… but rain here all day. 11 mms in fact, so I was able to put my new improved rainwater harvester to the test.

Don’t worry about the multicoloured pipework – when I have everything exactly where I want it I can change that. But you can see that the rainwater falls down the downpipe and initially into the part that’s angled to the right, that’s a kind of sump. Anything that is heavier than water, like dirt or concrete, will drop down into there, with the bend in the pipe to stop the dirty water splashing up.

When the lower part is filled, the rainwater will go down the part that’s angled to the left and into the rainwater collector. All the dirt, stones and so on will still fall down the part to the right and collect in there.

The water in the collector certainly seems to be clean, and when I undid the screw cap at the bottom, a pile of dirty water fell out. So it’s working.

Also working is my electrical panel. In the living room I ripped out all of about 100 years-worth of redundant wiring and connected up some decent stuff. All properly connected and fused.

When it went dark at about 16:00 (it’s been just like winter with this rain) I coupled up all of the batteries and the solar panels – 780 watts-worth of panels and 920 amp hours-worth of batteries. Tomorrow morning I’ll run some wires up to the attic.

But talking of dark, I had just 13.2 amp-hours of solar energy registered from the 3 solar panels on the barn. You have to go back to 26th April to find a day as depressing as that. But the 3 solar panels on the roof of the house showed a total of 28.2 amp-hours, so that’s encouraging. Now all 6 on the house are connected, that’s even more encouraging.

In other news, Pascal came round to borrow a tyre pressure gauge to check the pressure on the caravan tyres. Later, he came round again. He’d pumped up the tyres and taken the caravan for a spin to make sure nothing was going to drop off (that was a sensible idea) but he couldn’t reverse it up the track to Claude’s.

I went round to do it for him but his car just didn’t have the whack to push it up the hill in reverse and it kept on overheating. We pushed the caravan up by hand – 5 of us.

Later, Pascal’s lad came round to tell me that Pascal had decided not to take the caravan. He’ll get a friend of Claude to deliver it next time he’s coming down. So wiser councils have at last prevailed.

That’s a much more sensible idea and if it all goes pear-shaped it will be someone else’s responsibility and not his.

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