Tag Archives: solar energy

Thursday 9th June 2011 – DESPITE THE EXCITEMENT …

… of the last few days, it became even more exciting that that today.

We started off the day with a phone call from The One That Got Away. It appeared that her boss was not in a position to see me and so could I come on Friday?

That led to a hectic change of plans and a jaunt down to Machynlleth in Wales to find out why Dulas had not replied to my request for a quotation. I’m certainly boxing the compass, and my stay is far from over.

And basically the answer to why I’ve had no reply is that the sales staff couldn’t be bothered to do so.

The saleswoman who would ordinarily deal with me is away in Germany at a conference, and when that happens, the whole organisation grinds to a halt.

I was told that she has her phone switched off – such a gift of foresight by the warehouse manager being probably the most astonishing part of our discussion. If he can see as far as Germany from where he was sitting then he’s clearly in the wrong job.

And if he is possessed of the facilities of such long sight, it is clearly there to compensate him for his lack of near-sighted vision because he could not see anything within the warehouse that he manages, in order to identify the products that he has in stock.

Never mind painting by numbers – he does warehouse-managing by numbers, so it seems. What about that for stock control?

He also does a pretty good job at prevarication and obfuscation but of course I’ve been here before (and I have, too) and seen his type before. I’ve also dealt with his type before and I don’t think that he will forget my visit to his office in a hurry.

Nevertheless, the upshot of this is that I still don’t have my product.

And what stuck in my mind more than anything about this visit is that despite all of my effort to drive to Machynlleth on a fruitless expedition caused by the “couldn’t care less” attitude of Dulas towards potential customers whose pockets are bulging with the folding stuff ready to spend at the first opportunity – a round trip of 304 kilometres, don’t forget – the manager did not even have the common courtesy or decency to offer me a cup of coffee.

CAT – the Centre for Alternative Technology – up the road, is equally as useless when it comes to recommending another supplier. For an organisation whose job it is to promote the use and development of Renewable Energy, they came up with nothing at all.

It really is astonishing but what with the estate agents the other day not being bothered to sell product to a client and with Dulas today not being bothered to sell a product to a client either, is it really any wonder that the UK is going down the pan?

Here we have a client with a fair bit of cash in his pocket (houses aren’t cheap, and neither are solar panels) and it’s too much trouble for British companies to deal with them.

I spent the afternoon in Barmouth on the seafront and that was pleasant as well – it was a gorgeous day.

And then as my way back home took me past Nina’s, I called in for a long chat. After all, it is years since I saw her.

She and Marion are in the throes of modernisation and we all ended up having quite a discussion about solar energy. It seems that I’m now co-opted onto the modernisation panel and a solar water and solar photovoltaic project will follow in early course.

Always assuming that I can find an eager supplier willing to divest me of some money.

And the photos?

I took quite a few today but when I came to download them, the memory card was bare. What has happened there?

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Thursday 5th May 2011 – Considering that it’s only …

… the 5th of May today and there’s about 6 or 7 weeks to the apex of the year, I am proud to announce that nevertheless I’ve set a new record today for solar energy. In the house, bank one received 173 amp-hours and bank two received 166 amp-hours. That’s over 4 KwH of solar power and whichever way you look at it, that’s impressive for just 780 watts of generating capacity.

And so you can tell the kind of day that we had. Beautiful blue skies and not a cloud anywhere. The kind of day that you would expect the solar water heater to give me enough heat to have a shower, a shave and a coffee as well. But it isn’t to be because I’ve made some kind of error in my calculations. Looking for a place to install it in a hurry while I demolished the beichstuhl, I fastened upon a nice spot out of the way and in full sun, but shaded by the fence so that I can shower there in peace. But what I didn’t take into my calculations is that while in the spring the sun has no problem heating the water, we are having issues with leaf shading from the trees and the water is struggling to heat up to a respectable temperature.

There is a way round this. The heat eschanger is really hot – 50°C is no big deal at all – and so I could run the water in the solar heater through the heat exchanger so that the water would heat up through there, and I even have a suitable pump to do it. But I can’t get electricity down there to power the pump and Terry can’t find the hole saw that he has for cutting through the stone walls so that I can run a cable through. I’ll have to think of a plan B. Such as tipping some hot water out of the electric immersion heater into the solar tank.

Today was a paperwork day. I worked on the website first and then caught up with some paperwork that needed doing. I had a delivery from FEDEX and the contents of that required my attention too. I ended up having to go into Pionsat to the Post and to the Bank, and I’ve had to spend a shed-load of money today – errrr about €7,000 in fact. But it’s all going to be worth it in the long run.

Back from the town, it wasn’t worth starting in the barn and so I planted the tomato and aubergine plants that I bought 10 days ago, and thoroughly watered the garden. And despite having had 7mm of rain two days ago it was as dry as a bone and I used about 175 litres out of the dirty water butt that takes the rainfall off the barn roof. And if there had been more water there I would have used that too. It’s hard to believe just how dry the soil is.

Anyway tomorrow I’ll move the caravan body from the barn and burn it if I can, and then move the Ford Cortina 2000E estate and the Ford Escort van. I’ll be glad to have them in a secure place.

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Sunday 13th June 2010 – Sunday is a day of rest …

eco fair pontaumur puy de dome france… but not for me today – I had things to do.

One of the things was to go to Pontaumur for an Eco-building fair. But that was pretty much a waste of time. There were about 30 stands, of which about 25 were trying to get people to sign up for this “Become a Solar Energy Producer and Sell to the Electricity Board” scam.

If you’ve ever experienced this scam – with the cold canvassing phone calls and the harassment in every shopping centre, then you’ll know what I mean. It’s what double glazing was in the 1970s, cavity wall insulation was in the 1980s, financial planning was in the 1990s. Nothing more than a means of the disreputable sharks looking out for poor helpless minnows to swallow.

Think about it for a minute – on a good day (and I mean a good day) I can create 4KwH of electricity. Selling all of that to the EDF will get me 4x€0.55 – ie just over €2. Say that I can do that on 50 days per year, that’s €100 per year. The cost of my set-up here was about €6000 – so it will take me 60 years to get my money back. But I’m using for the most part cheap analogue equipment. Going over to new digital equipment you can add another €3000 easily to that.

And I installed my system myself. How much would the labour charges be for someone else to do it? And then what will be the return on the investment? And when the resale price falls from 0.55 to 0.45 later this year, then what?

Solar (or wind) energy is never ever going to be cost-effective at today’s rates and today’s prices. No-one is ever going to get rich from selling it back to the central supplier here in Europe. There are going to be thousands of disappointed customers in five years time, just like there were with Endowment mortgages, because greedy people who have seen nothing but the Pound signs  will have been suckered in by a bunch of sharks.

Renewable energy is a lifestyle choice and not much else – that is, until the retail price of energy is adjusted to reflect its true cost. And then, of course, it will be totally different.

However I did meet Christiane there – I met her 2 weeks ago at the Plant Fair too – and I also found someone to talk to about a system of lagoons for dealing with my waste water. So that’s back on the agenda.

Before that however I went to the Authors’ Fair at Pionsat to chat to Marianne. Bill was there too.

Later round at Terry’s we took the broyer off the tractor and with a winch and ramps we went to put it in the back of his van. But either the van has shrunk or the broyer has grown since we last measured it and now it won’t fit.

We’re having no luck at all with this blasted tractor-moving.

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Saturday 19th September 2009 – WELL, THAT’S ME SPENT UP!

540 euros in Brico Depot and not an awful lot to show for it.

Running through the list there’s

  • a pile of insulation – 20mm stuff because they had run out of 40mm and so I’ll just double up the thickness
  • some filler for the cracks in the plasterboard
  • some plasterboard tape
  • some fibreglass wallpaper
  • some fibreglass wallpaper glue
  • some blue wall paint (I forgot the gloss for the woodwork)
  • piles of tools for puttying and wallpapering
  • some floor tiles to build a plinth for the woodstove
  • all of the cement and grouting
  • some light switches
  • a telephone socket (and, yes, I forgot the telephone cable)

That was the first load. The second load was

  • 38 metres of tongue-and grooving – not the rubbishy stuff at 3.37 euros that I use for building or the better stuff at 4.95 euros (they had run out of that too – GRRRRR) but some other stuff at 6.17 euros
  • some wood battens for the tongue-and-grooving
  • some varnish
  • some nails
  • some underfelt for the laminate floor

And no woodstove either.

The cheapest on offer is 190 euros but I don’t much like it. As Krys suggests, Machine Mart is the place to be and Terry sent me a link to their site. And Simon is still in the UK. How can I contact him?

It’s a lot of money but realistically all that I now need for the attic is a couple of sheets of bare plasterboard for around the head of the stairs, and a supply of skirting board. And two panes of glass but I’ll explain that in due course (and no, I haven’t broken a window). I have everything else.

Outside in the car park I was doorstepped by a couple of Dutch people who wanted to talk to me about solar energy. It takes Dutch folk completely by surprise when I talk to them in Dutch (well, Flemish but it’s near enough).

But it’s a sign of the times that the Dutch want to become involved in solar energy. There is no word in Dutch for “cheap”. The word that they use is “goedkoep” which literally means “a good buy” – implying that if you do see something cheap you immediately have to purchase it.

The Dutch were the original settlers of New York, which is why I’m absolutely astonished that the USA is known as “The Land of The Free”. The problem with the Dutch is that they have no word for “gratis”.

Having said that, however, I sympathise with Michael Caine, who famously said in Goldmember “There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures – and the Dutch”.

Only one footy match tomorrow – in the Cup and at Briffon, a village in the foothills of the Mont Dore about 100 years away from here. I’ll need a native guide and a pile of native bearers to get there I expect.

By the way, for those of you who have been following the discussion and debate in the “comments” to some of the entries on my blog (and you can always join in), you will be delighted to know that the verb “to sand” in French is “poncer”.

I will be doing a lot of poncing next week.

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Monday 24th August 2009 – WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS?

strange vegetable fat cucumber les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ve made a start on eating my cucumbers and I put my hand inside the cloche (well, a few lengths of old concrete shuttering made into a deep frame and covered by a caravan window). This is what I discovered.

Maybe it’s a melon, I dunno. There’s all kinds of things in the cloche. However it’s quite exciting to see it.

This morning the weather had clouded over and cooled down. With this threatened storm I fixed the guttering on the lean-to so that it’s all complete on there. I was going to do the house. I have 3 long ladders here but in a masterpiece of logistics I’ve managed to have half a section of each of the ladders attached to something semi-permanent, meaning I have 3 half-ladders ( and not a single whole one) available for climbing up the side of the house.

I dunno how I manage it.

When the “storm” arrived (ha-ha-ha) it was as I expected – no more than a handfull of raindrops. Not even anything resembling a shower ( and having served on the Open University Students’ Association’s Executive Committee in many capacities for as long as I did, I can recognise a shower all right). Not even 1cm of rain to fill my water butts (although even as I type, I can hear raindrops outside).

This afternoon I carried on with my control panel. Terry suggests I put all the wires into trunking and he’s quite right. In fact I’ve already planned for that.

But two things that I did do was firstly to run the permanent wires down to the back of the control panel and attach them to the bolts behind the panel so they won’t ever be disturbed (even though if they stay around me for long enough they’ll be disturbed all right) and secondly I put some plastic junction box thingies over the ends of the bolts that protrude through the control panel so that they will be protected against short circuits if ever I drop a spanner across the ends.

I’ve put fuses (1×100 amp for the inverter that is still in Pompey being repaired, 2×30-amp for the lighting circuits and 4×70-amp for the two power circuits ans two auxillary circuits) in the fuse box, wired up an American socket (I use American plugs and sockets for my 12-volt circuits as they are designed for heavy duty high-amperage cable) and started to wire the power cable in.

I use 6mm cable for the power circuits and 2.5mm cable for the lighting. No risk of voltage drop with me.

Tomorrow I’ll finish up the basic wiring and then connect the 4 batteries and the solar panels up to the system that I’ve been building. Then I can run a power circuit and a lighting circuit as well as a 230-volt circuit up to the attic and I can get started up there.

And not before time too.

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Sunday 23rd August 2009 – IT DOESN’T LOOK …

solar energy control panel les guis virlet puy de dome france… as if I’ve done very much today.

There are two circuit breakers now on the control panel. They are at the bottom right and are for the two solar arrays.

On the bottom of the board to the left of centre is the fuse box out of a late 1990s Vauxhall Astra. They are one of the reasons why I visit scrapyards in the UK so often. They have one heavy cable in and 8 maxi fuses (up to 100 amp) and 8 wires out – just the job for the 12-volt circuits I’ll be having in the house.

There’s also some of the wiring installed, and you can also see the insulation and 6 of the batteries already in what will be the battery box.

Mind you, don’t forget that it’s Sunday today so I don’t set the alarm – sleep till I wake up and so on. So at 06:55, a time that doesn’t normally exist on a Sunday morning except when I haven’t been to bed yet, I was wide away and at 07:30 I was up and about.

Another glorious sunny day was promised so I did a load of washing in the little tabletop washer that I bought for 10 Euros last year at the Virlet brocante. And I’ve had my moneysworth out of that. And while the washing was on the go I steamcleaned the verandah and I can actually get to the chemical toilet without falling over something and breaking my neck … "shame" – ed.

Following that it was lunch and then the obligatory visit to Claude’s to fix the trailerboard that Pascal can’t get working after he’s fixed it once.

This afternoon was the battery box followed by a big blazing fire in the grate in the living room to
1) aerate and dry out the house
2) get rid of a week’s accumulation of rubbish
3) cook my baked potatoes for tea.
And there’s definitely something about my own spuds. Shop-bought ones will bake easily in a hot open fire yet those I grow myself won’t cook. It shows you how rotten shop-bought spuds are, and how fresh mine are.

And we’re told that we’ll be having a storm tomorrow afternoon. I can try out my sump idea to see if it helps keep the rainwater clean. But if it’s anything like last week’s storm we’ll have 10 drops of rain and that will be that.

And today’s solar energy in the house? A mere 129.0 amp-hours.

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Saturday 22nd August 2009 – THIS IS ABSOLUTELY ASTONISHING!

solar energy record amp-hours les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe solar panels on the roof of the Luton Transit that feed the power to the barn (and originally to here with some very dodgy wiring) have been there since August 2007 and the most solar energy that they have ever received is 90.8 amp-hours, back on 22 April 2009.

Bearing in mind that fact that was some 2 months before the optimal date for capturing solar energy, you would expect that figure to be broken some time in midsummer but as yet it’s not quite managed it.

By contrast, the 3 panels on the roof of the house that are currently wired in capture a theoretical 21 watts more and although they are not angled optimally into the sun, they are situated in a much better location for catching the sun, so I had high hopes for these panels. But not 120.6 amp-hours worth.

That’s a pretty astonishing figure from just 390 watts, and with another 390 watts to come from the second bank of panels, you can understand why I’m optimistic about this set-up if I can generate these kinds of figures. This would represent just under 3KwH of electricity (1 KwH is about 88 amp-hours or so) being generated today on both banks of panels.

This morning I was awake long before the alarm went off and spent the morning tidying up, sowing some lettuce seed into a container in the verandah and rescuing some oregano and mint (with not having the time to do any gardening just now the whole place is going to pot!).

Lunchtime saw me in St Eloy shopping (or trying to shop if there was anything to buy – the place is rapidly going downhill) and when the DiY shop opened I went to get my polystyrene sheets for the battery box.
“We don’t carry that” said the owner. “You need to go to the builders’ merchants”
“Ok” I replied, heading for the door
“But it’s a waste of time going now. They are closed!”
This blasted country gets me down at times. The concept of customer service is getting to be as bad as the UK’s. Builders’ merchants closed on Saturdays when everyone has the weekend to do DiY, hotels that close for the summer holidays when they should be open for summer holidaymakers, restaurants “closed for lunch” (I’ve seen that!). No perishing idea.

If someone were to open a decent DiY in St Eloy they would clean up. And if Screwfix or Toolstation got their acts together and started to operate here they too would hit the jackpot.

So I piddled off the 40km to Commentry and the Bricomarche. Not only were they open (and that’s a surprise) and not only did they have my polystyrene (and what a price too! I needed oxygen after that!), they also had the missing bits for the guttering as well as the bits that I need to make a sump in my rainwater collection plan.

So …gulp … 68 Euros the lighter, I returned home, fitted the sump into the rainwater collection circuit (I’ll post a pic of it one of these days) and fitted the polystyrene into the battery box.

I put the other 6 batteries in there and I’ll remove away from the front door the 4 I’m currently using, and put them in the box. But that’s for tomorrow.

And while I was sitting drinking a coffee, an old beat-up little white Citroen pulled up at the back of the house. A couple had a look at the back of the house, had a good chat and then drove away. I wonder what that’s all about.

I suppose I’ll soon find out. But it’s been all go today, hasn’t it?

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Thursday 16th July 2009 – I TELL YOU WHAT ….

…. I’m ever so impressed with my electrical set-up.

We had four bags of concrete mix today and a 375-watt cement mixer. And it mixed all of the concrete using the power off the batteries in the barn. Admittedly there was bright sunlight pushing up the amps but nevertheless it was impressive. Just as impressive was that all of the concrete was mixed using rainwater out of the water butts.

But it was hard work today. The heat was unbearable. The morning was bad enough as Terry was painting and I was shuttering in between the rafters and infilling with stones. In the afternoon it was even worse, and I was climbing up the ladders to the top of the scaffolding carrying bricks, stones, buckets of concrete and the like. It’s just as well that we ran out of concrete (we’re going shopping tomorrow for more) because we couldn’t carry on like that in that heat.

I also dropped off Caliburn’s temporary registration at the bank so they can change the insurance over, and the postie came, bringing Caliburn’s permanent log book. She said that there would be a very violent storm at 19:00 tonight so I told her that when she’s finished her round she can get up on the roof with us and help us do the slating.

She never turned up though, and she was wrong about the storm. At about 21:00 the clouds closed in and we had some rain and there was thunder rumbling away in the distance. Right now, it’s P155ing down outside but nothing like what she promised us. We’ll have to see what tomorrow brings.

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