Tag Archives: 12 volt domestic circuit

Wednesday 5th February 2014 – IT TOOK ME LONGER …

… than I was expecting to finish off this wiring today. But the positive side of all of this is that it’s all done properly now. And much of it is now correctly sheathed and tacked into place, and hidden behind insulation. Under normal circumstances it won’t need doing again.

But I’m surprised that I did anything at all today. In the night I was being chased around by a bull and a herd of cows and I dashed into a house for safety. But Brain of Britain forgot to close the door, didn’t he, and the bull came in behind me, trapping me in the house. I don’t get on too well with big animals and this was definitely one of “those” moments. But I don’t recall having this type of dream before. What was that all about?

But back to current (well, we are discussing electricity) issues, we now have a four-gang light switch properly installed on the first floor landing. There are the two light switches for each of the flights of stairs, a third that will be for a light on the landing, and a fourth for the light in the cupboard at the back of the stairs.

But we did have an accident today. The 12-volt LED light on the flight of stairs up to the first floor keeps on falling out of the blub holder (these light bulbs are heavier than you might think) and today it finally smashed. But only the outer cover, the internal works are fine. And it’s much lighter now of course and the beam is much more spread out. Yes, after all of this, it still works.

In the middle of all of this, Cécile rang up for a chat and was on the phone for 45 minutes. It’s nice to chat to friends of course, but they always ring up when I’m in the middle of doing something, never when I’m sitting down with a coffee.

This afternoon I’ve padded out the stud wall at the head of the stairs up here with insulation and cut and shaped three pieces of plasterboard. I fitted the light switch for the light at the head of the stairs and I was in the process of filling the joins when I lost the light. Working long after my knocking-off time.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the filling and then I can start to fit the ceiling out here.

Isn’t that progress?

-2

Tuesday 4th February 2014 -I’VE BEEN WIRING TODAY

I’m at the stage in the plasterboarding where I need to move the light switch at the top of the stairs. And, when I peeled off the old insulation that I put on the end wall as a temporary measure, I had a look at the wiring that I had done back in October 2009.

It’s much better than the first load of wiring that I did, but even so, it’s a shameful mess with no kind of colour co-ordination at all and I’ve no idea which wires go where.

I was half-expecting something like this and so not only do I have proper red and black wire for the 12-volt circuits and blue and brown for the 230-volt circuits, I also have some orange wire and some violet wire for the shunt wires between the L1 and L2 terminals on 2-way light switches. So after about an hour’s worth of staring at it to try to make sense of the wiring that I did back in 2009, I simply ripped the light circuits out and started again.

The 230-volt light circuit hasn’t been replaced. These 12-volt LED lights do all that I have asked them to do, and plenty more besides. But now in the attic and in the stairwell down to the first floor I have proper wiring, properly colour-coded, properly connected together (these little spring-clip connectors are magnificent – they beat everything else that I have ever used), properly routed and properly sheathed.

And to my great surprise, it all worked straight away with no trouble-shooting required. Such are the benefits of colour-coded wiring.

I was hoping to finish down to the bottom of the stairwell before I knocked off but that wasn’t possible. There was still 40 minutes before knocking off and there was still plenty oflight, but not enough for working on electricity in confined space in the gathering gloom.

I’ll finish that tomorrow morning so if you don’t hear from me tomorrow I’ll be a shrivelled black blob hanging from the ceiling in the stairwell.

-1

Thursday 9th January 2014 – WOW!

And for several good reasons too.

Firstly, I was up early this morning and I was at LIDL in St Eloy just minutes after the place opened. Not quick enough for the recessed LED lights and fittings that I was hoping to fit in the living room, which is a shame, and there were only 6xGU5.3 12-volt LED light clusters left.

Needless to say, I cleared those right out and when I returned home I had a good look at them.

The 12-volt LED bulbs that I have here are 1.2-watt bulbs which is sufficient for what I want to do. But these new ones are 3-watt. I fitted two, one over the desk and one over the kitchen table nd, well, WOW! It’s like Blackpool illuminations here. I’m well-impressed with these!

I stopped off at Cécile’s to chack her mailbox but it was still empty. And so I had to go off to St Gervais to talk to the Postie. Of course, with no letter of authority, no receipt or anything there wasn’t much that I could do, but I did it all the same.

I started to work on the downstairs lighting too. For years the lights in the verandah have been confusing me – the 2-gang light switches have constantly failed to do what they are supposed to do. I was there for an hour trying all kinds of permutaions and still nothing was working, but a closer inspection of one of the switches – the feed switch – showed that the brass housing seemed to be cracked. I fitted a new switch to see if that made any difference and, sure enough, not only did we have light but proper 2-gang controlled light switching too just as we are supposed to.

I then turned my attention to the light in the ground floor. Fitting it and wiring it all up was no problem but I needed a neutral connection. It was then that I found that I’d done all of the wires in twin-and-earth so there wasn’t a simple neutral cable. I need to cut into a twin-and-earth and strip out all of the insulation.

But then I had another look at it all. For a start, I’ve wired the lights up with blue and brown cable – the same that I’m using for mains wire and I almost ended up cutting into a 230 volt cable. I’d made up my mind long ago that 12-volt would be red and black so this wiring is evidently older, before I sorted myself out.

And it’s rubbish too. When I started doing this, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and sorked it out by trial and error. It’s been a trial and there are dozens of errors, so I’ve decided that, seeing as how I’ll be starting work down here sometime soon, the wiring will be the first thing to be changed so there isn’t really any point in trying to do anything with it. Consequently I’ve abandoned that plan.

The next WOW! relates to my pile of rubble. In fact, it’s all gone and the floor is free. That’s not to say that there’s no rubble there of course. The big pile went by the end of the afternoon but there are still some bits and pieces.

So tomorrow I’ll be attacking the stuff that’s in there, reorganising all of it and making a work room there. That will mean that the bedroom will be free of clutter so that I can carry on in there.

And that really WILL be a big WOW!

-7

Thursday 26th December 2013 – ALMOST TOO GOOD …

liz messenger vegan christmas cake les guis virlet puy de dome france
… to cut into, isn’t it?

And believe me, it tastes every bit as good as it looks – I promise you that. And the nicest thing of all about it is that I have no-one with whom to share it – it’s all mine!

So this morning I finally managed my lie-in. Even though I was awake quite early, it was 10:30 before I heaved myself out of my stinking pit, and quite right too. After breakfast I watched a DVD or two and then I had some work to do.

Now I know that I have said that I don’t work on Bank Holidays but there were one or two things that needed attention.

Firstly, I’ll very shortly be rewiring the electricity in the barn. And for that I need a new control panel on the southern wall. In order to make it work properly, I need to make a list of the items that are going to be wired into it. That’s not the sort of thing that one can do à l’improviste.
Secondly, my rock radio programme is getting a little out of hand. I’ve no idea what music I’ve been playing and, quite by accident, I discovered that I’d played the same track twice in three months and that’s not really on. Furthermore, I’m not on line all that often and I need access to band biographies and the like. I’ve already researched tons of stuff and so with all of this, it seems to be to be a good idea to create a database with all of the information on it so that it’s immediately to hand.

This evening I’ve had even more exciting things to do. I lit a fire and I cooked my Christmas dinner. Everything went according to plan and was cooked to perfection, even the sprouts (not overcooked) and the roast potatoes (done to perfection)

And it tasted magnificent too – but not as good as Liz Messenger’s cake.

-7

Thursday 19th December 2013 – FIAT LUX!

12 volt DC electric lighting LED les guis virlet puy de dome franceNo – we aren’t talking about Italian cars and washing powder here, it’s that we now have power and light upstais in the downhill lean-to.

I was fed up of trailing cables all over the place, which is what I’ve been having to do for the last couple of days, and so bearing in mind that I did some wiring in there a while ago and that I also drilled a hole through the wall into the house last year, I hunted down a cheap American extension and fed it through the hole.

I then collected all of the loose wires, joined them together ( and these French cable connectors are the bees’ knees that’s for sure. I’m going to go round and replace every single one of my “chocolate block” connectors), threaded them through a conduit and put a plug on the end. With a switch wired in for working the lights as well, I plugged the circuit in and there we are!

But just looking at this image here, It’s hard to realise that just two years ago, there was almost nothing of that far wall, no flooring and no roof either. That lean-to has come a long way when you consider all of that.

After lunch I measured up for the shelving unit that I’m going to build, and tracked down the demi-chevrons that I need for the uprights as well as a few laths for the horizontal shelf supports. The uprights were cut to the approximate size and the front uprights were cut and marked for the horizontals, but I didn’t have time to finish them.

Firstly Marianne phoned me about tomorrow and then Rosemary rang for a natter. It’s always nice to talk to friends and I welcome every opportunity that there is, even if it does mean that I fall behind with my work. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Tomorrow I’m off to Clermont, on the bus would you believe? It’s Pionsat’s annual shopping day and I mustn’t miss it.

-4

Thursday 27th June 2013 – I WAS BACK …

… in Belgium, Brussels in fact, at a big office not too far from the NATO headquarters and the airport and there were a few of us watching the aeroplanes take off. At the end of the runway was a big tower block somewhat similar to the Chrysler building and the aircraft had to take some kind of bizarre avoiding manoeuvre to miss it. If that wasnt enough, there was an air display taking place at the same time just off the airport and the aircraft were having to negotiate all of that as well.
And at one certain moment a large aeroplane took aff, towing behing it a large baggage trailer, the type that you often see being pulled behind a large European motor coach.

Yes, I’ve been at the cheese again, haven’t I? Another one of these exciting dreams that looks so logical when you are right up inside it but looks totally peculiar when you wake up and see it at a distance.

light circuit shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnyway enough of this rubbish.

Back once more at Pooh Corner you will notice yet another addition to the wiring system in the shower room.

Not only do we have a (working) 230-volt power circuit and a (working) 12-volt power circuit but we now also have a lighting circuit.

In those bulb holders just there I’ll be fitting some 12-volt LED bulbs – regular readers of this rubbish will recall me buying a pile a while back.

And if I had been able to have spent another few hours on it I would have had all of the lights on the first floor working as well, but it wasn’t to be.

Mind you, it’s my own fault because if you haven’t already guessed, I spent the greater part of the day looking for tools and equipment and stuff, and I’m really going to have to do something about all of this.

It’s doing my head in good and proper.

-5

Wednesday 26th June 2013 – HERE’S ANOTHER …

electricity shower room stud wall les guis virlet puy de dome france… photo of the new temporary electrical circuit here at Pooh Corner.

At first glance it looks very much like a close-up of the previous image but in fact a closer perusal will reveal the addition of a pair of American 110-volt sockets.

As you might recall if you are a regular reader of this rubbish and have been following these pages quite closely since right back at the very beginning, my house is powered by solar panels and wind turbines creating energy at 12 volts DC.

As a result I spent an inordinate amount of my time sourcing 12-volt appliances, because I can run these directly off my supply without the need for a transformer.

That calls for a 12-volt DC circuit around the house and that means that the cables will be carrying a heavier amperage (500 watts at 230 volts is just over 2 amps, but 500 watts at 12 volts is just over 40 mps).

And the heavier the amperage, the thicker cable – I use 6mm cable instead of 1.5mm cable.

Because North America runs on 110 volts instead of the European 230 volts, then more than twice as much amperage is required to power an identical appliance, and so the USA uses thicker cable.

Consequently all of their plugs and sockets are much more suitable for my purposes when it comes to a 12-volt system as they are built to handle heavier amperage and thicker cable.

So that’s what I’ve been doing this afternoon, expanding the 12-volt power circuit into the shower room.

All that remains to do now is to fit the wiring for the light circuit, drill two large holes through the outside wall for the air exchange, and then I can wallop the rest of the plasterboard onto the walls.

This morning though, once the sun had climbed well into the sky, I doused the weeds outside the house with this radical weed-killer that Liz gave me. I’m not quite sure just how well its going to work but it has to be better than nothing at all. I really do hope that it lives up to expectations.

I had a little relaxation in the evening and watched a John Wayne film – Fort Apache. This is one of what is known as “The Cavalry Trilogy” and is famous for two particular reasons.

  1. it’s probably the earliest mainstream film to look at the American genocide – if not holocaust – of its ethnic citizens from the point of view of the victims
  2. most of the action takes place over ground which I know extremely well, because you might remember that back in 2002 I drove for a couple of days through the Utah Desert and in particular through Monument Valley and The Valley Of The Gods where most of the action takes place. I recognised almost all of the sites and it brought back some very happy memories.
-4

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.

-4

Monday 3rd September 2012 – I DIDN’T START …

… the pointing today, and I wouldn’t be doing any tomorrow save for Rosemary coming round for a lesson (talk about the blind leading the blind!) because I was rather side-tracked this afternoon.

And so I was this morning.

I made a good start though thanks to my really early night last night (in bed well before midnight) and I had a good crack at the web site.

With not being on long enough last night to charge the computer though, the battery went quickly flat and when I switched on the inverter to charge up the machine, the internet came on and my friend Marianne from Belgium was on line.

So we ended up chatting for an hour or so seeing as we haven’t seen each other on line for months.

But this afternoon, doing the pointing means of course lowering the scaffolding and as I was about to do that, I suddenly remembered that the wind turbine that I put on the side of the house in the early spring is only wired in temporarily.

If I move the scaffolding, that will be that and it won’t be long before the old manky wire that I used to connect up the wind turbine to the charging circuit in the emergency, all open and exposed to the atmosphere, rots away.

Consequently I set to to run some decent 2.5mm wire through some flexible conduit, and to install a junction box under the eaves for the second wind turbine that will one day be installed on the other side of the house.

And while I was up the ladder under the eaves it occurred to me that while I was there I could fit a light there as planned, that works off the dusk/dawn sensor and which will automatically light up the front door and down the side of the house to the door to the lean-to during the hours of darkness.

And as I was running that wire through the conduit, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to put a light under the eaves at the other end of the front of the house to light up the door to the verandah.

And so I ran yet more wire through another conduit.

Net result – the wire is ready to wire up the wind turbine, but I’ll wait until Rosemary is here before I do that. I’m going to have to be something of an acrobat and on a ladder that is hanging on a roof, I’d rather there was someone here to call the ambulance.

One of the lights, that over the front door and the lean-to, is now installed and when I came back from PIonsat tonight (it’s the Anglo-French club’s meeting) it was doing exactly what it was supposed to.

And doing it quite efficiently too.

Not that 1 watt of LED power is going to light up much, but I could certainly move around without a torch and that is what is the aim.

So an early start tomorrow to steam-clean the verandah seeing as how I’ll be having visitors. I might even clean some more in here too – you never know. I bet I still won’t find my mobile phone though.

I haven’t a clue where that might be.

-2

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!

-2

Wednesday 1st AUGUST 2012 – I’VE BROKEN …

hole between house and lean-to les guis virlet puy de dome france… through the wall between the house and the lean-to.

It’s not properly through, yet and to be honest I don’t think that it will ever be, because one of the down-sides drilling from both sides of the wall is that the two holes never mate up and mine is about 5mm out.

This morning I was working on the website but for one reason or another I couldn’t concentrate. Add to that the fact that we had so much solar energy this morning, and so I decided to go out and run the huge drill for half an hour or so

That used up some of the surplus electrical energy while I was doing it (only 82 amps made it into the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the surplus energy I capture) and it broke through.

I need to tidy the hole up now, which will take a while, run a tube through the hole, and pass 6 wires through the tube – 230 volt mains, 12 volt DC power and 12-volt DC light, and then the world will be my lobster in the lean-to.

One of the benefits of having power in the lean-to is that I can tile the floor, make a kind-of work area and then install the big washing machine.

I’d love to see how that works and how much current that it uses, bearing in mind that I’ll be running it off the hot-fill from the dump-load with the machine on a low temperature setting and on the economy wash low-water programme. 

collapsed lean to rebuilding stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceTalking of the lean-to, I spend a few hours on the wall too and it seems that I’m advancing rapidly.

While I was scavenging around for stones in the house, I came across a pile of smashed-up lightweight brick, plaster and the like from when I knocked a wall down and so I’m shovelling that up and using it as infill.

Apart from the fact that it is of course quite light, it’s slowly emptying the house and that can only be a good thing, killing two birds with one stone.

roche d'agoux puy de dome franceFor our Wednesday walk this afternoon, we went to Roche d’Agoux, a small village right out in the wilderness on the edge of the world.

Roche d’Agoux has a couple of claims to fame, not the least of which is this really impressive outcrop of milky quartzite. There’s a whole seam of this stuff that runs diagonally through the whole of the north-west of the Combrailles, making the odd spectacular appearance here and there, and spectacular is certainly the word.

roche d'agoux puy de dome franceThe photo of the Roche is quite well-known – it’s a typical touristy thing of course – but what isn’t so well-known is the quartz. And so I’ll show you a close-up photo of that, and you can see what I mean by “milky quartz”.

Incidentally, it’s from this rocky outcrop where the Roche in the name comes from and it is, incidentally the same root for the word that is used for the area of the Staffordshire Moorlands in the UK the Roaches – that place where the wallabies hang out

roche d'agoux puy de dome franceWhen you look around here today at the sleepy little village of … errr … 91 people (a far cry from the heady days of the 1840s when 450 people were living here) it’s hard to remember that at one time, this was quite probably the most important town of the region.

You look at towns like Marcillat en Combraille, for example. A big, bustling village today yet it didn’t receive its charter for a market until 1258 – and that charter was granted by none other than a certain nobleman called Guillaume de la Roche d’Agoux.

He was certainly the most important nobleman in the area at the time and he did have his castle here in Roche d’Agoux.

castle chateau fort roche d'agoux puy de dome franceMany people will tell you that the Roche d’Agoux is actually the ruins of his castle, or chateau-fort, but that isn’t so.

That was something that was mentioned in a guide book of the region of the 1880s and which has lingered on in current folklore.

In fact, that’s the site of his castle over there on that mound. However, it was dismantled in the early 15th Century and that date is interesting.

castle chateau fort roche d'agoux puy de dome franceIt’s quite early for this to have happened – long before Cardinal Richelieu’s edicts of the 1620s against the nobility that led to the dismantling of most of the castles in this area – and nothing has come to light which might suggest a reason for this.

However, certainly a few years ago there were some quite substantial remains to be seen, but no-one knows the present position today, because the current owner does not welcome visitors.

I spoke … "at great length" – ed … last time that we were here about the magnificent church.

church roche d'agoux puy de dome franceLike every church almost everywhere in Medieval Europe, the rapid expansion of the population in that period led to the rapid expansion of the church, and having a crafty nose around, I came across some really good evidence of this.

Up there we can see the remains of a window that has long-since been filled it. It’s very reasonable to assume that this wall was thus an outside wall of the building and the light was lost when the annexe was built on behind it

So I dropped Marianne off at Pionsat and went back home to carry on working for a while.

No point in wasting the day.

-2

Thursday 29th March 2012 – IT’S "NEW TOY" TIME AGAIN.

akai 12 volt DC DVD player television les guis virlet puy de dome franceI told you the other day that I had ordered a new DVD player – an AKAI 12-volt television, 16″ screen, with built-in DVD player.

Anyway, it turned up this morning.

First thing that I did was to cut off the cigarette lighter plug (I hate these) from the 12-volt connector lead, wired a fuseholder into the lead and then wired it up to an American plug.

Regular readers of thie rubbish will remember, but for the benefit of newer readers, I have a 12-volt electrical circuit running around the house, using American plugs and sockets.

I use them for the simple reason that they take heavier cable and I use 6mm cable for the circuit – the bigger the better to avoid voltage drop.

Anyway, the cable works and so does the DVD player. It even played one of the DVDs that wouldn’t work on the old in-car DVD, and the sound quality is exceptional.

I’m really pleased with it.

Only downside is the remote control. The keys are moulded plastic with the symbols moulded in., the same colour (light grey) as the keys. And so it’s really difficult to tell which key that you need to press, especially in the dim light.

But that’s a minor point.

Apart from that, then besides another couple of hours on the computer, I was outside in the garden for much of the day.

Another bed has been dug over and the remainder of the onion sets were planted and a few lines of leeks were sown.

After that I did a little hoeing and planted the beans that I had soaking, some cabbage, sprouts and cauliflower seeds.

I’ve also planted all of the raspberry plants that Liz kindly gave me in exchange for the lettuce from the other week.

All in all, it’s been another busy day today.

-4

Monday 30th January 2012 – I FORGOT …

… what I was intending to to today.

It’s sad, isn’t it, when that happens.

But probably the … errr … late start this morning might have had something to do with it.

And when I noticed that the sun was actually shining, I had a run round and cleared the solar panels of snow, to give them a head start.

So woodcutting came next, and I spent quite some time dealing with two huge tree trunks that filled a good deal of the woodshed and will keep me going for three months, I reckon.

And when I talked the other day, about all of the wood that I had on hand on the ground floor of the lean-to, which is almost full of the stuff. All of that has been in there for years (and I do mean years) so seeing as I’m short of wood in my little room, I cut up a pile of that and brought it up here. It’s bone dry of course and so it burns quite well.

But that led me on to sorting out some of the wood in there and I made a little more space. And what with finding the box of hooks, I screwed some of them into the beams and started to hang gardening tools and the like from them.

Even the brushcutter has a hook of its own now.

This afternoon I started to move the wood around on the car park by the end of the barn. I’m making more space there now and I reckon I can start to think about how I’m going to build the shed to keep the motorbikes and the cement mixer

I’ve also done a little experiment.

I bought a handful of 12-volt work lights – the type that look like the halogen security lights that you hang from a building. What I did is to try it with a LED cluster light rather than a 50-watt halogen. And while it’s nothing like as bright, of course, it’s effective and I shall be using that for working purposes in future.

Finally I carried on with the wiring in the lean-to. I’ve found the pull light switches so I’ll be installing that tomorrow.

I had to cut a hole in the floor of the upstairs part of the lean-to to pass a cable through. Off to the barn I went to find a holesaw. I happened to glance at the sky and thought to myself “that looks like it might snow”. So I went into the barn, found the 33mm holesaw, and walked out right into a blizzard.

Yes, we’re back in the snow again.

I’ll be up to my knees in the stuff tomorrow morning.

-3

Thursday 26th January 2012 – I DON’T SEEM …

… to have done very much today.

Mind you, that’s not very much of a surprise considering that I managed to sleep through all of the alarms in here this morning and was … errr … somewhat late in raising myself from the dead.

In fact, much of the morning was spent sorting out the wood that is leaning against the end wall of the barn, and then sawing up a dozen or so lengths.

two storey wood shed les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe strange thing is that while the woodpile is slowly increasing, the number of lengths of uncut wood standing up against the wall doesn’t seem to have decreased.

Perhaps I have hit upon the secret of the self-reproducing wood supply – something that reminded me of the story of the Irishman, granted two wishes by his fairy godmother, asked for a bottle of Guinness that refilled itself every time he poured some out of it.
“And your second wish?” enquired the fairy godmother.
“I’ll have another one of those bottles”.

LED light 12 volt domestic circuit electric wiring les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis afternoon I carried on with the wiring in the upstairs of the lean-to.

Most of that time was spent looking for equipment of course, but I now have two lights and two pairs of 12-volt power sockets. They are all wired up, but they aren’t wired into the circuit of course – I need to drill a 40mm hole right through the stone wall into the house to do that, and that’s something that is going to have to wait for a bit.

I’ve a drill that will do it – a 1050-watt SDS drill, but with the current that it draws, you need a brilliantly sunny day. And while a strange golden thing did pop out from behind a cloud for 5 minutes, it’s been about 9 days since we have seen the sun.

It shows just how lucky I was with that little dry spell earlier in the month that enabled me to do the roof of the lean-to.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its several predecessor forms will recall that I bought 2 x 400-watt wind turbines from the manufacturers in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2002. One of them flies proudly above the barn but the other one is in the back of the barn because the blades on these turbines are rather brittle and I’ve ended up having to make up one set out of the two that I had originally. And the manufacturers never ever replied to any of my mails asking about buying s new set of replacement blades.

So a couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and contacted a company in the USA that makes parts for home-build wind turbines, and I’ve bought a set of blades from them, complete with hub, to fit on the other wind turbine.

In what was left of my working day, I’ve assembled the blades onto the hub unit and what I intend to do tomorrow is to resurrect the abandoned wind turbine and stick the blade and hub assembly onto it, and then shove it onto a pole somewhere where it will catch the wind.

These blades have the lowest drag co-efficient of any after-market wind turbine blades and so I’ll be interested to see just how they perform.

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Wednesday 25th January 2012 – HAVING RUN …

two storey woodshed les guis virlet puy de dome france… out of room to store firewood once it’s been cut, I’ve now invented the two-storey woodshed – and I bet there’s certainly something narsty in that!

It’s become something of a necessity to find a space to store the wood these days with all of the wood that I’ve been cutting up just recently and having acquired a cement mixer and needing a place to store it out of the weather.

The logical thing to do is to build a lean-to shed, out of old scrap beams off the house roof and the corrugated iron sheets that I took off the lean-to roof, probably on the car park up against the end wall of the barn.

But for this I need to move all of the wood that is leaning up against that wall, and the easiest way to move it is to cut it up into firewood-sized lengths and stack it somewhere.

Hence the two-storey woodshed.

Of course this isn’t going to be its permanent home, but it will give some kind of shelter to the wood for now.

And so this morning, as well as building the woodshed, I cut up a yet another load of wood. Some of it was quite thick and it showed the benefit of buying a decent saw.

And it also showed the benefit of buying a wood grenade – something similar to a large chisel but with a point, not a blade, and four serrated sides. Stuck into a log of wood and wallopped with a sledgehammer, it splits the log cleanly and effectively into a more-manageable size.

This afternoon I noticed, to my surprise, that the batteries on bank 2 of the barn were fully-charged. And that was a surprise in this weather, I can say. Yes, miserable, wet and depresssing – but that’s enough about me.

So with the batteries fully charged, I decided on a change. I disconnected them and connected up a couple of others, to let them charge up for a few days to see what they might do.

Following that, I sorted out the extension leads and put them upstairs in the lean-to. I may as well use it now I’ve built it.

And that led on to another idea, and I’ve started to install lights up there. Not that there’s much need because I noticed that at 18:00 when I knocked off work, the evening was still light. Yes, the nights are getting shorter again.

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