Tag Archives: 12 volt domestic circuit

Wednesday 21st October 2009 – WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE …

clear varnish tongue and groove attic les guis virlet puy de dome france… in this pic is all the varnish on the tongue and grooving. That’s because, for once in my life, I’ve found some clear varnish that really is clear.

So clear in fact that I couldn’t see where I was up to each time. I was impressed with that.

What you also can’t see is all of the rubbish, debris, sawdust, polystyrene offcuts and the like. I decided to start by tidying up and picking up all of the stuff.

And after half an hour of this I thought “This is ridiculous – I’ll be here forever” and got out the yard brush. One reason why I started from the top is that you brush the rubbish downwards.

And when I get to the ground floor? well, that’s easy. I’m putting in a suspended floor and all of the rubbish can go underneath.

Which reminds me – it rained today – about 8mms – and I happened to put my hand on the sandy soil that is the ground floor of the house (at least where I dug out for the battery box) and it is as damp as heck. A suspended floor is pretty much essential, I reckon.

And while I’m on the subject of that, now that I have the door on upstairs, the temperature is keeping pace more-or-less with what I get in my room. But it’s a totally different kind of temperature – like it’s a dry temperature upstairs and a damp wet one down here. I’m surprised I haven’t caught pleurisy living in here and I can’t wait to move in upstairs.

I’ve also installed all of the light fittings upstairs and started on the plugs at the “other” end of the room. It looks like I’m heading for an electrical day tomorrow.

Friday 16th October 2009 – And while I have something vaguely resembling an internet connection …

electricity 12 volt domestic circuit wiring atticI’ll post Friday’s pic.

There I was, fiddling around with this perishing beading that never seems to want to go on where I want to put it, and suddenly I had a horrible thought.

Next weekend is, I reckon, the last weekend in October. And the clocks go back and although I gain an extra hour in bed, I lose an hour’s light. And it’s already getting dark far too early for my liking. Time to cut my losses and go with what I’ve got and get myself in there.

So b*****ks to the beading and I’ve started on the definitive wiring. On the back wall is, from left to right, a British 13-amp double socket (for mains voltage – I prefer them as the plugs are fused), an American 110-volt double socket (which I use for my 12-volt circuits as they are designed for hefty cable) and a British 5-amp single socket – which I’ll be using for a small 6-volt circuit seeing as I have a pile of 6-volt stuff.

Round the corner are the light switches – one bank of 2 for the 12-volt lights and a single one for the 230-volt lights, then another bank of American and British sockets, and a telephone socket. I now have 12-volt power into the room and if you look carefully you can see the mp3 player that is my hi-fi (connected to a pair of powered computer speakers) and a table lamp that’s actually working.

So downstairs and put my feet up, and no perishing internet. And no telephone either. The whole circuit is down. So use the mobile phone to dial up the repair service and “sorry, you cannot access this number from a mobile phone. Please use your landline to report the fault, or consult our website”. Someone should tell them that this is France, not Ireland!

So I dashed down to the local hotel-cum-bar-cum-restaurant-cum-meeting place …“that’s a lot of cum” – ed … to find out that it doesn’t open on Friday nights, Saturdays or Sundays. It’s also closed for holidays during August – what kind of way is that to run a business? But that’s another story.

In the end Liz very kindly reported the fault (it’s a general collapse of the Virlet exchange and everyone is cut off) and she posted a note on the blog to calm my eager readers. And consequently my mailbox is swamped with mails of goodwill, which is extremely nice.

There’s even a mail from a member of the OUSA Executive Committee – who shall remain nameless as reading my blog is punishable by death. “Hurry up and get back on line. We look forward to your pithy comments. All we have to read at the moment is this circular from Turdi de Hatred. Your postings are like shafts of wit. Hers are .. errr …. well, quite!”

Tuesday 29th September 2009 – I’VE FINISHED PLASTERBOARDING …

insulation plasterboard attic les guis virlet puy de dome france… the outside walls to my room now. Even the two patches around the far window have been done.

Well, not quite. There’s a sliver of an offcut needed for one corner but I have that ready, and then there’s the corner that you can see, where I need to think about the cabling.

One thing I didn’t think about though was the wiring at this end of the room. I forgot to make allowances for where it has to go. But never mind, there’s another option or two about that and I’ll just have to use one of those.

That cassette player I bought on Saturday – it’s been filed under “B”. The reason is that it’s playing slow. Not by much, but by sufficient to annoy me. What I’ve done for now is to bring into the house the hi-fi from the barn. This consists of a cheap mp3 player and a pair of computer speakers and it’s quite adequate for my needs. I can’t work without music – it makes the time go quicker and helps me to relax.

The only drawback is that the speakers are 9-volt. I’m trying my best to standardise everything and if I can’t run things on 12 volt I want to run them on 6-volt. I have a set of 6-volt speakers but only one channel is working. I’ll have to see if I can fix it, or else look for another pair of 6-volt speakers at a brocante.

But I think that I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact that audio cassettes is a dying technology, and I shall have to move with the times.

insulation plasterboard stud wall attic les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis is the pic that you should have seen yesterday. You can see the stud wall that I’ve finished off now, and all of the plasterboard done down in that corner (except for the tiny sliver that is missing).

Tomorrow I’ll be starting to filling and taping the gaps between all of the boards. I want to do this as quickly as possible as I’m dying to get poncing. When that’s done I can set about fitting the tongue-and-grooving.

In other news, the Open University Students Association Executive Committee has been stung into action by my justified criticism the other day. Members of that august body, in an effort to engage with a much wider audience, have been taking part in some of these reality TV programmes. Andy Pandy, having been well-coached by his friend Teddy, has entered “Come Dancing” as he is one of the few people who can actually do that, but it all went horribly wrong when Pol Pot’s Sibling (who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as he or she deserves) was eaten by the other contestants during the “Bush Tucker Challenge”.

Monday 28th September 2009 – WE HAD TECHNICAL ISSUES …

… with tonight’s image otherwise you would have seen that I now have plasterboarding on three quarters of the walls of the attic.

You would also have seen some extra wooden battens in the corner of the room opposite where my desk is going to be. That’s because I’m going to build a cupboard in there. I’m going to miss my target of the end of the month – I’m about two weeks behind – so I may as well do this kind of work while I’m at it as it won’t make much difference to my schedule.

But the insulation is certainly doing its job up there. 2 degrees warmer than in my room and at one stage I had to open all of the windows in there as it was so warm. It’s going to be interesting in there in the winter. Especially as Simon has now returned and he has my woodstove with him. I must go and rescue it this weekend.

It’s just as well I spent the last winter cutting down all of those trees, and this stove will also give me an incentive to do some more woodcutting this winter too.

But talking of timber, I’ve been putting together a project for a Dutch mushroom farmer whom I met at the timber yard when I was there with Liz. He wants 3.5Kw of electricity each day – that’s quite a lot, and so a 12-volt system is quite out of the question. Imagine all of the heat in the cables.

I’ll have to develop the 48-volt system and run on mains power with a really decent inverter. That should be exciting.

Back in the attic, tomorrow I’ll be finishing off the plasterboarding, except for one small corner. That’s where the cables are that run from the solar panels through where the bathroom will be and down to the control panel.

They need to be disconnected and run through some kind of trunking and that requires some careful thought as it’s fraught with all kinds of problems such as short circuits and the like. It’s the kind of thing that needs to be done at night when there is no current in the cables but I don’t think clearly enough after 19:00 at night.

Friday 25th September 2009 – AND JUST FOR A CHANGE …

fitting stud wall attic les guis virlet puy de dome france… today’s pic is taken from almost the same spot as the previous two.

You can’t see the battens that I affixed to the wall but you can see the insulation that I attached. That is on the rear wall to the left of the wooden framing, and in the apex above the door. There’s even a shelf up there now – that’s where I’ll be fitting the water tank.

You may be wondering why it is that I haven’t fitted the insulation to the rest of the wall. Two reasons really –

  1. it is outside the limits of my room so I don’t need to do it just now. I’d rather concentrate my efforts inside my room
  2. I ran out of insulation

I’ve also fitted all of the rest of the flooring – one piece of which was not without some considerable effort.

The orange cable that you see is an American 110-volt extension cable, bought in Farmington, New Mexico, in September 2002 and brought back to Europe in my hand luggage. I use American 110-volt fittings for my 12-volt circuit on the farm as it’s capable of handling a much heavier current than European fittings. And I needed the extension cable because with fitting the flooring I’ve had to take out the temporary circuit that I installed the other week.

And of course I clean forgot that I had moved the cassette player across the room. Consequently, in a moment of inattention, I kicked it down through the hole in the stairs all the way down to ground level. I bet that’s done it a world of good.

But cassettes are so depassé these days and CDs are in and as I don’t have a 12-volt CD player I will have to see if I can’t liberate one from a brocante some time and make a more modern 12-volt hi-fi.

Terry and Liz came round again too. They had been to get more sand and came round to see if I had any cement. There were three bags in Caliburn and as they are temporarily in the way I donated them to the cause.

Tomorrow, no Brico Depot. Caliburn is still choc-a-bloc of stuff so I’ve plenty to be going on with. I may well have a run around Commentry tomorrow – it’s quite a while since I’ve been shopping there and there are an Aldi, a Lidl, a good DiY place and a couple of cruddy cheapo shops that are sometimes worth a poke around.

And in other exciting news I’ve had an e-mail from Simon. He wasn’t able to pick up a cheap woodstove for me from Machine Mart as he was leaving last night and delivery wasn’t until today. But a change of plan means that he isn’t leaving until Monday so he’s picking up a stove for me. Many thanks to Krys and Terry for teaming up to work that out for me, and for Simon for putting it into operation.

Friday 11th September 2009 – I HAD ANOTHER ONE …

space blanket wall insulation attic flooring counter battens les guis virlet puy de dome france… of those days where I couldn’t seem to get going.

Mind you, I was so exhausted after yesterday’s exertions that I had a lie-in until 10:00 to recover and it wasn’t until 11:00 that I got to work.

I finished the wiring at the far end of the room and then finished off the insulation down the two side walls. That involved fitting the battens and then xylophening them to protect against woodworm and the like. Then I had to stretch the insulation across the battens and staple it on.

space blanket insulation attic flooring les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis afternoon I started to fit the rest of the floor.

This involved pulling up the old pallets that I’d been using as flooring, xylophening the beams and then fitting the sheets of OSB.

A couple of them needed trimming down and cutting for shapes and I did such I good job of this (I even impressed myself!) that one piece took about an hour to tap into place. And I was giving it such a whack with the mallet that I’m convinced I’ve broken my finger when I missed my aim with the mallet
“Your whole finger?”
“No – the one next to it”
I’ve done almost as much as I can now before the major engineering starts and it was at 19:45 when I came down from the attic. By the time I’d unloaded Caliburn ready for the fray around Brico Depot tomorrow it was 20:15.

It’s all working though. The lowest temperature in the house is higher than the lowest temperature in my room – and that’s saying something. Just wait until the floor and the insulation are finished and there’s a wall around the head of the stairs.

Today was grey. miserable and overcast. No snow though although we have been told that it’s on its way. Only 13 amp-hours in the barn but over 60 in the house. A good move putting these panels on the roof.

And in other news, the footy restarts tomorrow night. YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.

Wednesday 9th September 2009 – IF ANYONE MENTIONS "PADDED CELLS" THEY WILL BE DISQUALIFIED;

counter battens wall space blanket insulation attic les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ve fitted the insulation and the counter-battens on the far wall, and insulation to half of the two side walls as you can see.

If you look closely you will see that I’ve started to lay the flooring and install the wiring for the power sockets that I’ll be fitting.

But it’s blasted slow going and I’ve no idea why. I was up there working until 19:30 today yet you would never tell. I reckon it’s going to take at least a week longer than planned to get this room finished.

attic space blanket wall insulation counter battens les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Remember that there is no door or wall to the stairwell and that there is no floor to the room either. Yet the temperature in the attic reached 27.5 degrees – a full degree higher than in my room and a record temperature, whilst even as I speak, at 00:18, the temperature up there is 23.2 degrees.

Tomorrow I’m having another day off – helping Terry with his woodpile. He had a lorry-load (and I mean 35 tonnes or thereabouts) delivered and although he and Liz have moved a good deal of it there’s still plenty of heavy stuff that needs to go. There was some mention of vegan chocolate cake, and as you know, that would entice me away from just about anything else, even Kate Bush.

In other news, I see that Caligula and her horse are actually calling for volunteers to sit on a couple of panels – one to help students with visual impairments and one to look at the role of students under OUSA Sutures. You may well be wondering what on earth Caligula and her horse are doing calling for volunteers – it’s not the norm for anyone on the Executive Committee to be interested in the opinions of the students.

It’s probably due to the right sandbagging that one of the previous committees received over the idea that they wouldn’t be interested in nominating a student voice for a committee to consider … er … student support (you really couldn’t make this up, you know – even the OU’s hierarchy couldn’t believe it – never mind the students).

But don’t be misled into thinking that any opinion voiced by any student is going to be of any interest to Caligula and her horse. There was this very ephemeral discussion group called “OUSA Consultations” where students were encouraged to publish their views on OUSA and the Executive Committee. One student wrote “load of crap” (well, he or she didn’t, but that was the gist of his or her message) and Caligula and her horse were so impressed by this remarkable display of honesty that she banned the poster from the airwaves for a month. Such is the manner in which dissent is dealt with in OUSA. Even Pol Pot would be impressed with that.

But the interesting point about this committee to look at OUSA Sutures is that it is charged to “consider the role that OUSA will play in the future“. You don’t need a committee to sit and consider this. I can tell you the answer right now without leaving my seat – and that is “bugger all”.

As long as OUSA has Caligula and her horse in charge, aided and abetted by your friend and mine Turdi de Hatred, OUSA will do as the OU tells it and likes it. Not a single member of the committee has the b@ll$ to stand up to the University and tell it to p155 off. Someone needs to be reminded that it is the students who are the customers and they are the people in the chair – they are the ones with the dosh.

The University exists to support the students, not the other way round, and it should therefore be the students – not the hide-bound chairborne wonders – who should be calling the shots. When are the students going to elect delegates with courage instead of this rabble?

But even more interesting is that OUSA Sutures has been on the cards now for well over two years, and OUSA has now reached the stage where we are going to have a committee to look at the implications.

And only after two and a bit years. Rip van Winkle, eat your heart out!

Friday 4th September 2009 – I’VE FINISHED THE POLYSTYRENE TODAY.

loft insulation space blanket les guis virlet puy de dome franceAll the silver has now turned to white, and there are lots of cables hanging down from the ceiling for the light fittings. I’m afraid that all the cables are buried, albeit in trunking, as I’m not planning any maintenance on them. I’m not sure what maintenance they might need.

Next task – which I should have finished today – is to turn the white into silver by putting up some battens on the wall and covering the wall with this insulation stuff.

loft insulation polystyrene les guis virlet puy de dome franceFrom Brico Depot tomorrow I’ll be buying the under-flooring – 22mm chipboard or OSB. That’s what I’ll be fitting when the wall has been insulated.

But I need the shower base (I’ll try not to drop it tomorrow) as I have to design the shower room and then alter the floor plan of the attic to take into account where the bathroom will be – one or two beams neeed repositioning and we need some pillars. So that’s not going to be straightforward.

Once the floor is in (my task for next week once the insulation is done) I can get the plasterboard for the walls. I’m going for the standard with a backing of 40mm of insulation. All in all, that will be a hell of a lot of insulation.

After that, I need to reposition the stairs and to put up a false wall to keep the stairs enclosed and stop the heat disappearing.

Which reminds me – this insulation is working. For the last two days the highest temperature in the attic has been higher than the highest temperature in my little room, and also, I put my had down the back of the polystyrene as i was fitting the last piece, and there was definitely heat being trapped in there.

I’m not bothered about the quality of the flooring though. I’ll be fitting some laminate over the top which will cover it nicely.

And talking of temperature, the summer has now ended. 2 consecutive days of rain (3 of the last 4 have seen rain) and I have a jacket on in here. Winter is definitely on its way.

In other news, I see that the Septics are up in arms about Iran appointing a suspected terrorist as a Government minister. The hypocrisy is unbelievable and you certainly couldn’t make up a story like this one.

Just WHO do they think that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of the Northern Irish government are? And the Septics brokered the peace deal that put them in power.

Of course you might be thinking that Adams and McGuinness are white and not brown or black and that makes all the difference as far as Americans are concerned – but that can’t be it. Didn’t the Septics fete Nelson Persondela when he became President of South Africa?

And never mind the “suspected terrorist” – he was actually a convicted terrorist and furthermore, the reason why he did the full 27 years and didn’t get parole was because he refused to renounce violence as a means of furthering his political aims (and one of the best definitions of a terrorist is “someone who resorts to violence to further his political aims”).

It’s just further proof of another famous definition associated with terrorists – namely “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” If the Septics and most of the British can pull their heads out of their nether regions for 5 minutes and take a dispassionate view of what’s happening in the world today, they can see that what the Iraqis are dojng in Iraq against the Americans and what the Afghans are doing in Afghanistan to the NATO farces, it’s no different to what the French and the Yugoslav and the other resistants did to the Nazis who had overrun their countries.

And the response by the American and NATO farces is no different to what the Nazis did to the resistants. Never mind your “illegal foreign combatants” in Iraq and Afghanistan – what about the British and other forces that were parachuted in to occupied Europe in the period 1942-45?

This current western hypocrisy makes me sick

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

attic loft space blanket insulation 12 volt domestic wiring circuit les guis virlet puy de dome france… 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.

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

new chipboard panel front doorles guis virlet puy de dome franceWell, 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.

open front door to outside les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut 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!

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

rainwater harvesting les guis virlet puy de dome france… 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.

electrical panel 12 volt domestic electrical circuit les guis virlet puy de dome france
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.

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

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

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

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

I dunno how I manage it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And not before time too.

Saturday 25th JULY 2009 – I WAS GOING TO SHOW YOU ALL ….

kwikstage scaffolding plywood les guis virlet puy de dome france… a photo of the front of the house with the insulation on, but we didn’t have time to take a photo of it.

I was up early this morning and while waiting for Terry I did some tidying up in the barn. I have to record this as me tidying up in the barn is a pretty rare event,

First thing that Terry and I did after he arrived was to thread 4 strands of 6mm cable through a 25mm flexible conduit (for the two solar arrays that will be on the roof) and 2 strands of 6mm cable through some 25mm flexible conduit for the wind turbine that will be on the apex of the roof. Then we cut a channel through the wall, fastened the conduit in and cemented it down. So that’s the wiring organised.

Dave turned up some time through the performance and if two pairs of hands are a vast improvement on one, then three pairs of hands are an even greater improvement. We had the insulation on in no time and without stopping fastened down the battening and had half the plywood on by 17:00. That was some impressive work and we can be proud of what we accomplished today.

Tomorrow Terry is having a day off and taking Liz to the chainsaw-carving. We have to keep Liz happy as our supplies of food depend upon it and the food is too good to miss out on. I’m going to have one of those rare days where I’m going to sit around the house and do absolutely nothing at all. I think I’ve earned it.