but after an hour or so I set about the house again. In preparation for restarting work tomorrow I amended the power board (amending the power board will be a regular feature). I now have the 600-watt inverter in here as I’ll be bringing the power tools inside in order to do the work on the walls and floor.
I’ve wired in the electricity meter so I can see how much electricity I’m using – but it’s not as good as the one in the barn as this one only goes to 1 decimal place while the one in the barn goes to 2 places and so is much more useful. There’s also a British double socket wired onto the power board now. One side will be for charging up power tool batteries and the other side will be for an extension to take power up into the attic temporarily.
And why British plugs and sockets? The answer is that the plugs for the appliances are fused and you can change the fuses. And as my circuit will be a maximum of 1200 watts (when the Studer comes back from being repaired) that’s 5 amps max. So a 5-amp fuse in the plugs for all the appliances will protect all my appliances quite nicely.
All the power board needs for now, apart from a woolly sock, is a mains (230-volt) clock so that I can see how long I’ve had the inverter running. But you try to buy a mains clock these days! In the barn I have a clock that Claude found for me – off an old electric cooker that he found down the tip. I wish he’d find me another for the house.
So much for my day off anyway.
