The plasterboarding on the two outside walls in the bedroom is only up to 2.50 metres whereas the room itself is about 2.78. What I’ve done in the gaps is to run all of the conduit and trunking for the electric cables, as you may have already seen. For the side wall, I can make up the difference by building up with some plasterboard strips and then put a plank of 4.50 x 10 over the trunking so that it looks like a beam (the real outer beam is of course hidden in the 80mm of insulation on the wall).

But a big hunt around didn’t uncover a suitable plank and so I need to go to the sawmill, unless anyone has a suitable beam lying around anywhere. Of course I could use two smaller planks but it would look silly. Whoever heard of a beam with a join in it?

For the front wall I’ll be using plasterboard with 20mm of insulation behind it and cut to a castellated shape to fit between the beams. And so today I’ve been fitting the longitudinal laths between the beams so that I can infill between the beams with tongue-and-grooving to hide the 60mm of insulation there, and then I fitted some stand-off brackets on the front wall to take the plasterboard. This is all very finicky work and as you know I don’t do finicky and so it’s really slowwwwww. But it’s progress all the same

I’ve also made a change at the top of the stairs just here. I had a huge old cardboard box that I had opened out and used as an insulated wall covering, to cover over the back of the plasterboarding into my attic (I can’t cover it properly as I’ll be running the water pipes down there in due course). But a bit of measuring up revealed that the offcuts of the space-blanket insulation from when I did the walls of the bedroom – they would be a perfect fit and so I took the box off and redid it. And it’s cut down all the draughts that came in through there. But the firewood doesn’t like it and just now one of the boxes of firewood went crashing down the stairs decanting its contents all over the place.

This afternoon I braved the Hound of the Baskervilles and went round to Bill’s. He had a 100-litre immersion heater that was fairly new and which he was giving away to a good home. It has a slight leak around the electriclty plate, but that’s no problem for me as I’ll be taking it off anyway and fitting my own with one of my 12-volt elements.

He also had a small 50-litre immersion heater as well that was looking for a good home. And that got me thinking. Heater elements are what is known as “resistance elements” and so will work with any kind of voltage. And so with 50 litres, which isn’t a lot of water but more than I ever need, I could use it as the dump load for the set-up in the barn and run my 12-volt surplus current into it directly. With the element rated at 220 volts and with me putting 13.4 volts through it, I’d be getting only 0.06 of the power output (if the element is rated at 1200 watts I’d be getting about 75 watts – if it’s rated at an unlikely 3kw I would be getting about 180 watts) but 50 litres in a proper insulated tank won’t need all that much power to warm up. What I will need to do is to find a way of fitting a temperature sensor in there so that I can keep an eye on the temperature.

Of course, it might not work. But the whole idea is that it’s an experiment and we can see what happens.

But I had a bad night last night. I woke up at about 04:00 with a nightmare (a long time since I’ve had one of those) and I couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards. I’ll be having an early night.

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