Tag Archives: high winds

Thursday 25th August 2011 – Well, what a day!

And I had so much to do as well and I’ve ended up not doing very much.

Working unti 04:30 was one thing but another thing was being dragged out of the bed almost at the crack of dawn (well, 9:50, anyway) by the phone. Of all people, it wss the bank. Could I go down there?

That was eerie but what followed was certainly different. It appears that there has been some confusion at the bank, a sum of money hadn’t been paid, and a girl due to fly out to Canada on Saturday didn’t have any of the paperwork necessary. And so until about 12:45 I was engaged in negotiations down in Pionsat and then out at St Maurice pres Pionsat, which despite its name is nowhere near Pionsat.

Back at the ranch, I then had to make a few telephone calls to Canada, and thanks to Katherine for giving me some help as to who to call. All in all, I was involved in this for hours.

Having said that, though, I was flattered that the bank had called me in to help. It’s definitely a sign of progress.

And what else? I now have some web pages in French for my business web site, thanks to Marianne who made a few corrections to my text, I’ve almost finished this battery box idea thing, I’ve a proof of no-claims bonus for my Canadian car insurance, I’ve my train tickets, I’ve booked a motel in Montreal for the first night, I’ve rented some storage space in Montreal – ooooh, lots of things.

What with the late finish, the early start and all of the excitement I’m whacked so I’m off to bed. To listen to the wind in the trees as a strong wind has started up. It’s a beautiful breeze blowing through here.

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Monday 21st March 2011 – And if you thought …

that yesterday’s 260-odd amp-hours was impressive, then what about today’s 300 amp-hours? We haven’t had many days like that in June and July.

Not only that, the water temperature in the home-made immersion heater topped 60°C and that was impressive too. In fact, it was more-than-impressive – it was the highest figure ever recorded. And it’s only March as well.

You can guess the kind of day that we’ve been having today. Cold and windy but totally beautiful.

And what have I been up to today? Last night just as I was going to bed Terry mailed me. “I need to give you your stuff back as I need the van empty”
“Okay” I replied. “I’ll see what I can do. Come round as late as possible”
And so today I started to tidy up in the barn again and make a huge pile of space to put stuff. But then I had a phone call. “I need to come to see The Beguiled. Can I drop your stuff off in an hour’s time?”

So the tidying went out of the window and stuff was thrown everywhere to make a big space. Terry arrived and so did my furniture, and that is nice. There’s still lots of space too, which I’ll need for when I go back and fetch the rest of the stuff. But the barn where I want to put the Ford Cortina 2000E – that can be cleared in a day or so. I just need to move the caravan shell.

I was whacked after that (strange things go on around here) and crashed out – I almost missed the Anglo-French Group meeting but I awoke just in time.

But I’m thinking about this barn. It’s not going to be difficult to put a suspended floor in over the garage bit, you know I’m going to be looking into this

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Thursday 10th March 2011 – I have to go to rescue my Minerva.

If you are fairly new to these pages I bet you don’t know that I own a Minerva. It’s something I bought years ago while I was on the lookout for an old Land Rover for hauling logs around the farm. Ever since then it’s been in storage near Antwerp but I received an e-mail today to say that the storage facilities are closing down and I need to move it.

Luckily we are here with Terry’s big trailer, and I reckon that the Minerva will fit on it. It’s rather a shame in a way because I was hoping to be able to move the Cortina 2000E estate and get that down to the farm, but it will still be nice to recover the Minerva after all these years. Ahhh well.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ve painted the door frame to the apartment and I’ve also prepared the wall at the back of the terrace. But when I went out to paint that, the wind blew me back inside again. It was rough out there, and so that will have to wait until another day.

This afternoon I cleaned all of the paintwork in the hall and then painted the ceiling in there.

Terry carried on with the odd jobs such as repapering part of the kitchen and fixing a few electrical items while Liz carried on with her marathon floor-waxing, with the help of Terry once the little jobs were finished. Once the floor was something like, we moved the living room back into where it ought to be and I’ve moved my bed and computer into this room while Terry and Liz started to paint the walls in the hallway.

Tomorrow I have to empty out my room of what is left there and then give it a good clean, put the second coat of paint on the door frame and paint the terrace wall if the wind will let me. Terry and Liz will finish the walls in the hallway and then paint my bedroom. The second coat for the hall and bedroom is planned for Saturday morning, and then all that will remain will be touching up in the blue bedroom where Terry and Liz are sleeping.

And that, dear reader, will be that. We’ll empty the place on Monday morning, have an estate agent round on Monday afternoon and then adjourn to a hotel for a couple of days so that the place will be completely empty so that we can do the touching up.

Such is the plan. And so you just watch something happen to upset it all.

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Saturday 5th February 2011 – This gale is still howling away

It’s been going almost non-stop for over 48 hours and shows little sign of abating.And here we are trying to cut tiles and paint window frames and we’ve ended up with dust and paint everywhere.

Mind you, I have the making of a magnificent bathroom thanks to Liz’s artistic eyes and Terry’s workmanship. It’s certainly something. It might even be finished by Monday night and that will be real progress.

In the bedroom all of the woodwork is painted, we have wallpapered and there’s a couple of coats of paint on the ceiling, although there will be others as the ceiling is quite thirsty.

This afternoon I took Liz and Terry to the battlefield at Waterloo but there was far too much wind to make it possible to climb to the top of the Butte du Lion. And at the huge Carrefour at Mont-St Jean we did a week’s worth of shopping and spent a fortune. But it was worth is for I even found a supply of vegan cheese. And that doesn’t happen every day.

Then off to the big Brico where we spent another small fortune, but now we have all the wallpaper and paint that we need for here. I needed an operation for the removal of my wallet, and was given oxygen afterwards.

A major disappointment was that Chi-Chi’s, the really good Tex-Mex restaurant in Overijse, had closed down. Terry suggested a pizza, Liz fancied a fritkot, but once I had Tex-Mex on my mind that was that and we fought our way into Brussels city centre for the other Chi-Chi’s. Terry was suitably impressed with the roads in the city, of course. He reckons that they wouldn’t be out of place in Ougadougou or Dar-es-Salaam.

And what a good night it was in Chi-Chi’s – excellent service (none of the staff is Belgian), really good food, and a couple of South Americans entertaining the diners. It’s been a long time since I had such an enjoyable evening. Liz enjoyed her Mexican coffee and Terry loved his deep-fried ice-cream.

And so that was our day. And a good day it was too, with a good time being had by all. Tomorrow is a day of rest of course, and then back to the grindstone on Monday.

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Friday 4th February 2011 – We are making some good progress right now

Terry has spent all day tiling in the bathroom and he’s making some splendid progress. It’s looking a world different that it did this time last week and I’m really impressed.

Liz and I spent all day in the third bedroom. We started off by putting the second coat of paint on the woodwork, and then carried on with the wallpapering. Liz kept on encouraging me when I was starting to flag, and we managed in the end to do all of it, even the fiddly bits that take all the time. It’s much better when you have someone to help to motivate you.

So not much to write about, but a great deal of work done. We are all thoroughly exhausted and I’m off to bed in a minute. But I don’t imagine I’ll get much sleep. There’s been a howling gale blowing here all day and some of the gusts are shaking the windows, making quite a noise. It’s been ages since I’ve seen a wind quite like this.

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Thursday 6th January 2011 – I had a gorgeous tea tonight.

I finally managed to get my long-promised Bangers, mash and baked beans this evening. and it was gorgeous. The leftover vegan sausages from Christmas (and weren’t they nice?), a tin of baked beans, and I found a tin of spuds in the emergency supplies.

Yes, a tin of spuds, for all of mine have ended up in the compost. I know that you are supposed to keep them in a frost-free room but nothing round here is frost-free when the temperature reaches -13.5°C outside, and the whole crop had gone.

In the bedroom, the wiring is almost finished and I’ll soon be able to do the boarding. And I’ve been having tremendous fun with it all. There’s conduit and trunking and wires all over the place and it’s like 3 plates of spaghetti. Of course I don’t have a clue what I’m doing but that’s not anything that has ever bothered me in the past. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating and that’s when we will see if the place catches fire or not.

All last night and today we had a howling gale. It’s blown in one of the panes of glass in the bedroom window to match the other one that a rock fell through. I can’t board this one up as there won’t be any light getting into the room and there’s no point replacing the glass so I’m going to be freezing to death in there while I’m working.

But what I did do today was to dismantle the dump load from the electrical set-up in the barn and use the charge controller to measure the current being produced by the big wind turbine. And there was that much wind that at times there was quite a charge being registered. I’m going to have to get a decent charge controller with data facilities for the wind turbine that I’ll be mounting on the house. Stuck on a short pole attached to the fence that was going around like the clappers too in this wind.

This evening I was outside working until 18:10 before it went black outside. I’m using this final half-hour of my working day to have some sort of desultory tidying-up of the outside of the house and barn. Heaven knows it needs it, with the place having been covered in scaffolding for the last two summers. But for some reason that I don’t quite understand, I’ve been feeling quite enthusiastic today, the best I’ve been for quite a while. I think that I’m making some kind of rapid progress, which is cheering me up.

I’m not used to this.

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Thursday 16th December 2010 – I WONDER IF YOU CAN GUESS …

… whereabouts in the verandah the cooker is situated?

Yes, the weather has warmed up slightly today – it even managed to struggle up above freezing inside the verandah and so the heat that the cooker gave off while heating up my lunchtime coffee managed to thaw away some of the snow on the roof.

But of course, as you know, it isn’t snow at all but just several inches of severe frost.

And this evening we’ve had a dramatic change in the direction – and the speed – of the wind. We are now having a howling westerly gale blowing in that’s keeping the temperature up a little (not like the 11°C that we had the other day) but blowing all the smoke back down my chimney and suffocating the fire (and me as it blows all of the smoke back into my room).

Nevertheless I wonder if this might bring me some sunshine. It’s been ages since I’ve had any.

Things are progressing in the bedroom as well. all of the long wall has been insulated and I could have done even more had I not … errrr … slept through the alarm and had I woken up before … errrr … 10:26.

It’s not quite how it ought to be though because with my wall being 2.65 metres high and the plasterboard being 2.50 metres high, I need to let in another horizontal batten in the appropriate place to support the join between the boards. But that’s tomorrow’s task as I ran out of time today.

I’m not going to have too much time tomorrow either. I had a telephone call from some society asking me if I would like to become an energy producer and sell my excess output to the Electricity Board. By pure coincidence they “just happen” to have a salesman in Virlet tomorrow and he will be delighted to talk to me about how I can become rich, at no obligation, and he will even give me a free estimate for the supply and fitting of some solar panels.

Of course this is a far too good an opportunity to miss and I’m eager to see exactly what he proposes with regard to selling me a solar panel system. He’ll be here at 14:00 so he says, and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

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Wednesday 14th July 2010 – Today will go down in history!

I’ve finally fitted the most important piece in the jigsaw of my electrical system here (the wind turbine notwithstanding) and that it the electric water-heating mechanism.

How my system works at the moment is that there are two banks each of three solar panels and each bank is connected to the batteries via a charge controller. The two controllers are set up differently so that one cuts of when the batteries reach 14.1 volts and the other one cuts out when the batteries reach 14.15 volts. They both cut back in when the battery level drops to 13.4 volts or so. This avoids any overcharging of the batteries.

You can tell when the batteries are fully charged by the difference in solar charge received by each of the banks. If there’s a substantial difference then that will be because the one set at a lower charge will have cut out, just leaving the second one running. And if I have the fridge working then sometimes the difference can be substantial. On the 8th July for example one bank recorded 37.7 amp-hours whereas the other recorded 157.3 amp-hours, almost 2 kilowatt-hours of charge.

You can see therefore from this that there can be times when an enormous amount of solar energy is totally wasted. So what you can do is to rig up a system whereby once the batteries are fully-charged then instead of the system shutting down, all of the unwanted power is diverted into some kind of “dump load”.

I’ve had plans for this for ages and a while ago I bought some 12-volt water heater elements. And today, even though it’s been a Bank Holiday and I don’t normally work, I’ve rigged up an old galvanised 50-litre ash can as a kind of ad-hoc immersion heater.

It’s going to have to be developed further of course. Electric elements floating around on wooden pontoons in open-topped galvanised ash cans full of water right close to the main access in the house is a recipe for some kind of disaster sooner or later and one of the reasons why I’ve been holding off from fitting this dump load is because I’ve been looking for some kind of more substantial and correct recipient but in the absence of anything more positive I can’t be waiting for ever. The piazzo buzzer on there by the way is to let me know when the circuit opens up

The proof of the pudding is of course in the eating and now that this system is wired in I can put a 12-volt clock in line to tell me how long the circuit is open.

And so while the clock on the right (from a Renault Clio by the way) keeps the time, the one on the left (from a Vauxhall Cavalier) tells me how long I’ve been heating the water.

1h20 (it was about 1h35 by the time it finished) may not seem a lot to anybody and the water didn’t get all that hot but on day one with 50 litres of water in what is effectively a large open bucket – that has to be progress. Just imagine that in a 50-litre sealed tank with loads of insulation around it.

And I had a visitor this afternoon – a guy who I met the other day and wanted to discuss solar panels and wind turbines. He was here for about three hours and we had quite a lengthy chat.

And that’s not the only visitor I had today either. The windows up here are wide open and there’s this lovely gale blowing right through here, and it’s just blown this huge, enormous green thing that looks like a cricket right into the attic. We had quite a chase around the place and eventually I caught him in a plastic box and threw him back outside.

Thursday 25th March 2010 – God it was hard this morning …

… but that’s enough about Percy Penguin, who doesn’t feature in these pages half as much as she ought to.

It was agony in bed last night with the muscles in my legs tightening up continually. It kept me awake for much of the night, as did the French Air Force, who decided on carrying out night-time manoeuvres … “personoeuvres please” – ed … until gone 02:30. Getting up for a gipsy’s at 06:00 was probably the most painful thing I have ever tried.

Going downstairs for breakfast was interesting too, and I was clearly in no fit state to go out working so I came back up here and did a load of outstanding work on the computer – much of which was the preparation for our radio broadcast next week. I managed a fair bit too – but that’s enough about … “you’ve already done that” – ed … and that’s got me thinking.

When I was in Brussels I used to do my computer work from 11:00 until 14:00 and then work on the apartment in the afternoon and evening. Pretty soon the clocks will go forward and we will have more daytime daylight so bearing this in mind I could easily work from 10:00 until 12:00 up here on the computer and then work until maybe 19:00 or 19:30 outside. That would be much more useful.

By about 12:00 I felt a little better so I went outside and did another raised bed. That’s 5 in position. But the weather has changed. It was blowing a gale when I went outside, so much so that it’s lifted the cucumber and tomato seeds off the shelf in the greenhouse and spilled them all over the floor so I needed to replant them which was a pain.

Now the weather has really turned and it’s pouring with rain outside. I have mixed feelings about that. I love the hot weather but I’m getting low on water and also the plants that I have sown need the water. This is the sign if a true rural peasant, definitely a distinction from the vacancier.

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Friday 19th March 2010 – It’s raining now and blowing a gale.

In fact the rain is the first we’ve had since a week last Thursday -over a week ago. And hasn’t a lot happened in that time? A week ago we were still in the grip of the icy weather with the temperature as low as minus 9. Last night it was as low as … er …. PLUS 9.2

And look at everything I’ve done too – finished off weeding the hedge and the area around the vegetable garden, burnt all of the rubbish in a mega-bonfire, moved the greenhouse, moved the cloche, dug two raised beds, planted tons of seeds. Today I finished all of the sowing for February and March and I’ve started to repot the Liz Ayers Memorial Orchard, as the trees are having to stay in their pots for another year.

One thing I noticed in a gardening book is that they reckon that the soil I’m planting things in should be friable. One of my plots has onion and garlic in it. Now how friable is that?

But I’m going to have to do something about the manure water distiller. Since its installation back in February it’s given me about half a litre, most of which was yesterday.Today it gave me three litres and there is more beckoning. I’m going to have to move it no matter what otherwise they will be changing my address from “Les Guis” to “The House at Pooh Corner” and like Christopher Robin, I’ll go down with Alice or some other infectious disease. Which of course reminds me – the new AA Milne Travel Company is now organising trips to London where you can visit Buckingham Palace to see The Changing of the Guard, followed by a trip to the Bank of England to see “The Guarding of the Change”.

And I’ve not long been back from Clermont Ferrand, I’m thoroughly exhausted after this hard week, and so I’m going to have an early night.

Goodnight All!

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Tuesday 9th March 2010 – We were back in the studio today.

And not only that, we were actually told what we had to do! Now isn’t THAT a welcome departure from the usual? and we also know when we will be being broadcast.

Basically we have to do a 5-minute spot, and didn’t that cause some consternation? Have you any idea how quickly 5 minutes goes when you are busy? After recording the first programme we were there hacking away at the material we had in a (vain) effort to cut it all right down. But we managed just the same – it was a case of having to, but it’s depressing when all of your hard work falls onto the cutting-room floor.

And we are going onto the airwaves next Tuesday at 18:50, repeated on Wednesday morning at 08:50.

I spent the morning arranging things and as it was a nice day again I had the heater on up here. That’s getting to be a habit just recently, isn’t it?

And after we came back from the studio I went round to see Marianne – I haven’t seen her for a while. I enlisted her help for our radio show -she’s the local journalist so she gets to know everything that’s been going on and she owes me a favour- I let her use one of my photographs for an article that she wrote. She’s also keen to involve herself in this English-language newspaper that died a death and so I offered her my support. I hope she will wear it in comfort.

And the weather has deteriorated some more. Howling gales, devastating winds, and temperature in the heat exchanger of minus 11. It’s flaming March, for God’s sake.

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Sunday 28th February 2010 – Phew!

I didn’t wake up until past 11:00 this morning But that’s no surprise as I didn’t get to sleep until God knows what time. What kept me awake for most of the night was the hurricane we had. It started to blow round about 19:30 but by the time 01:00 came round it was howling away like a good’un. The crescendo was at probably 04:00 when there was everything howling around. You could hear the wood that I had neatly stacked up come crashing down and it was round about this time that the bathroom window was blown in.

What was surprising though was how warm it was. it was 12 degrees outside during all of this – a good 10 degrees warmer than usual. In fact when I woke up it was almost 14 degrees in here and it rose steadily during the day.

So first job after breakfast was to fix everything. But in reality there wasn’t all that much. The barn has lost a pile of slates but it will be going to lose all of them in early course – the same with the bathroom window which is going to be replaced. So the permanent damage is about nil. Mind you it wasn’t half impressive.

And most of today has been spent cleaning and tidying. It’s about time I did something like this. Nietzsche said something like “out of chaos comes order” but he clearly hasn’t ever been around anywhere that I have been.

I’ve had no heating today either – the first day of the year. And it’s still 13.4 degrees. Sumer is definitely acumen in. Lude sing cucu, what?

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EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality