… that I did today was to empty the composting toilet.
I’ve been neglecting it for a few days, what with one thing or another.
And of course, once you get started you’ll be surprised at how many other things there are too. But the composting toilet did need to be emptied, such is the exciting life that I lead these days.
Second job was to cut a mound of wood.
I’ve been running the pile down this last week or two while I’ve been waming myself and cooking with the new woodstove and so I set about sawing up a big load of wood which should keep me going for the next few weeks.
All done by hand with this new saw, and I’m almost as impressed with that as I am with my galvanised steel dustbin, which hasn’t featured anything as much as it deserves in these pages of late.
Third job was to rescue the old anemometer that was formerly mounted on the side of the house and which I had taken down when I had put the wind turbine up there.
This was sitting in the lean-to not doing very much at all but it’s now screwed to the fence by the front door.
The main reason why I put it back up is that its temperature gauge is much more accurate than the one that I’m currently using to measure the air temperature.
This afternoon, with the sun blazing down and the heater upstairs working flat-out, I reckoned that this is a bit silly. There is so much more that I ought to be doing with the surplus electricity that I have.
And so remembering the heady days of spring and summer 2011 with the 12-volt immersion heater that I had made out of an old xylophene drum and a 12-volt heater element and which corroded through while I was in Canada just now, I set to and dismantled it.
I gave the important bits – like the heater element – the once-over to make sure that they still worked (and you would be amazed at how quickly it boils 1.5 litres of water) and then built another heater using a 4-gallon plastic water header tank.
I’m not sure how long the plastic will remain viable, but it should be good for a while anyway. It will hopefully give me hot water in weather like this and I can do my washing.
But all of this got me thinking – and that kind of thing is dangerous.
When I was setting out on the road of doing all of this, I remembered mentioning to someone who I thought was a friend of mine my plans for maybe having a microwave oven here.
A short while later I stumbled across a thread in a newsgroup somewhere where this “friend” and his mates were openly ridiculing my thoughts about this. Of course, such a friendship had to peter out after that.
Nevertheless, I do wonder what this guy and his mates would be saying now when here, in the middle of winter, for the last three days I’ve been running an electric heater up in the attic.
Serve them right.
And what happened to this day off that I was going to have?
