Tag Archives: bank holiday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

vauxhall cavalier car clock renault clio electric timer dump load les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe proof of the pudding is of course in the eating and now that this system is wired in I can put a 12-volt clock in line to tell me how long the circuit is open.

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

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

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

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

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Monday 24th May 2010 – There were about 15 of us …

… including Clotilde and Heidi from the Conversation Group, who went for this tramp in the woods today. Unfortunately the tramp got away but never mind – we’ll get him next time.

coal mine abandoned pithead winding gear gouttieres puy de dome franceFirst place we were taken to was deep in the woods at the back of Gouttieres, and here we uncovered some old machinery.

It is in fact some old pithead winding gear – a winding frame of sorts and a steam engine to power it – and dates from the turn of the 20th Century when this mine-shaft was sunk to exploit the coal seam here.

St Eloy les Mines was well-known for its coal mines, as I have said many times in the past and as the quest for fuel intensified at the end of the 19th Century they started to sink shafts at the peripheral edges of the valley.

coal mine abandoned pithead winding gear gouttieres puy de dome franceThey struck a good, profitable seam at Youx and Montjoie and so they followed it right through to the edge of the plateau where the valley opens out into the valley of the Sioule.

Early indications were promising and several mines were sunk in the area between Gouttieres and Lapeize, including this site in the forest at the back of Gouttieres. They had high hopes for the area – even going to the lengths of making a huge goods yard at the railway station at Gouttieres for the trans-shipment of the mined coal.

A great deal of investment was made in the area, not just with the mine installations themselves but even dividing up farmland into tiny plots for housing for the workers, but all hopes were dashed as the coal quite literally turned to dust.

puits michelin abandoned coal mine lapeize gouttieres puy de dome franceNot one of the pits that were sunk lasted more than a handful of years. It was quickly discovered that the reserves were nothing like as prolific as everyone was expecting and there was insufficient coal to make the proposition an economic one.

Even the massive Puits Michelin at Lapeize, the remains of which can be seen in this photograph, lasted no more than 5 years. The huge area that was set aside for a slag heap rose to no more than about 20 feet high.

surface coal seam lapeize gouttieres puy de dome franceWe visited the site of 3 or 4 mines but the highlight of the visit, from one point of view at least, was finding the final outcrop of surface coal.

Here, we are probably no more than 300 metres from the Puits Michelin and this is where the coal seam ends. It just curves upwards to the surface and that is that. No wonder that it wasn’t possible to make an economic proposition of coal-mining in the area with the coal seam petering out like this.

A small amount of open-cast mining was carried out here but it was done in a very desultory, half-hearted fasion and never amounted to very much at all.

After a stop for iced water we went to look at the quarries at Lapeize.

gres de lapeize quarry puy de dome franceThe area is famous for the “Grès de Lapeize” – a hard silty millstone grit type of rock with a close affinity to sandstone and there are 5 major outcrops in the Lapeize area.

These have been quarried for centuries, if not millennia, and many important buildings in the area, including the Chateau de Pionsat, are made from the stone.

They closed down just prior to World War II but some kind of desultory attempt was made to restart them but it was doomed to failure. But in 1970 one of the quarries was bought (for a pittance) by a man from St Georges de Mons who was going to build a hotel there and he needed the stone.

old car american GMC world war II lorry side valve - cylinder gres de lapeize quarry puy de dome franceNow Krys told me to look out for fossils (I suppose she meant something other than my fellow walkers)  but never mind that – the guy who bought the quarry took a wartime American GMC truck – 6-cylinder petrol sidevalve – into the quarry. And people say that it was fitted with a mechanical crane to scoop up the rock.

And one day he simply stopped coming and his truck is still there.

So I had a good nosy around it. It’s been robbed of many parts but its major components are still there. And it’s not a mechanical bucket on the back, it’s a mechanical prodder-type of ram-type of drill for breaking the stone off the wall and into manageable chunks.

Still, hottest day of the year so far – 34.5 degrees and the heat exchanger went off the scale – the first time since 6th August last year.

However it got off to a bad start. Being a Bank Holiday I was planning on a lie-in but not one but two phone calls shortly after 09:00 knackered that idea.

And it’s still warm now. It reached over 27 degrees in here even with all of the windows open and as I type – at 01:40 with all of the windows open and a pleasant breeze blowing in, it’s still 24.7 degrees. Summer has well and truly acumen in. Lude sing cucu, hey what?

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Saturday 1st May 2010 – Yes, I was right

It was a bank holiday today. And everywhere was indeed closed, as I found out when I got to St Eloy les Mines this afternoon. It’s quite ironic in a way – it’s the fete de travail, the festival of work, and so everyone celebrates the festival of work by … errrr … not working.

So with St Eloy being closed I came back here and carried on with what I was doing before I went out – namely “badger all”. as you know, bank holidays count as days of rest for me and I never do anything.

It’s rained as well – 4.5mm, which means that in the past two days we have had 14mm of rain. Now given that the footprint of my verandah is about 4.5mx1.5m, which gives a surface area of 6.75 square metres, and 1 cubic metre is the equivalent of 1000 litres, then to get 1000 litres off the verandah of the roof and into the water butts I need 149mm of rain (that’s right, isn’t it, Krys?). so 14mm of rain has given me 94.5 litres, which is about 20% of my capacity (I have 2×230 litre water butts). Some of the plants are starting to go berserk and I don’t reckon it will be long before I can start eating my radishes.

And no footy tonight either. I was at a loss for things to do. Still, the big grudge match tomorrow – bottom-of-the-table clash between Pionsat and Effiat. Kick-off 15:00 and not to be missed.

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