Yes, I’m exhausted. And I’ve only been tidying up the wiring outside underneath the fascia board.
That was meant to be a five-minute task but I’m already on the 3rd day and it’s far from finished. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong.
I started off by disconnecting the wind turbine on the fence – the one that I’ve been using as a test bed. I wanted the timer off it. I then connected two wires to it, and that was where the easy bit ended.
When I dud the roof, I ran some 6mm wire down some conduit from outside under the eaves with theaim of wiring up the wind turbine – the one on the roof – to it, but it never gave any charge and so I ran an outside wire up to the turbine. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I had another go at wiring up this 6mm wire to see where the fault was.
This is where I discovered that the charge controller is built for a maximum of 4mm wire. After hours of fiddling around I had to splice some 2.5mm wire into the 6mm wire to make the good connection. When I wired it all up to the batteries and installed a fuse, I had a bright blue flash right across the living room.
Hmmm. A dead short. THat’s why the wire’s not working.
Back on the scaffolding, I cut down the wire so that there was no excess outside, and then attached a couple of new lengths to the older lengths in order to pull them through. Anyway, that promptly stuck and it took about an hour to pull it all back out.
Next, I tried a cable puller and that became irrevocably stuck and nothing that I could do would shift it. After much binding in the marsh, there was nothing for it but to unpack the corner of the attic where all of the wiring comes through (it’s not sealed off yet) and unstick it from the inside under the eaves. And that took hours and now the attic is on an even worse mess
But I didn’t ‘arf have a surprise when I opened it all. I don’t mean the cable puller – that came out in seconds, but there was a huge pile of wire inside there.
It seems that the wire from the outside is just coiled up behind the plasterboard and isn’t going into the conduit to go downstairs. Furthermore, the two wires that are coming up from downstairs is also coiled up behind the plasterboard and hasn’t been pssed through the conduit to the outside.
I’ve no idea what I must have been thinking when I was doing this wiring back in 2009, but at least it explains why the wind turbine wire wasn’t doing anything back in those days.
It also explains the blue flash downstairs too – that’s because the wires coming upstairs had been taped together so that they wouldn’t separate, and the copper in one wire is touching the copper in the other.
The wire that came through from the outside, I pulled it out, and the one that came from downstairs, I pushed that outside for the wind turbine and at last I’ll have a circuit.
If I had stopped there, it wouldn’t have been quite so bad, but seeing as I’m putting another bank of solar panels on the wall outside and they need a pair of wires, and I had the xall dismantled and a onduit passing through to the outside, I decided to pass the wires through the conduit and inside the house so that they aren’t visible fr – om the outside.
So with 4 strands of 6mm cable trying to fit through a 16mm conduit, it called for some delicate manoeuvre and I’ve never had cable so firmly wedged in conduit before. It was inch-by-inch, on and off the scaffolding to feed it into place and then into the attic to pull it through from outside. And when you need 7.5 metres of cable coming through, you can see how many times I was on and off the scaffolding.
Anyway, I now have 7.5 metres of wire coiled up inside and the next intention was to thread it down the conduit – a 32mm pipe with all kinds of stuff coming up in it. I’ve started to thread the cable puller up from the bottom, but that’s stuck in the conduit for the moment.
So that’s where I’m at at 19:30 in the evening with my little 5-minute job. I’ll be in bed in a moment with no tea because I don’t feel like making any. I’ll have another go at it tomorrow.
