Tag Archives: eric hall

Thursday 3rd September 2009 – IF YOU LOOK VERY CLOSELY AT THIS PIC …..

… you can see that although I’ve only done half of the polystyrene insulation (so no chance of it being finished by tomorrow) we have some electric cable now in the picture.

Two light fittings for the 12-volt halogens, and 1 light fitting for 230-volt. And all with trunking, Terry.

Took me ages to get the wiring right as it needed quite a bit of thought (and quite a bit of cable, and quite a bit of time looking for the cable and so on) and I really don’t have much of an idea about what I’m doing …“it’s never bothered you before” – ed… but I’ve cracked it now, I think.

I’m having 4×12-volt halogens switched in 2×2, and 2 mains lights on one switch. I wasn’t actually going to bother with mains lighting as I can do everything I want with 12-volt, but it makes sense to have it, especially as the Studer inverter (if I ever get it back) can run all day idling away and drawing no current. And I have a few compact flourescent bulbs.

Threading the wire into the conduit took ages and so it was 14.30 when I stopped for lunch. And a late lunch means that you’re all out of sync and it was 19:20 when I stopped. And I still would have been working there now if the phone hadn’t rung – another client!

Tomorrow I’ll finish off the insulation between the rafters and then pretty myself up. It’s shopping day on Saturday and I have to go to Brico Depot.

-6

Wednesday 2nd September 2009 – 18:50 TODAY …

… when I finished working.

Mind you, I had an idea that it would be something like that. Cassettes are quite regular in length so you can work it out to 10 minutes or so.

But I’m not going to have this insulation finished by Friday. It’s sloooooooooooowwwwwwwwwww. This shiny space-blanket type of stuff works best in a vacuum and in the absence of a suitable vacuum you have to do your best to make your own.

The outside was easy – you remember me using counter-battens to put the hardboard layer 25mm off the insulation. But the inside is not so easy. The chevrons are about 65mm in depth so I tacked in some small nails at 40mm and cut a load of 40mm polystyrene tiles to fit in between the chevrons – pushing them down to the nails so that they are flush with the outside of the chevron and 25mm off the insulation – so I now have my air gap of 25mm.

Well, sort-of. We struggled to get the insulation as tight as we could and it wssn’t easy – in places we didn’t manage it. But it’s the best we could do.

But every piece of polystyrene has to be cut to size individually – no standardisation of distances between chevrons on this job. And that’s what’s taking the time, especially with the … er … knife that I have.

I’ve done less that half of it and I’vr also got to thread the electric cables throough it – something I’d forgotten all about.

You’ve no idea how much criticism I’ve been getting for using polystyrene as insulation. But

no-one’s given me a substantiated suggestion what else I can use and, more importantly, where I can get it
I’m on a limited budget
any insulation is good insulation and it’ll more than economise on the energy wasted in making it
fourthly – it’s not polystyrene anyway. If you look closely at it, you’ll see it’s recycled Dalmatian

But I was shattered again when I’d finished – but not like yesterday. Yesterday I crashed out for an hour, was too tired to cook anything to eat, and crashed out again before bedtime. Tonight I at least managed to cook some pasta and open a tin. But I’m clearly not well and it’s a little disconcerting.

>Highlight of the music today was Kate Bush. She has a beautiful voice and she can sing to me all night. In fact, it’s a toss-up between her and Karen Peris of Innocence Mission, but seeing as how Karen is a right two-bagger … he means “more admired for her personal qualities than her aesthetic appearance” – ed … then it’s Kate Bush for me every time.

When I recorded all my music onto mp3 and copied it to SD cards I copied it alphabetically by artist and named each card after what was on it – such as “Wishbone Ash to Yes” or “Caravan to Aynsley Dunbar”. And I have a card entitled “Help Yourself to Kate Bush”

Quite!

Her two best albums by a country mile are Lionheart and The Kick Inside.

have been on my playlist for ever and they always will be, and it was a shame that she lost her way when she tried to run the show herself after flying out from under the wing of Dave Gilmour. At the time that she did those two albums she had a boyfriend who was a bassist and if you listen carefully to the tracks you can hear how it would be possible for them to be performed by just a bassist and a keyboard player.

And if I ever were to have a dream that I would wish to come true it would be to be on stage with Kate Bush – just the two of us – and perform Lionheart and The Kick Inside

-9

Tuesday 1st September 2009 – AS I HAVE SAID BEFORE …

… you can always tell how engrossed in a task I am by what time I knock off.

Knocking-off time is usually 18:00 or thereabouts, so no-one was more surprised than me to notice that I was still up here painting at 19:20 and it was only the light that started to disappear that made me sit up and notice.

Mind you, the attic is now painted and it looks quite nice as you can see. Very Tudor-esque – in fact it reminds me of the time Nerina was interested in buying a Morris Minor Traveller and took me along to see it. It needed quite a bit of work, including a new paint job.
“We can paint it white and do the woodwork black, and it will look like a Tudor cottage” I suggested
“The roof has a couple of dents in it” she said.
“Don’t worry about that. No-one will notice when I’ve thatched it”

In fact, if I put a floor down tomorrow, I could quite easily move into there tomorrow night. But I’m not going to – I’m going to do it properly.

If you look at the bottom corner – in centre-pic, you’ll notice that the paint looks pretty thin. In fact, the “plaster” in that corner was just running sand and every time I put a brush of paint up against it, a pile of sand fell off. After an hour or so of messing about, I came up with the solution (in more ways than one). I mixed up a couple of litres of water with a small amount of cement so that it was just grey water, and I painted it liberally over the sand until it had well soaked in.

Then I made a thicker mixture and painted that over. And then a third, thicker one. And then when it had dried, I painted over it with the acrylic paint. That seems to have done the job.

What helps when you are working is some decent music, and I had a lucky dip into the cassette box all day, picking cassettes at random. Lucky find from a long-forgotten past was Runrig’s Cutter and the Clan. A long time since I’ve heard that.

A fine folk-rock band, Runrig, and living proof, as the rest of the non-English-speaking world will already be able to tell you, that good rock music is good rock music even though you might not be able to understand the lyrics. “Alba”, the track that opens the album, is a good thumping rocker, even if the lyrics translated from the Gaelic into English read
“We hate all English-speaking b@$t@rd$ and when we catch one alive we will pull off his testicles and shove them up his @r$e”

Keyboard player with Runrig is Pete Wishart, Scottish MP and former keyboard player with Big Country. I met him at a European Parliament session in Strasbourg a few years ago before he joined Runrig.
“I’m a Big Country member” he told me.
“That’s right” I replied. “I remember”.

It’s rained more-or-less non-stop all day and we have had 9mm of rain. It looked for a while like this magnificent summer might have finally come to an end, but I’ve just been outside and it’s clear blue (yes, blue – there’s a bright moon outside) sky. So it might pick up again and summer might carry on. But you’ve no idea how satisfying it is to be working in the attic and hear the torrential rain and be grateful for the magnificent job that we did on this roof.

-2

Monday 31st August 2009 – WA-HEY!

I now have all the windows fitted in the attic.

What I spent today doing was installing the two windows that I bought on Saturday. But don’t worry – Auvergnat window-fitters can rest in peace as I shan’t be challenging them with my technical abilities.

The smaller of the two windows was a little too big for its hole and they didn’t have a smaller one, so yours truly got out the cheap electric plane that he had bought ages ago and never used, and put it to work.

That soon sorted out the vertical height adjustment. There was the opposite problem in the horizontal plane (not the one I’d been using to shorten the height) so I attached the window into place by using some small right-angled brackets (I bought a job lot of 100 for a quid ages ago and they are worth their weight in gold) screwed to the side of the frame and screwed to the face of the window opening.

And then I used a couple of pieces of wood as vertical shuttering and filled in the big gaps with a pile of cement. And an impressive job it turned out to be.

The big window was just about the right size horizontally (with judicious use of a sledgehammer and large chisel around the brickwork) and slightly too short in the vertical. So I screwed it to the lintel and fastened it into the sides with half a dozen of those “knock-through” screws and rawlplugs.

I then put some wood on the sill to use as a form of ad-hoc shuttering on the outside of the window and then filled it with cement underneath from the inside.

And that turned out to be a neat job too. It hardly required any facing on the outside.I then pointed it up out and in. And you can tell how much I was enjoying what I was doing by the fact that it was 18:45 when I noticed the time and called it a day.

Tomorrow I’ll be painting the rest of the walls with the white paint I bought on Saturday. I want to get all of the insulation in by Friday.

I came across a cassette by “Men At Work” … "you mean ‘persons exercising traditional labour practices’" – ed … a fine old Australian band better known for “A Land Down Under” but they did much better stuff than that.

Two Hearts is a more ballady-type of album and not a particular favourite of mine, although Nerina liked it. On the other hand, Cargo rocks along quite nicely and is probably the best of their albums.

The best track on Cargo, and the best that Men At Work ever recorded, is a song called “No Restrictions”. It begins with the lyrics “There are no restrictions on what I do or say”, so you can tell that it was written a very long time ago. I wonder what on earth they would sing today.

It totally appalls me to see how many freedoms that westerners had 10 years ago have all been eroded away to nothing by fascist governments labouring under the guise of “Socialists”.

And what is even more appalling is that it only seems to be me and a handful of others who care about it.

But of course, during the decline of the Roman Empire, those in power gave the masses “bread and circuses” to keep them occupied so that they didn’t notice. With the decline of the British Empire, those in power have given the masses 24-hour drinking and 500 channels on the TV to keep them quiet.

And instead of Rollerball to distract them, there’s always West Ham v Millwall.

-4

Sunday 30th August 2009 – I WAS UP …

… early again today, but not as early as yesterday. But early nevertheless bearing in mind it’s Sunday.

After breakfast I tidied up the verandah, in the garage and round about, and as you might expect, my visitors didn’t show up.But while I was waiting I also cleaned and tidied up the cab of Caliburn, so as to silence my critics on these pages, Graham.

After lunch it was off to the brocante at Virlet. Not as good as usual and not as many stalls but I did manage to find a chest of drawers – four drawers and quite big and just fits nicely under my bed – all for 7 Euros.

But so much for minimalisation – I have far too many clothes to go in it. I shall have to have a spell of throwing away clothes. There’s far too many for what I need down here.< That gave me an opportunity to have a decent in-depth tidy-up in my room. And this constant smell like something has died in here is due to the damp that is ingressing. I'm surprised that I haven't gone down with pleurisy or pneumonia - not like Christopher Robin who, as you all know, went down with Alice. Fitting the guttering may well help to do something about the damp but moving into the attic is the logical answer. If I get damp in there then I know that I've REALLY got a problem.

-5

Saturday 29th August 2009 – I WAS UP …

… early this morning. Long before the alarm went off, actually. Not like me, this. But at 08:45 I was on my way to Montlucon for part I of my mega-shop.

Nothing of interest in Carrefour or Vima, and only some new vegan burgers in Amaranthe. But Noz came up trumps again. A copy of an old Donovan album at 1:90 was something, but a triple-pack of Nice CDs at 3:90 was even more exciting – especially as the whole lot was reduced by 50%.

At Auchan I bumped into Rob and Julie and their kids. This was a complete surprise – older readers of my organ at its previous location will recall that it’s usually at Brico Depot that I bump into them. And poor Julie has been quite ill for a few months, although she’s recovering slowly now. That’s nice – I like them and their daughter Ashleigh is quite a big fan of His Nibs.

Brico Depot was exciting. I had two constraints – firstly money and secondly (and more importantly) space inside Caliburn. Interior space was important as I had forgotten to take my ladder with me so I can only reach a very short distance onto the roof-rack to tie stuff on. That stymied me a bit.

But we have the two windows (one of which needs some planing down to fit the hole), some more paint, loads of polystyrene and plenty of wood battens, as well as quite a bit of other stuff. That’ll keep me out of mischief for a week or so and I can go and get another load of stuff next weekend. It’s all very well buying it all in one go but firstly you have to transport it and secondly you have to store it.

I did also pick up a 70x70cm shower base. This was crucial as I’m building the bathroom around the shower and the dimensions need to be worked out fairly soon in my plans. It was the last one in the shop as well so I was quite proud. But as you might expect, as I was walking around the shop it slid off my trolley and smashed into a hundred pieces. Ahh well.

I also went to the “Conforama”. It’s a big furniture shop and it regularly sends out its publicity. Even though it’s only just across the road from the Auchan, in all the years that I’ve lived here I’ve never ever been there, but today I had good reason for going.

They are having a sale on these “click clack” sofas that transform themselves into double beds with a space underneath for storing your bedding. Now, I had one of those in Brussels and I was quite impressed with it for what it was. And so I’ve decided that I want another one to put up in my attic to sit and to sleep on.

The raised bed that I built here works fine but after nearly two years it’s fairly uncomfortable and so I’ve decided to push the boat out and get a really good quality one with a decent mattress. There’s 15% off until the 14th September and delivery is within 3 weeks so if I order it in 2 weeks time it should be ready for when my room is finished. It’s going to be expensive but a good bed is worth its weight in gold.

One problem though is that they don’t do a blue cover – one that will go with my room when I’ve painted it. The assistant who minced over to talk to me talked to me with a lithp, so I was on safe ground talking to him about colour co-ordination and soft furnishings. I suppose I should have profited from the situation to discuss curtains with him.

Talking of beds, tomorrow is Sunday, but no lie-in. A prospective customer wants to come round and talk to me about solar panels. Well, I’ll get out of bed early if there’s a possibility of amounts of folding stuff changing hands in my direction.

And it’s Virlet brocante in the afternoon. Always a good one, that.

-5

Friday 28th August – I’VE BEEN PAINTING TODAY.

All of the beams have had the final coat of the LIDL brown stuff, and I’ve started to paint the wall of the room. In fact, if I had had more white paint I would have done a lot more than this but I ran out.

Not to worry, though. I had plenty of other things to do, such as tidying up the back of Caliburn as he’s going to be rather full tomorrow.

It all looks rather Tudor-ish right now with the wattle-and-daub effect, and I bet you are all wondering what on earth I’m doing with white paint, seeing as how I hate white so much. In fact, it’s the leftover from when I painted my little room, which is also white.

But it was the cheapest paint in the shop and it’s acrylic so it makes a nice plasticky layer over the brick stone and cement and keeps the dust bound to the wall, which is why I use it. Nothing worse that having dust everywhere when you can do something to prevent it.

But as it’s being covered by a layer of insulation and then a layer of insulation-backed plasterboard and then that fibreglass wallpaper which will be painted a decent colour, then the white is neither here nor there.

I also have music in the attic now. Many years ago I made a contraption out of an old orange box, an old car radio-cassette and a speaker. It did me well down here for years until moved up a gear with the mp3 hifi. Anyway, I resurrected it together with a pile of old cassette tapes and it’s installed in the attic. Music while I work! But the quality is lamentable when compared with modern-day hi-fi and I don’t know how we could have listened to music like that back in those days.

But I was listening to a couple of old albums by Rush – a fine old Canadian band – Moving Pictures and A Farewell To Kings. Geddy Lee is one of the nest bassist-vocalists I’ve ever heard and the lyrics, written by the drummer (now that’s astonishing in itself) Neil Peart, are amazing.

How about
When they turn the pages of history when these days have passed long ago
Will they read of us with sadness for the seeds that we let grow
We turned our gaze from the castles in the distance
Eyes cast down on the path of least resistance

Cities full of hatred fear and lies
Withered hearts and cruel, tormented eyes
Scheming demons dressed in kingly guise
Beating down the multitude and scoffing at the wise
or
They say there are strangers who threaten us, immigrants and infidels.
They say there is strangeness too dangerous in our theatres and bookstore shelves.
Those who know what’s best for us must rise and save us from ourselves.

Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand

What’s astonishing is that although these lyrics conform pretty well to life in today’s USA and the UK they were actually written over 30 years ago. But then again, I’ve talked about this before.

-3

Thursday 27th August 2009 – WORK ON THE ATTIC …

… has started in earnest this morning. And in fact if I had been able to find my heavy bolster chisel when I started to look for it instead of having to search for two (yes, two) hours to find it, I would have started this morning.

I’ve whacked a huge hole in the wall that took me through into the chimney, and I’ve passed in a piece of enamel piping 125mm in diameter. This is the outlet for the woodstove that I will be putting up here for the winter to keep me warm memo – buy a woodstove.

I then mixed a huge bucket full of cement and cemented up the hole around the pipe and filled in the cracks that were in the wall. when I finished that, it was 18:00 to the second, so I knocked off. Not like last night where I was so carried away by enthusiasm that I was still working at 19:15 when I noticed the time.

You can always tell when I’m absorbed in an interesting job by how late it is when I knock off.

This morning I went chaud-pied to St Eloy to get the LED lights. And, major disappointment, they only had 7 GU10s, 7 MR16s and 6 E14s.

Needless to say, after I had left they didn’t have any at all.

They also had a few cans of the wood treatment that I like (albeit increased in price to 8.99 instead of 7.99) and they are two tins lighter of that stuff now too. It’s very good stuff, this LIDL wood treatment.

I went to Pionsat afterwards to pick up my new bank card and to empty the chemical toilet when I get the time, get the new improved beichstuhl up and running.

While I was emptying the toilet, a woman came in to use the facilities. She made about half a pace in, grabbed her nose, said “God, it stinks in here” and piddled off, giving me a huge grimace. And that took me completely by surprise – I had thought my chemical toilet was known the whole world over by now.

And back home, while looking for the bolster chisel I measured up everything that I’m going to need to do my room. It’s going to stretch my budget considerably but then again, comfort has its price but it is its own reward.

And talking of cracks, an ugly crack appeared on the wall of the OUSA office the other day. But Als Ryan had it papered over before Turdi de Hatred could read it.

-5

Wednesday 26th August 2009 – I NOW HAVE A NEW FRONT DOOR!

Well, to tell the truth I have had a couple before. The original one fell to pieces when we tried to open it after 20 years of being closed, and so I replaced it with another door, which I nailed shut and that was that.

But since I moved into the lean-to-that-will-be-the-kitchen, it’s been pretty inconvenient not having a proper front door. everyone and everything has to traipse through my little room and when start bringing construction material and the like into the house it will be impossible.

So now I have a front door that opens and closes and is even fitted with a bolt to keep it closed when I go out.

It’s quite good and works quite well, but it’s not very substantial (a bit of 10mm chipboard that I had lying around). A good puff will probably bring it down but let’s not get talking about elitism or sexual preference.

You can see the windows at the top of the door frame. When I put in the suspended floor I’ll take the windows out and simply move the door up the frame in order to give me the required height.

But having seen how bright it gets in that corner when the door was opened, I’ll be going for a door with glass in it.

As well as a front door I also have power and light up in the attic. This is real progress as there wasn’t any up there previously even though there used to be mains electric here in the dim and distant past.

And talking of mains electricity I’m off to LIDL early tomorrow morning. They are having a sale of LED light bulbs – both mains and 12-volt. The mains ones include GU10 fittings and I have plenty of sockets for those so I’m going for a shed-load. And all for 4 Euros 47 each too!

-5

Tuesday 25th August 2009 – IT’S DONE NOTHING …

… but rain here all day. 11 mms in fact, so I was able to put my new improved rainwater harvester to the test.

Don’t worry about the multicoloured pipework – when I have everything exactly where I want it I can change that. But you can see that the rainwater falls down the downpipe and initially into the part that’s angled to the right, that’s a kind of sump. Anything that is heavier than water, like dirt or concrete, will drop down into there, with the bend in the pipe to stop the dirty water splashing up.

When the lower part is filled, the rainwater will go down the part that’s angled to the left and into the rainwater collector. All the dirt, stones and so on will still fall down the part to the right and collect in there.

The water in the collector certainly seems to be clean, and when I undid the screw cap at the bottom, a pile of dirty water fell out. So it’s working.

Also working is my electrical panel. In the living room I ripped out all of about 100 years-worth of redundant wiring and connected up some decent stuff. All properly connected and fused.

When it went dark at about 16:00 (it’s been just like winter with this rain) I coupled up all of the batteries and the solar panels – 780 watts-worth of panels and 920 amp hours-worth of batteries. Tomorrow morning I’ll run some wires up to the attic.

But talking of dark, I had just 13.2 amp-hours of solar energy registered from the 3 solar panels on the barn. You have to go back to 26th April to find a day as depressing as that. But the 3 solar panels on the roof of the house showed a total of 28.2 amp-hours, so that’s encouraging. Now all 6 on the house are connected, that’s even more encouraging.

In other news, Pascal came round to borrow a tyre pressure gauge to check the pressure on the caravan tyres. Later, he came round again. He’d pumped up the tyres and taken the caravan for a spin to make sure nothing was going to drop off (that was a sensible idea) but he couldn’t reverse it up the track to Claude’s.

I went round to do it for him but his car just didn’t have the whack to push it up the hill in reverse and it kept on overheating. We pushed the caravan up by hand – 5 of us.

Later, Pascal’s lad came round to tell me that Pascal had decided not to take the caravan. He’ll get a friend of Claude to deliver it next time he’s coming down. So wiser councils have at last prevailed.

That’s a much more sensible idea and if it all goes pear-shaped it will be someone else’s responsibility and not his.

-6

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

I’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.

-5

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

… 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.

-7

Saturday 22nd August 2009 – THIS IS ABSOLUTELY ASTONISHING!

The 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?

-4

Friday 21st August 2009 – YOU CAN SEE IN THIS PHOTO …

… why it is that I need to move the batteries. They are blocking up the front door. And if I’m going to start some kind of serious work inside, I need the front door off so that I can bring messy stuff in that way rather than in through my little room.

Today, I put a row of breeze blocks down on the concrete base that I laid yesterday. I can’t build it right up as just right now I don’t know how high the suspended floor is going to be. But tomorrow I’ll be putting a layer of 40mm polystyrene on the base and around the sides, and dropping 10 batteries (thats 920 amp-hours in total) in there.

I’ve also started building the control panel as you can see. There are three charge controllers on there right now. From right to left, we have the charge controller for the 2nd bank of solar panels (the one for the first bank is currently nailed to the front door and will be moved onto the control panel in early course), then in the centre is the charge controller for the wind turbine, and on the left is the charge controller for the overload.

In case you don’t know, when the batteries are fully-charged the charge controllers shut down the charging circuit. And that’s a waste of energy. So what I’m doing is having an overload controller that will divert the surplus current into a “dump load” – in this case a 12 volt water heater element. So that way I’ll have plenty of hot water.

There’s also a bus bar or two on there. These are for connecting loads of heavy duty wires and cables together. Bus bars range from sophisticated professional jobs down to flattened copper pipe and self-tapping screws, but for many years now I’ve been developing the “ring terminal onto long bolt with butterfly nut” and it works just fine, so there’s no reason to change.

There will be a few other things on there too, like a mains inverter, a couple of clocks, some circuit breakers, a fuse box and all that kind of thing. Here is one I made earlier, but that has undergone considerable … er … modification since then.

And what do you think about the wallpaper in the house? The house as you know is built of stone and they plastered over it on the inside, and then put up some wallpaper of … er … stone. Why didn’t they just knock the plaster off?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Claude’s son came round this afternoon. he’d been rummaging around in one of his dad’s many sheds and came across a trailer board.

Well, a sort-of trailer board. The lenses on the lights were smashed and all the cable was missing but I cleaned it up, cleaned all the contacts and rewired it, and now there is in theory a working trailer board. I say “in theory” because there are no bulbs either but I have a 12-volt piazzo tester and when I connected it up to the contacts for the bulbs it did what it was supposed to do at the time it was supposed to do it.

So all Pascal needs to do now is to buy some lenses (they are “standard trailer – small” and some bulbs, attach it properly to the rear of the caravan, and there you are.

I checked and adjusted the brakes on the caravan too and during the course of the evening I learnt that
1) The caravan is over 40 years old
2) Pascal has never towed a trailer (or indeed anything, for that matter) before.
All I can say is “good luck” to him, taking that over the “Cote de Maille” between Puy-en-Velay and Montelimar at night.

-2

Thursday 20th August 2009 – AFTER WORKING ALL DAY ALMOST NON-STOP ….

… I’ve finished the first part of the base of the battery box, as you can see.

The floor in the house is dreadful, full of cracks that let in the damp (a piece of wood that I laid on the floor across a crack rotted to nothing in 6 months) so I started years ago to dig it up.

Earlier followers of my organ will recall me pulling up a chicken that had been cast into the original concrete floor (such pagan rites were apparently practised here in comparatively recent times) but I abandoned the demolition of the floor for another idea.

The ceiling is pretty high and there is a large step uo into the kitchen, so I’m going to put in a suspended floor and seal in the old concrete with bitumen. This will give me enough headroom to put the batteries under the floor in the entrance hall where they will keep nice and warm, and the gases can vent out via a pipe laid to the outside passing underneath the false floor.< So the first job this morning was to rearrange everything in the living room so that I had the space to work. And as the fridge is just 50cms wide and the door to the verandah is 54cms past the obstructions, I made an extended worktop in the verandah and I now have the fridge right next to where I'm cooking.

Then I had to dig down a little further, lay a layer of sand to cover up any sharp bits that might puncture the damp-proof course, build a framework, line it with a plastic sheet as a damp-proof course, lay more sand to protect the integrity of the damp-proof course, heap a pile of rubble inside the framework and then cover with a layer of concrete.

That took me until 19:00 and then I had to go to Claude and Francoise’s. Claude has given his old caravan to his son but the electrics aren’t working and he has to tow it to near Marseilles (it’s not moved under its own steam for 20 years and the tyres are totally perished – just like the rest of the caravan).

After what seemed like hours , and me tearing my trousers on a nail that was being used to hold up the jockey wheel, I noticed that someone had wired the trailer plug up wrongly. I fixed that and after another few hours I managed to get an indicator light working.

The whole electrical circuit on this caravan is shot to pieces and the light units have all short-circuited. Pascal is going to buy some more stuff tomorrow and wants to know if I can rewire the caravan on Friday evening.

Ahhh well.

After all these exertions I’m off to have an early night. I’m totally worn out right now.

-4

EPIC HALL

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