Tag Archives: wind turbine

Tuesday 13th March 2012 – A FEW MORE …

… records tumbled today.

We had the glorious weather again, so much so that the water that is heated by the surplus energy from the solar panels, the “dump load”, was heated to such an extent that it went off the end of the temperature gauge – ie over 70°C.

That’s the first time this year.

The water in the solar-heated tank (a black plastic box with a glass lid) reached 26.5°C and that’s the highest so far (but still a far cry from the 45°C of midsummer) and if it hadn’t have been so windy, I would have put some of the water out of the dump load into the solar-heated tank to bring the temperature up to about 38°C and I would have had the first solar shower of the year.

But it was far too windy – I would have died of exposure I reckon, and the fact that showering outside in the all-together is the way that it’s done around here, it would have been indecent exposure too.

Talking of the wind, it’s died down now, after the last few days, but once again I had more wind energy created today than the cumulative amount of wind since I installed the power meters 2 weeks or so ago.

Mind you, I don’t think that we will have that again tomorrow.

But here’s an interesting and little-known fact, one that I can now prove. And that is that you can often have more power from a low-powered wind turbine than you can from a high-powered one.

Confused?

Well, let me explain.

Most electric motors, and wind turbines are no exception, have magnets in them and these operate the coils of the motor. Of course, the bigger and more powerful the motor, the bigger and more resistant are the magnets. And so you need more force to overcome the resistance in the magnets.

When you have a low-powered wind it will overcome the resistance in the magnets in a low-powered motor, and make the motor turn. However, there will not be enough force in this low-powered wind to overcome the resistance in a big magnet in a high-powered motor so that this motor won’t turn.

And there I was today, watching the little Rutland 90-watt wind turbine quite happily ticking over and giving me 10 – or 15 watts for much of the day while the big 400-watt wind turbine was doing nothing at all.

And then, all of a sudden there would be a stronger gust of wind and the big Air 403 wind turbine would start to turn, and once it had built up steam it would be there with 50 watts, or 80 watts, or even 113 watts on one occasion, while the smaller wind turbine was giving out 30 or 40 watts.

But be that as it may, the smaller wind turbine chucked out in total three times as much energy as the larger one over the 24-hour period under review. And it’s done that consistently over the last few years.

There are lessons to be learnt here of course – namely a collection of low-powered turbines will do more good than one big one over a continuous period, especially in a place like this.

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Wednesday 29th February 2012 – I’VE GONE …

… onto summer hours!

Yes, already! It’s now light enough to be still working outside at 19:00 and so that’s what I’m doing.

And the computing activities that I need to do, well I’m doing those from 10:00 until 12:00.

So with an early night after my dithering about, I had an early morning as well, just for a change. And on went the coffee pot again because if anything it was even nicer today than yesterday.

So much so, in fact, that I ran the electric heater up here. Not because I needed to, but because it was a shame to waste the energy.

One of the things that I needed to do was to print off about 50 pages of stuff that I need to complete. And I think that I’m having printer issues. The black ink didn’t work at all and in the end I put a new cartridge in.

That worked fine for a few pages and then we were back to the missing lines and dirty heads again. I cleaned the heads, and that worked fine for a while and then we were back in the missing lines and dirty heads.

I don’t know why that is. Printers never seem to last very long with me.

This afternoon I had a pile of fun.

I’ve had a few parcels delivered these last couple of days, and one of them contained the half-a-dozen 12 volt DC hour meters similar to the 230 volt ones that I bought to run with the mains inverters.

control panel solar energy wind turbine timer overcharge meter les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe purpose of these 12-volt hour meters is to wire them into the solar panel circuits to see for how long a solar charge is received by the panels (to help in resiting them to an optimum position), to wire into the wind turbine circuits ditto, and also to wire into the overcharge circuits to see for how long surplus energy is created.

And so I spent a happy afternoon wiring in the overcharge timers and the solar timers. I’m not able to do the wind turbine timers as I need diodes to stop the backflow of energy from the batteries and they haven’t come yet.

The wind turbines are connected directly to the batteries with no charge controller so if you wire a timer in there without stopping the current flowing back from the batteries, the timers will be running 24 hours per day, feeding off the batteries.

I also did some tidying up of the panel that I made a couple of months ago – the one with the 600-watt inverter, the electric meter and the electrical sockets, that I’m using in the barn. That looks neater and tidier, and works better than before.

But I forgot to say that when I was in Brussels at Christmas, Marianne was chucking out an old hair drier – something like 400 watts or so. Anyway, I chucked it into Caliburn and brought it back here.

The reason?

Every now and again I use heat shrink insulation on bare wires and while you are supposed to shrink it using a hot-air paint stripper, I don’t have enough power to run a hot-air paint stripper.

I do have enough though to run a 400-watt hair drier and while it’s slower and not quite as effective, it does in fact work well enough.

I’m quite impressed with that.

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Friday 20th January 2012 – I CAN’T SEE …

… a thing right now in my room.

There’s a gusting wind blowing up outside and it’s in just the right direction to blow right down my chimney so every couple of minutes a load of smoke is blown back down the fire and out of the air vent into the room.

I’m being done up like a kipper just now.

But I was right about the weather – it’s rained for most of the day. And it is indeed nice to see the rail cascading off the new roof on the lean-to onto the ground, well away from the wall, and everything inside the lean-to being bone-dry for a change.

I can’t believe my luck with the weather for that 10-day spell when I decided to go for broke and do the lean-to roof. It’s not like me at all.

So I did some sawing of the wood this morning, but a downside of this now is that I’m cutting it faster than I’m burning it and I’m now running out of room to store it. I suppose that I shall have to make a larger woodpile, or a taller one or something.

I could, I suppose, even dig the trench that I need to dig at the side of the house by the “other” lean-to, drop the drainage pipe in there that needs to go in there and connect it into the drainage system, fill the trench with gravel, cover it over with a weed blanket and then build the real woodshed where it is supposed to go, but that’s not the work of half an hour.

After the woodcutting (which I managed to do without any interruption for a change) I did some more tidying up, starting in the lean-to.

First job was to rescue the remaining Hawker deep-discharge batteries and charge them up.

And here I’ve hit a problem, in that the battery box I made for the previous batteries is too small – the Hawkers are taller. But anyway once they were out of the way I tidied up in the lean-to, collected all of the stray solar panels and stacked them in a corner, and then hung up the smaller gardening tools so that I’m not tripping over them.

Having moved a couple of solar panels out of the barn I could then get in there and make some space to put the old Rutland wind turbine tidily out of the way.

This led to the discovery of a circular saw, not the 600-watt one that I can’t find anywhere at all, but the old 1050-watt one that was all rusted solid having been left in a container that filled with water through a leak in the barn roof when I was ill and which had subsequently been partly-dismantled for spares.

Of course, now that I have a 1200-watt inverter all things are possible, so I gave the saw a good spray with WD40 and reassembled it with some other bits and pieces. And much to my surprise it fired up!

Even more surprising was that the inverter didn’t even bat an eyelid.

The saw needs some “attention to detail” before I can use it to cut wood, but this is definitely progress.

This afternoon, with the weather deteriorating, I restarted work in the bedroom – the first time for God knows how long. I’ve fitted the false beam at the side wall – the beam that hides all of the electrical cable – and I’ve also packed out one of the plasterboard panels that didn’t quite mate with the others.

It was then that I lost the light and so I spent the last hour tidying up in the barn again.

And despite all of this time that I’ve spent tidying up, a I really can’t see any difference at all.

This evening by way of an experiment, I brought a kettle of water up here and put it on top of the woodstove. And after about 2.5 hours it was gloriously warm and I had a lovely hot wash and shave in front of the fire.

Definitely the highlight of the week, that, and I can’t think why I hadn’t done that before.

Next step is the coffee pot on the stove, and put the produce in a thermos ready for the following morning.

I ought to be much-better organised than I am.

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Monday 9th January 2012 – THERE’S NO POINT …

… in having an early night and going to bed early (well, 00:15 is early for me anyway) if you wake up again at 4:45 and can’t go back to sleep.

Mind you as day started to dawn and I knew that it was soon time to get up, I managed to fall asleep again, and it was 10:15 when I finally woke up. So much for my good resolutions for New Year.

First thing that I did after breakfast was to sort out a design fault on the electric board that I had made the other day. The wires to the inverter were bent at an unnatural angle and the live was touching the earth tag. I had to tape over the ends to insulate them and then drill a hole in the board to run the wires round to the back so that they are lying straight and parallel.

wall anchor hook and eye wind turbine guy wire les guis virlet puy de dome franceOnce I’d organised that I stripped off some of the temporary roof on the lean-to, put some scaffolding up there and put a ladder up from there to the top of the wind turbine mast.

There I turned round the bracket that we had turned when we raised the mast last month and straightened out all of the guys.

I drilled into the wall, fitted a wall anchor with an eye, attached a turnbuckle and then fastened a guy to it all and wound it up to take the tension so that the last is held firm in that direction. That’s one out of the four guy wires sorted out.

After lunch I made a major advance – I started to put the plywood on the roof of the lean-to. It was flaming difficult too – it’s not easy pulling those sheets up on my own, I’ll tell you that, but I have three now fastened into position.

I’m being careful with the supporting chevrons, having learned my lesson from elsewhere where I’ve been working. I’m putting the sheets into position and then fitting the chevrons underneath them so that the sheets are supported in the middle and that the edges of each adjacent sheet meet up over a chevron.

I recall all kinds of bouncing sheets when I was nailing the tiles on when I did it in other places. I don’t want to do that here.

But starting to put the roof on the lean-to. Isn’t this progress?

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Monday 28th November 2011 – I HAD VISITORS TODAY.

Here I was – up early and breakfasted, and tidying up (for a change) in my little room when the ‘phone rang. “If we come and raise up the wind turbine can we take the rest of the scaffolding?”

And so that put an end to the tidying up (which was a shame as it’s not often that I’m in the mood for tidying up) and I went up and prepared everything.

It didn’t take long for the three of us to put the wind turbine properly into position and the scaffolding has now gone, and there’s even a roof of sorts on the lean-to (a few sheets of corrugated iron and a tarpaulin) although I don’t know why. We’ve not had any rain here since 7th November.

It was then that I noticed that the wind turbine pole must have been rotated while we were raising it, as the bracket that holds the wire guy ropes is now the wrong way round. And I’ve no idea at all what I can do about that now.

I bet that you are thinking “great. He can go ahead and put the roof on the lean-to now” – but I can’t. I need the scaffolding for that, don’t I?

Caliburn is now emptied ready for a shopping trip to Montlucon tomorrow, and I’ve also done some more work cutting down the fir trees to a reasonable height. This time I’ve managed to afford falling trees, falling off the ladder and the like.

But anyway I’ve managed a good day’s work.

Up here this evening I’ve had the new fire working. It was difficult to get it to work properly but that’s the kind of thing that will surely come with practice.

But one thing and another – a bunch of herring hanging up in this room would have benefited from my efforts.

>But I gave someone quite a hard time today. I’m getting all bad-tempered and tetchy in my old age. And then I remembered that yesterday I gave the President of the football club a real hard time. That’s not like me at all these days.

And then I had a flashback – back to 1987 and my car accident when I suffered a fractured skull and how that was the beginning of the end and how bad-tempered and miserable I became for quite a good while after that. And now I’ve just fallen off a ladder and landed on my head as you know.

Don’t tell me that I’m going to be going through all of this again. It was bad enough back then!

As Terry Venables once famously said – “if history repeats itself then we can expect the same thing again”. That’s rather a depressing thought.

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Saturday 19th November 2011 – WELL, I’M A BIT ….

… disappointed today.

In the last 24 hours we’ve had 21 hours of recorded wind and the turbine has been going round like ye veritable clappers.

And do you know what?

There’s not even one watt recorded on the dial.

A quick check revealed that there’s no current reaching the battery bank. That’s sad.

I checked the two joints to the wind turbine and they seem to be working fine – I connected up a little piazo buzzer and that was ringing like Big Ben – and so it’s either going to be the final joint or else there’s a break in the cable somewhere.

That’s going to be a job for the multimeter on Monday morning

But it was certainly encouraging to see how the thing was going around today. And of course, all the time that it was going round, the big AIR 403 wind turbine didn’t move a muscle. It proves the point that I’ve been arguing with everyone for years that a small turbine can quite often produce more energy than a large one.

Why this is so is quite simple.

Feel the weight of the motors. The heavier a motor is, more powerful it is (generally speaking, of course. There are always exceptions). And the weight is made up of the copper coil and the magnet in the motor (it’s not this simple, but for the purpose of this discussion we’ll leave it here).

So the more powerful the motor, the bigger the magnet and the more magnetic resistance it contains. And so the more wind that you need to overcome the magnetic resistance. A less-powerful wind turbine will have less magnetic resistance and so it will need less wind to make it work. In low-wind situations (which is what I generally have here) two smaller wind turbines will pump out more power than one large one.

This afternoon I went to St Eloy-les-Mines where I spent next-to-nothing again but I did do a mega-wash at the launderette. That’s cheered me up. All clean clothes again. All I need to do is to find a way of getting me nice and clean as well, and then I can have nice new bedding. I shall work on that.

It was the Annual General Meeting of Pionsat Patrimoine this afternoon and interesting as it might be, I still can’t deal with the egos and the people who take 100 words to say either yes or no – and then say it 10 times over.

No footy tonight at Pionsat – Gerzat couldn’t raise a team to play the 2nd XI. But there was a game on at Marcillat, and that provided me with the biggest laugh that I have had for quite a while.

A goalkeeper and a forward went for a 50-50 ball and the keeper came off worse. It was a foul but a genuine attempt to play a loose ball with no malice whatsoever. The ref,in his wisdom, shows the Gannat forward a yellow card.

Outrage from the Gannat bench – and quite rightly so if you ask me. “We have to protect the goalkeepers” shouted the ref.

30 seconds later we have an almost-identical situation and this time it’s the forward who comes off worse And no yellow card. And in the silence of the still night up on the plateau where Marcillat play, the  Gannat trainer bellows out (and I mean Bellows Out- he could be heard back in Gannat I reckon) “and you have to protect the forwards too!”

At that remark, the whole ground collapses in laughter, except for the ref who clearly has no sense of humour whatever and goes over to talk to the trainer

Well, I wasn’t the only one who thought it funny. And doesn’t that makes a change for round here? 

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Friday 18th November 2011 – WHEN I TELL YOU …

… that I knocked off at 17:27 today, you will probably think something like “idle burger” or something like that.

But not a bit of it.

In fact, 17:27 was when I stopped for lunch.

installing wind turbine les guis virlet puy de dome francePutting this wind turbine was not as easy as you might think.

First thing was to solder two longer wires to the couple of inches that come out of the wind turbine. My soldering is total rubbish, and what didn’t help was that the heavy-duty soldering iron I bought from LIDL ages ago didn’t want to work properly.

After trying a couple of others, it was the ancient soldering iron that I had bought from Tandy (and that tells you how old it is) that did some kind of a job on the wiring.

installing wind turbine les guis virlet puy de dome franceCollecting all the tools, I then went off up the ladder to the top of the scaffolding (and you can see how high I was as well – right at the top and that was nerve-wracking) and that wasn’t easy either.

One of the more difficult issues was fitting the wind turbine through the hatch in the lean-to floor. I had to dismantle the blasted thing, carry it through and up the ladder and then reassemble it on top.

Passing the wire down the tube was something else as well. For some reason it didn’t want to go down and I had to spend an age persuading it.

installing wind turbine les guis virlet puy de dome franceFitting the wind turbine on the pole was exciting as well and it was quite a feat of balance to do that on a scaffolding like that.

I then had to fix the rudder back on the wind turbine but that was something of an issue as it seemed that the captive nut that holds the rudder on had sheared off. And so that meant climbing right up there, undoing the side of the turbine, and putting a nut and bolt in place.

It was at that moment that the wind sprang up, and if it wasn’t easy before, then trying to do this right up there with the thing swinging around and the blades going round like the clappers – that just made it worse.

But anyway it’s up there, and it’s all wired in as well. But I couldn’t solder up the wires which was annoying – not even the Tandy soldering iron would do that – and so I’ve had to use chocolate blocks for that and the sheath that I put over the conduit now won’t cover up the joints.

As you can tell, it wasn’t easy and it was no wonder that,having decided to work right through until I finished, it was so late when I came to a stop. And I wasn’t feeling like carrying on.

But anyway, having been hit in the face by the turning blades on occasions too numerous to count, I know that it works. It will be interesting to see what power it gives out. 

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Thursday 17th November 2011 – HAVE A CLOSE …

gorges de la sioule puy de dome france… look at this photo and see if you can spot where the Gorge de la Sioule might be.

It’s one thing I like about going out to Liz and Terry’s early in the morning – the fact that they live right on the edge of the gorge. And because the gorge is so deep and so steep the sun can’t shine into it until it has well-risen.

That means that the surrounding ground is quite warm whereas at the bottom of the gorge the air is quite cold and damp. And when the sun is high enough to enter the gorge it dramatically heats the cold damp air and you have clouds of condensation rising up from the gorge quite spectacularly.

Liz had to do some kind of newspaper interview the other week, in which she described the Combrailles as “The Land That Time Forgot”, and you can see clearly exactly what she means by that.

mont dore puy de sancy puy de dome franceBut it’s not just that view from here (in case you haven’t guessed, we’re at the bird-watching site at the back of St Gervais d’Auvergne again) that is spectacular. There’s a spectacular view across to the Puy de Sancy and the Mont Dore away over there.

All swathed in a hanging cloud or two too.

And if I’m not mistaken, I reckon that I can see some snow up there too. Winter is definitely icumen in. Lhude sing Rudolph

It’s a litle-known fact that when the system of départements was created, what is today the départements of the Puy-de-Dome was to be called the départements of Mont-Dore – which is after all the most significant feature of the region. However, the locals objected, saying that it sounded too much like the mont d’or – a mountain made of gold – and would give the impression that this was an extremely wealthy region.

And so today Terry and I bricked up one of the doorways (their house is two small cottages knocked into one) and fitted the window in the upper half, and then fitted the new door in the other doorway.

And it wasn’t as straight-forward as you might think either. The old doors had been made-to-measure for the doorways and of course, as we discovered as we were trying to fit everything, the door openings were not built straight. That was a complication we didn’t need.

Fitting the door was exciting though. We spent 10 minutes trying to make it seat on the hinge pins,and you’ve no idea how easily it fitted when we took out the wedge that was trapped underneath it.

And we also spent half an hour trying everything that we could to make the door close and you’ve no idea how well it closed when we took the packing strip out of the aluminium closing tray.

Ahhh well. You live and learn, I suppose.

Anyway,tomorrow I’ll be fitting the wind turbine if the weather holds, and now that I have my diamond core drills, I’ll be drilling from the house through into the lean-to and running cables there.

If I’m not careful,I might even have light and power in there tomorrow night.

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Wednesday 16th November 2011 – I’VE MADE GREAT PROGRESS …

MOUNTING BRACKET WIND TURBINE les guis virlet puy de dome france… today with the mount for the wind turbine. You can’t see it easily on the pic – you need to look carefully and you will see above and below the window the horizontal beams that will stand the vertical pole the required distance off the wall.

And if you look behind the ladder you can see the vertical upright – to the left of the yellow scaffolding pole.

It’s about 1 metre above the roof line and so what I’ve done is to cut a 1-metre length of pipe and I’ll be fastening the wind turbine to that. I have a special jointing piece for scaffolding pipe and so I can fit the two pipes together. That will give me a 2-metre height and I’ll see if I can slide the whole lot even higher.

The pole slides down easily enough – I have the squidged right hand to prove that – and so it should move up easily, or at least comparatively easily if I can manage the weight because it’s going to be quite something, the weight of it all, and I need all of the height that I can get.

My revised arrangements for mounting it all worked a treat and to fasten the wall anchors into the wall securely I’ve been driving them into the wall using a little something that I invented, based on a heavy washer, a couple of 17mm nuts, a deep 17mm socket and a lump hammer and that works a treat.

Mind you, it was all awkward to manipulate because it was so heavy and I had to manoeuvre the pipe in in three planes.

And I’m disappointed with this so-called super cement stuff. It’s not as super as I was hoping it to be and certainly not as super as the stuff that Terry was showing me the other day

Another thing that I found out today to my chagrin was that standard sizes in French pipe are different from standard UK sizes. And that’s awkward because French sizes are larger than UK sizes and I have all UK fittings. I’ll have to sort out some more pipe next time I go back the the UK.

Tomorrow I’m not going to be here. I’m round at Terry’s helping him fit his new door and window.

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Tuesday 15th November 2011 – IT’S NOT AS EASY …

… as you might think putting up this wind turbine and despite a good day’s work I’ve hardly scratched the surface of it.

First job was to reposition all of the planks on the scaffolding so that they are where I want them to be, and then to put the ladder where it should be as well. And that wasn’t the work of five minutes either.

After that it was to cut up an old scrap scaffolding pole (I bought a couple of those with just this kind of purpose in mind) to make the horizontal battens on the wall. There’s an overhang on the roof of about 70mms and so I’m having to invent something to stand the upright pole 70mms out of the wall, and that’s not easy.

Next task was to drill the holes for the mounting brackets to take the horizontal battens. And with the hard stone that we have around here this was playing havoc with the batteries on the Hitachi battery-powered SDS drill.

And then I had an idea.

I have a mains SDS drill – about 750 watts-worth but it’s pretty lightweight and not any better than the Hitachi. That’s always been down here but back in Brussels a few years ago I recalled buying a really heavy-duty 1050 watt SDS drill – with rotostop and everything. And that would make short work of drilling the holes.

  1. And so I had to hunt that down somewhere around the house or the barn and eventually, much to my surprise, I actually discovered it.
  2. And then it was to wire in the 1500-watt mega-inverter that I bought for the barn.
  3. And then it was to trail an electrical cable all around the side of the house from across the barn.
  4. And then look for an adapter because the drill is still wired to a European plug.

But now you see why it’s taking me so long.

But once I was up and running, that drill went through the stone like a hot knife through butter.

After much manipulation I have one of the horizontal battens on now, and that cement mastic stuff is excellent. But I’m going to have to take it off because I’ve thought of an improvement and I shall be doing that tomorrow.

What with having to manipulate the heavy upright pole (and that wasn’t easy either) I was exhausted and in any case heaving heavy pipes around 10 metres up in the air by the light of a torch is not recommended.

We talked the other day about the film Tony Rome. Now that film is from the mid-60s and one of the things that was going through my mind was “is this the earliest ‘mainstream’ film to have a reasonably-explicit lesbian love scene in it?”

I spent all afternoon trying to think if there was one any earlier than this but nothing came to mind, apart from some subculture stuff in the 1920s

Secondly, I was watching an episode of The Prisoner this morning at breakfast – “It’s Your Funeral” – and one of the actresses in it caught my ear. And I mean that too because while I didn’t recognise the face, the voice was ringing in my ears telling me something.

And it wasn’t until much later that the penny dropped. It was no one other than Annette Andre, which might mean nothing to you but her most famous role was as Philia, Michael Crawford’s sidekick in the film version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

That film which, although excellent in its own right, was notorious for dropping Frankie Howerd from the lead role in favour of the dreadful Zero Mostel and featuring a cameo of Buster Keaton, two things done simply so that the film would have a wider audience in the USA. 

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Friday 11th November 2011 – I COMPLETELY FORGOT …

… about a sack of sand that I had in the barn. I’d bought it to use for storing the carrots and so I had put it on one side. But the carrots aren’t up yet and I can always buy another sack of sand another time.

pointing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceI hadn’t forgotten that it was a bank holiday today, but when I finally crawled out from underneath the quilt and saw what a gorgeous day it was (23°C in November?) then I changed the habits of a lifetime and decided to put in a day’s work on the wall.

This was too good an opportunity to miss, especially as I had remembered about the sack of sand.

And I’m glad I did as well because even though I was still working outside when the light went, I managed to finish the wall as far as I could reach and I’m ever so impressed by that. All that remains of the wall is the bit that I can’t reach from the scaffolding, and for that I can put a ladder up on Monday and quickly do that if I get a move on, and then that will be that.

Just the wind turbine to mount after that (I have some funny … "you said that the other day" – ed …), and to anchor it to the wall, and then I can get on with putting the roof on the lean-to. I’ll be really pleased if I can get that far this year.

I took the camera up the scaffolding just in case we had Part Two of Wild Boar Wars but of course, with the camera on hand, they were conspicuous by their absence. No surprise there, then.

Tomorrow I’m off on a photo safari around the local area, and then shopping in St Eloy. Tomorrow night it’s Pionsat’s 1st XI against Methanol and the 3rd XI against Blot l’Eglise.

Ohh the joys of footy!

Talking of which, you can see last week’s matches which I have now put on line.

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Thursday 10th November 2011 – I DIDN’T …

… get so much done today.

And that’s despite having an early start as well.

But in the night when I had to get up to go for a gypsy’s, I saw a mouse appearing from a hole in the insulation in the ceiling. It saw me and darted back inside, and I heard the tell-tale scamper of tiny feet up into the roof.

And so this morning I spent an hour or so cutting up the off-cuts of tongue and grooving and making a wall across the insulation and shoring it up. And so far, it’s been All Quiet on the Western Front. We shall see. But mice are persistent creatures and if there’s a way in they will find it.

pointing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd it wasn’t All Quiet on the Eastern Front either.

I didn’t get much done on the wall because I spent much of the afternoon watching two herds of wild boar battle for possession of Lieneke’s field. The noise was spectacular to say the least. “Deafening” is another good word to describe it.

I didn’t have the Nikon D5000 with me up on the scaffolding (I’d probably get a pile of dust in it or drop it or something) and although I was tempted to go down and fetch it, discretion was the better part of valour. All of that aggression about 20 yards from me and if I had been observed I might possibly have become involved in it, and I’m not half as well-armed or well-equipped as a wild boar.

And they are quite noisy bar stewards as well.

Tomorrow I’m going to be pointing for as long as the sand holds out, and then I’ll make a start on the wind turbine.

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Wednesday 9th November 2011 – I BET …

… that you are fed up of hearing me talking about this wall.

Well, so am I, if the truth need be told, but not long now. Even as I speak, I’m sitting on the scaffolding planks doing the last row that I can, and there’s just about 90cms underneath that that I will have to do from a ladder.

But that can’t be done until I’ve moved the scaffolding, and that can’t be done until I’ve mounted the wind turbine (I don’t half do some weird things around here) and then there’s a strip that I can’t reach from the scaffolding – that’s going to be a ladder job too. 

I’m likely to run out of sand tomorrow and so rather than spend all of this time getting out the Sankey trailer, what I’ll do is simply to go to the quarry at Montaigut with a dozen or so sacks and bag it up myself there. That’s much more sensible, I reckon.

But I can’t believe that I’ve used so much sand. There was more than a trailer-load here before I started. 

At about 17:40 it became too dark to work and so,by the light of the solar lamps around here I started to tidy up at the front of the house. I’ve been pulling up weeds and putting them in the brazier that I bought the other week. When they have dried out I can have a bonfire.

There’s piles of other stuff that can go on the fire as well. High time I had a tidy up.

But it’s all getting to be quite exciting around here just now.There might even be a roof on the lean-to before long and won’t that be progress?

Ohh – and remember the thumb that has a lime burn on it? I’ve hit it with a hammer today. It’s not having much luck, is it?

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Tuesday 8th November 2011 – I’VE NOT …

… been feeling myself today.

“And quite right, too” I hear you say.

And I think that some of it has to do with shock. Shock of being wide awake and compos mentis, or rather, as compos mentis as I can be, long before the alarm went off. And that’s not something that happens every day either.

And breakfast was interrupted by a phone call – seems that there’s a panic down at the footy club and so I had to sort that out as well.

kwikstage scaffolding pointing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceWhen I finally made it outside, I had to reposition all of the planks on the scaffolding to get to where I need them for the next round of pointing and once I had done that, I could carry on.

For some reason, this has taken longer than I expected and I don’t know why.

I’m also on my last bag of sand and so I’ll have to go down to the quarry this week and get some more. That means pulling the Sankey trailer out of the undergrowth,which should be exciting.

But where I am now is the last bit of the pointing that I can do on the scaffolding. The rest will have to be done off a ladder.

And so before I take down the scaffolding, I’ll have to put up the wind turbine on the side of the house. That’s going to be exciting, trying to get that up on my own. And it’s complicated too as because of the roof overhang,

I need to do some engineering to get it to work.

And when that’s done, and the scaffolding is down, I can fit the roof on the lean-to. If I can get that far before the end of the year I shall be well-impressed.

I’ve come a long way this autumm. 

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Friday 4th November 2011 – THERE WON’T BE …

… a photo today, folks!

That’s because I did nothing of any importance  – well, as far as visually goes.

This morning was a computer morning, even though I’m on winter hours. Someone has asked for a quote for a solar panel installation and I needed to track down some product. One thing led to another and I was all morning doing things like this.

Later on I managed to make my way outside.

First job was to reposition the planks to the correct working position. And then I spent a delightful few hours chiselling out the old mortar. It was only after that that I could start on the pointing.

But I didn’t get much of it done. Each time I was up the scaffolding with a bucket of mix the heavens opened. And by the time I was back down soaked to the skin and with an empty bucket and covered up the lean-to, the rain would stop.

And so I would start again and then so would the weather.

This kept on until about 16:00 when the heavens truly opened. By 22:00 we had had 25.5mm and it was still coming.

But the advantage of having plenty to do is that I could go and work indoors. I’ve now measured in the beam in the lean-to where I want the studding to go for the stair rails for the inside and I’ve cut the lets.

And so on Monday when I start back I can either start on the wind turbine, carry on with the pointing or finish off the stud walls and stair rails in the lean-to, if the weather will let me.

That wasn’t everything either. I’ll have to go to the UK soon as a client wants a huge load of electronic items that are only available from Radio Spares. Don’t like that idea very much, but there we are.

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