Tag Archives: solar shower

Saturday 21st August 2010 – Here’s an interesting photo.

The time is 17:47, the air temperature outside underneath the solar shower is 31°C, and the water in the solar heating tank, all 20 or so litres of it, is 44°C.

Today has been a right scorcher right enough and I almost scalded myself when I had a shower. Believe me, 44°C is really hot and I am ever so impressed that I have managed to heat to this extent 20 litres of water in a black plastic container with an old caravan window over the top

But that’s not all either. The automatic water heater ran for several hours and I had 44.5°C in that. And that’s 50 litres of water in an open bucket with a 12-volt heater element floating on top, heated by surplus energy from the solar panels that would otherwise be dumped. Just imagine what the temperature would have been if it had been 30 litres of water in a sealed and insulated container.

That’s going to be my next trick – making an immersion heater, and I have a 30-litre container all lined up for use. All I need now is the time.

I reckon that the water heating, in summer anyway, is making great strides, and I have plans for the winter too. They involve some of that flexible copper tubing would round the chimney of my wood-burning stove. I also have 3 solar panels and a 400-watt wind turbine in the barn and I don’t use the power from there all that much – just the lighting in the barn, the washing machine and charging up the power tools. So if I made a portable immersion heater then in winter I could take it to the barn and rig up an automatic water heating system over there. I reckon that the batteries in the barn were fully-charged on an average of one day in two throughout last winter. Probably not by much, but nevertheless it will be worth seeing what happens over there and what results I would get.

While we are on the subject, I bumped into Simon at LIDL today. He had a 12-volt water tank in his van and he took it out a while ago. He’s offered it to me so I’ll install that in the barn for now and see what happens.

I had an expensive day out shopping today and I blew a mammoth €35. And all on the usual stuff today – nothing exciting or extravagant. I don’t know where my money goes. And while I was in the Carrefour I had to give directions to this Dutch guy who was looking for a public convenience for his little girl. And it wasn’t until we’d been talking for a few minutes and he said “are you English? I think that your Dutch is excellent” that I realised that we had been talking in Dutch. Well – he might have been, and I was replying in Flemish – ik spreek een beetje Vlaams – but I’m really going to have a go at remembering some of the languages I used to be able to speak.

What got me thinking about languages too was that I had a visitor this evening – the guy off this building site who wanted to talk about solar panels. He studied in the Soviet Union round about the same time that I was driving buses there and I reckon that I can’t remember anything at all of all the Russian I used to speak.

I’ve also been tidying up here. I have some tie-wraps with screw-holes that will be ideal for a job that we are doing on Lieneke’s house. But can I hell find them and my place is just a total tip. It’s high time I exerted myself to make an effort – yet another job for when this perishing job on Lieneke’s house is finished

Tuesday 17th August 2010 – Tomorrow the World!

Do you remember that plant that I showed you a photograph of the other day – the one that had taken over the greenhouse? It’s actually a gherkin plant and here you can see it leaving the greenhouse and setting out for Montlucon.

At the rate that it’s going, it’ll get there before any UK Council Worker or British Rail porter will, that’s for sure, and who knows where it will head for next?

I’ve been gardening again today. Or at least, this afternoon.

We had done as much as we could on the roof today. The cement on the stone cladding on the side of the house hadn’t quite set and you can’t put too many stones on a cladded wall like this in one go, and the tiles that we had ordered for the roof hadn’t arrived.

We hadn’t had instructions from Lieneke about the inside of the lean-to either, and with Terry and Simon needing to price up some more material, we decided on a half-day on the roof.

I dug up the garlic and weeded the onion bed – that was the first thing. Strangely, only half the garlic had taken and the other half was in its single clove. The latter I replanted in one of the herb troughs to see what happens. But there’s nothing like enough garlic – I’ll need to bear that in mind.

And while weeding, I noticed the onions. Nothing like enough of them either but they are there all right.

I also tidied up all of the wood at the front of the barn – the left-over new stuff at least. I need a rainy day so that I can have the time to stack it correctly inside without having to worry about working on Lieneke’s roof. In fact I have tons of jobs to do really – let’s hope that this week will see us finish the roof.

You’ll notice a couple of little changes in the lean-to too. I’ve moved a couple of sheets of iron and now the end wall is totally exposed. I’ve fitted (at the top, at least) two demi-chevrons that will guide me in forming the top of the long wall.

There was a full drum of waste in the mixer when we knocked off and it was a lovely chalky mix and so I did a pile of pointing, including that corner of the other lean-to where I lived for a while and which was getting damp.

I cleaned out the mixer with stones again. built a couple of thin walls and poured the mixture in between. I hadn’t quite sealed the wall as you can see and so some of the stuff leaked out, but it’s progress all the same.

A solar shower (the summer sort-of came back today) and that was my lot.

The automatic water-heater switched on too – and a temperature of 45.5 degrees. This is looking quite optimistic.

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Sunday 8th August 2010 – It was Sunday today.

And there was a vintage vehicle exhibition and brocante at St Maurice pres Pionsat as well.

And so I stayed at home.

Mind you it was … errrr …. 11:30 when I woke up and so I’d missed a good deal of the day. And then with working on my web site until 14:00 I missed a good deal more. But I went into Pionsat to the baker’s – and it was shut! It seems that last Sunday was a one-off seeing as how it ought to have been Pionsat’s brocante last week. But as I was quietly GRRRRRing to myself, out of the door came the boulangere, and so she sold me what I needed. It must have been my lucky day!

Back at the ranch, seeing as I wasn’t going anywhere I lit a huge bonfire and burnt a pile of stuff that has been lingering around here, and I also burnt the dried weeds that I had pulled up when I was working with Lieneke. In fact one of the reasons why I’m still awake now is that the fire is merrily burning away and I can’t go to bed leaving it unattended. But make the most of the sunny day – it won’t last, this weather.

I also installed the compost bin properly in its proper place this afternoon after the temporary installation last night and added the compost from the collapsed plastic composting bin. At the moment it’s four sections high and the three that are currently unused are in shot. I’ll have to think of a place to put them.

You can also see the chassis for the Citroen 2CV that formed the basis of the Lomax kit car I once owned. There’s also a solar garden light and one of the solar cookers for the composting toilet. The others have now been incorporated into the compost and given a liberal dosing of potash.

Nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus are the essential ingredients for any fertiliser. There are plenty of nitrogen and phosphorus in the contents of a composting toilet and wood-ash is a good source of potassium. So all the essential ingredients for my garden are right to hand. Now all I need to do is to work out how I can move the methane digester and add the contents of that to the compost. I reckon that I ought to neutralise its contents with plenty of wood ash and sawdust first though but that will just add to the weight.

Nevertheless, things are slowly moving around here. The composting bin was another thing that I’ve been meaning to do for ages and I’m glad it’s in position now.

I was so engrossed that it was 18:30 when I knocked off. And on a Sunday too! A nice hot 41°C shower rounded the day off quite nicely. Tomorrow I imagine that we will be back on that blasted roof.

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Wednesday 28th July 2010 – I had another day off today …

… because Terry was elsewhere, and I celebrated it with something of a lie-in.

After breakfast I did some more work on my website, which has fallen way behind schedule, and then I finally managed to do a big load of washing, what with the wind and the weather being all right for that sort of thing. It’s amazing how much washing there was but then again I haven’t done any for a while.

After a late lunch I emptied Caliburn out. I’ve lost my SatNav and I’ve no idea where it might be. It’s nowhere in Caliburn as far as I can see and it’s annoying me, this.

Terry suggests that I look elsewhere for it in case I may have taken it out of Caliburn at some time, but around here, where on earth do you start? You can be here for a week and only just scratch the surface. I reckon it’s well and truly gone.

But at least Caliburn is now fully empty, and he needs to be. We have a scaffolding to pick up in a week or so and the other trailer has now apparently gone tits-up. This is annoying me! We are going to have to collect it in the two vans.

When I knocked off I had a shower – the solar shower was showing 36 degrees and that’s warm enough. The automatic heater fired itself up as well today and reached 33 degrees, 11 degrees above the ambient. Add on another 11 degrees for a closed lid and another 11 degrees for insulation and you can see how this is all going to work when I install a tank instead. I noticed by the way that even with the fridge running and the water heater working there was still an excess of solar power. I might have to fit two elements instead of just one.

But talking of the fridge, there’s no thermostat on mine and so it runs 24 hours per day 7 days per week. And at 5 amps that’s a total of 120 amp-hours, or about 1.45Kw. But Conforama where I bought my bed settee from, they are offering a table top fridge – twice as big as mine – that uses just 0.37Kw per day – or about 32 amp-hours. And it’s an A+ so there’s bound to be a ton of insulation stuffed into it, so I’m currently thinking about abandoning my 12-volt fridge, buying a small inverter that will power the fridge and then having the inverter switched into the dump load. When the batteries are fully charged the inverter will fire up and run the fridge as well as the water heater and when the battery charge drops the inverter (and the fridge) switch off.

The big advantage of this is that on a good day it takes until about 12:30 for the batteries to be fully charged. with no fridge running through the night the batteries will be fully-charged in an hour or so and that’ll give me more time for the water heater and the fridge will be running away in the background on its minimal power requirement.

I shall have to look into this.

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 – Terry had other things to do today …

… so he didn’t come down today. Mind you he did ring me at 08:00 to tell me not to wake up, which was kind of him.

So I had a relaxed morning doing not very much. I checked on Lieneke’s house to make sure things were okay and that was that. I was going to do some washing but the weather wasn’t stable enough for that. I need to do some soon as I’m running out of clothes.

This afternoon we went to record our monthly programmes and this was full of hitches. The guy who takes us had his floosie with him and so engrossed were they in talking that he missed our exit on the Motorway and we had to drive miles out of our way to get to the studio. And then they had a technician in repairing the computer so we had to wait an hour or so.

And then the computer still wasn’t working so we had to record our programmes on the analogue tape machine.

And then the tape jammed

And then we ran out of tape.

So all in all it took hours.

And that is really that. I’m thoroughly exhausted and I’m going to have another early night. I’ve not even managed to make myself any food.

But summer has returned. The solar shower reached 35 degrees and if I had made it home earlier than 18:15 I would have had a shower. And the automatic water heater started up again. Only 20 minutes but it pushed the water temp up by 4 degrees.

Tomorrow I may even have a shower if the weather keeps up.

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Saturday 17th July 2010 – I’ve not done much today

After having had to work on a Bank Holiday and on the odd Sunday just recently I’ve been taking it easy.

A leisurely morning entering the stats into the computer and then at lunchtime going to Commentry for shopping. Aldi produced s few tins of metal paint to replace the one we used on the caravan chassis a few weeks ago and Centrakor – one of the cheapo shops produced a shower curtain. But as usual the other cheap shop – Les Bonnes Affaires – produced the goods – a huge pile of plastic storage containers at 10 for €1 so I bought 30 of them. And then I can sort out all my nails and screws properly.

Most of the day was miserable and it didn’t lighten up until late afternoon. The water didn’t get hot enough for a solar shower and the electric water heater didn’t click in. But never mind.

But while doing the statistics it was interesting to see the figures of solar energy received for the first day that the automatic heater ran. Bank 1 gave an impressive 153.3 amp-hours and bank 2 gave a record 130.7. So now that I have somewhere to dump all of the electricity then you can see that my system is capable of generating almost 285 amp-hours of electricity – that’s over 3KwH – in a good day. And I’m quite pleased with that. Next task is to put up the remaining wind turbine. That should be even more impressive.

Friday 16th July 2010 – I’ve made a couple of changes …

… to the automatic water heater. First thing was to fit the top of the element (where all of the wires are) into a watertight box so that the risk of them being splashed with water is minimised.

There’s also a little LED warning light fitted to tell me when the diverter is working and current is reaching the element.

I’ve added a double-keel to the pontoon as well. The element protrudes 19cms below the pontoon so I fitted a keel of 20cms, 1 each side of the element, so that if the water level drops the element won’t ground out and cause a short circuit.

Finally, I’ve fitted a 50-amp fuse on the control board, just in case anything extraordinary happens.

After that I cleared off some weeds and brambles from the side of the lean-to that faces down the garden. Once they had been cleared I laid down a few pallets and started bringing the cut wood out of the lean-to and stacking it on the pallets. I need to move this wood as I want to put the composting toilet there – I need the space where that currently is for other purposes.

But I didn’t do that for long as Lieneke arrived and started to clear out her field that is next to mine. It’s been a bit of a mess for years but now she’s started on it and so I felt obliged to join in on my side of the fence.

I’ve moved much of the wood from here and stacked it around the back of the barn. And then I pulled up the weeds nettles and brambles that were stuck in the wall. Lieneke needed a hand to move a huge load of barbed wire that she had found in her meadow and there was so much of that that it took quite a while.

But you’ll also notice that I’ve put the left-hand gate back on its hinges, and doing that was important. One of the side effects of clearing the weeds and brambles is that there is now a clear shot from the lane down to where I have my shower. And of course I don’t want to give any of the locals an inferiority complex

So for that reason, until I can get a shower curtain I’ll be taking my solar showers behind the gate.

But I need to move the composting toilet tomorrow. I can’t now use it where it is at the moment.

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Thursday 15th July 2010 – After about almost a year …

… of waiting to fix that downpipe on the side of the house and it being in position for just a couple of weeks, I took it down today.

There were two reasons for that –
firstly – all of the rainwater from the house and the lean-to are just running off down the lane and turning the place into a quagmire
secondly – the water situation is starting to become a little tight- I reckon I have about 150 litres or so left.
And when it rains, the 6.5 sq.m of verandah roof doesn’t catch all that much – 100 litres of water is about 15mm of rain. But add to that the footprint of the lean-to – 5m x 1.8m, or 9 sq.m, then the 100 litres of water becomes 6mm of rain. And then add that to the side of the house roof – with its footprint of 5.3m x 3.5m or just over 18.5 sq m then the 100 litres of water becomes just under 3mm of rain.

Sitting here the other day watching the rain filling up that water butt by the barn with all of the water off the barn roof has given me some new ideas which I put into action.

What I did was to rip off all of the guttering on the lean-to and to replace it so that it slopes to the right rather than the left. The guttering now captures all of the water off the lean-to and now I can replenish my water supply more quickly – always of course assuming that it’s ever going to rain again.

This morning though I removed all of the wood from off the old vegetable patch at the side of the barn – all that we ripped off the one side of the roof. 3 of the beams are useless and will have to be cut up for firewood but of the others some of the wood can be salvaged and I might start shortly on the greenhouse, using the old beams as a frame.

While I was at it, and with the old vegetable patch now being clear of wood, I set to work on that with a vengeance.

I spent a pleasant hour or two pulling out all of the weeds that were growing over the stone wall and now you can actually see it, for the first time since I don’t know when. This place is starting to tidy itself up a bit and that’s a pleasant change.

The automatic electric water heater is working too. It ran for almost three hours today and I put a thermometer in to see what the temperature was doing. 37°C the water reached in that time so not much danger of the sytem melting down, although if I make a sealed circuit with a smaller tank I shall either fit a thermal cut-out of have an expansion tank of some description. But it’s still impressive all the same.

Ironically the water in the solar water heater reached a lovely 44°C this evening and so I had a nice steamy shower.

What with one thing and another things are starting to get quite luxurious around here!

Sunday 11th July 2010 – Now how weird is this?

I’ve had one of those days today that just became more and more weird as it drew on.

I went to Espinasse this afternoon for the local fete and as far as I was concerned it was a fete worse than death.

it got off to a bad start in my opinion before the day even started. We had the typical defilé as you might expect, but whoever heard of a village fete here in the Combrailles where there wasn’t even a hint of a brocante? The Combrailles is the brocante capital of the world and the locals will vider their greniers at the drop of a hat. All we had today was a brocan’t, and that’s not on at all.

Highlight was the Irish musicians who came on stage at 18:00.

Now I bet you that you can go into any Irish pub anywhere in the whole wide world, or any folk night anywhere in any English-speaking area of the world, or anywhere wherever any Celtic musicians might be grouped and the first two songs that you will always hear will be “Dirty Old Town” and “The Wild Rover”.

And here in the backwoods, miles from civilisation and 200 years behind the times, what did these Irish musicians play as his first two songs? YEEEEUUUUCCCCCHHHHHHH. I had a word with him about it afterwards, and his response was “ohh well”. Yes – ohh well indeed.

But that was not the most weird part of all of this. They stopped the music mid set …. to draw the lottery numbers and shout out the prizewinners. It was just like being in any Workingmen’s Club anywhere in the United Kingdom where they would stop the … entertainment … (and I use the term loosely) so that they could play bingo.

It was absolutely unbelievable.

Another thing that we had today that was astonishing was a politically-correct May Queen. Normally the May Queen of any village is a young teenage or preteen girl and there are good reasons for this, especially for the pagans amongst us, those of us who are more than 2,000 years old and with long memories and those of us happen to know a little about early medieval village life.

But of course the way the world is these days in the UK and other such cases it’s becoming less and less politically correct to have a real May Queen just in case someone might photograph her – but who would ever have thought that such a taboo (because that’s what it is in the strictest and literal sense of the word) would have reached down here?

Mind you, I know that it’s not a politically-correct thing to say, but it could just maybe be because they couldn’t find a virgin in the village?

Another thing that caught my eye was an American from Colorado Springs wandering around and wearing a T-shirt reading
“Land of the Free
Home of the Brave”.
Anyone who has ever read anything that I have ever written will know all about my opinion about the USA being “The Land of the Free“. Everywhere I’ve ever been in the USA it’s always been “please prepare your admission money”.

As for “Home of the Brave” – well Manifest Destiny, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee as well as hundreds if not thousands of other similar “incidents” saw to it that there are no longer any braves in the USA.

In fact the more I thought about it, the more offended I was about that blasted T-shirt and in the end I went and had an “frank exchange of views” with the wearer.

There was clearly something up with me today – I don’t normally let things like this get to me. It must have been the heat. In the end I came home and had a shower (and we aren’t talking about Open University Students Association’s Executive Committee either). 19:45 and still 43 degrees in the container. I’ve picked a good site for that.

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Saturday 10th July 2010 – There was no mistake this morning …

… about the weather. I awoke quite early to the sound of what was without question a driving rainstorm. And when I went out a little later we had had about 4.5mm of rainfall through the night.

That may not sound like a lot and over a surface area of 6.5 square metres (the verandah) where about 155mm of rainfall would make 1000 litres, then the 30 litres of rain from today is pretty small beer.

But off just one side of the barn roof, which has a footprint of about 16m x 3.5m, or 56 square metres, then almost ten times that is quite a lot.

You’ll see the impromptu drainage system that I’ve rigged up (don’t worry that it is neither straight nor square – this is just a temporary lash-up) and if you look closely at the 203-litre water butt, you’ll see that it’s overflowing. And quite right too!

So much so in fact that I’m going to change some of the drainage around on the house so that the drainage on the lean-to (all 8 square metres of it plus the part of the house roof that falls onto there) will drain into the water butts at the verandah.

Terry has found me some puzzolane and I’ve also thought of yet another amelioration to the water supply and so I reckon that next week I’ll have a good go at this.

Lieneke woke me up this morning. She needed to talk to Terry and so I gave her all of his contact details. It involves The Folding Stuff so it’s pretty important. And after computing for a while I did a couple of odd jobs. I now have a bracket for holding the ramps onto the towing dolly and I’ve also done something with the guttering on the far side of the barn.

I haven’t shown you anything of the solar shower yet. I spent some time this afternoon working on it and now that it is sort-of finished for the moment, all can be revealed.

We’ve started off with a black IKEA storage box, of which I have more than a few lying around here. I’ve drilled a hole in the bottom and fitted a connection with a tap. And then we have a simple shower pipe and head from my old place in Brussels.

But that’s not the most exciting part of it. I’ve erected a metal framework using an old set of shelving units and put the storage box onto the top, covering it with an old caravan window. It’s nothing exciting, but it all seems to work.

I’ve an idea about filling it too but that calls for yet more engineering, but seeing as it was 19:15 when I knocked off (and I still managed to find the time to fit in a solar shower from the old system) I called it a day instead.

But I’m intrigued to see how this new siting of the solar water will fit in with the temperature readings that I have been keeping. It’ll attract the sun much earlier in the day for a start, that’s for sure.

And in other news, my brassica have now been attacked by the Cabbage White Butterfly and four times a day I’m engaged with stripping the caterpillars off the plants before they strip the plants. So far it’s a draw but it’s hard work.

And in other other news, it seems that I was rather careless when potting up some seeds. I now have a huge tomato plant growing in the middle of the greenhouse.

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Friday 9th July 2010 – As I have said before ….

… if you are the kind of person who is always in a hurry or rushing around for appointments and the like then you don’t want to be living around here.

Not with leviathans like this roaming around the lanes round here anyway.

I encountered these two beasts on my way back from Commentry. The other side of Ronnet it was, and it wasn’t until we reached the Abbey of Bellaigues that they took the high road and I took the low road. About 6 miles of 25kph with nowhere to pass them. Ahhh well!

This morning I was awoken at 06:04 by a storm – howling winds and all that kind of thing. I was half-expecting torrential rain but when I finally crawled out of my stinking pit (09:40 – I was having a lie-in after my efforts on the roof) there wan’t a trace of anything.I surely can’t have dreamt it all?

So a couple of hours catching up on the computer and then off to Commentry for shopping. And nothing really interesting at all. But even more interesting – I’m trying to set up my water filters and can I elephants find any puzzolane. I asked inter alia at the local builders’ merchants and he had to look up in his catalogue before telling me that he didn’t have any. In case you are wondering what puzzolane is, it’s a certain type of volcanic lava – lightweight, porous and made of carbon and it’s a superb natural water filter.

In the Puy de Dome there are over 80 dormant volcanoes all of which have produced puzzolane, and not for nothing is this region littered with commercialised natural springs – Volvic being the prime example but there are many others. All the ground water is filtered through the natural puzzolane layers. So why can’t I get hold of any?

Back at Pooh Corner, having unloaded Caliburn, I made a desultory start on tidying up. But the weather clouded over and it looked like rain so grabbing hold of a few offcuts and odds-and-ends I’ve rigged up a kind of downspout system for one of my spare 203-litre water butts to catch the rain that might fall on the barn roof.

And badger me if, when I came in and read my messages, that Krys hadn’t written to me to suggest that I think about a way of collecting the rainwater that falls on the roof. Great Minds or Fools, Ms Stephenson?

And now it’s 00:30 – 7 hours after I fixed this downspout – and it’s rumbling away with thunder and flashing away with lightning and not a drop of rain has fallen. All my plants and I could do with a heavy downpour, especially through the night. I can’t wait to see the water cascade off the barn roof and into the water butt.

And another solar shower this evening. That’s 6 consecutive days. I was never this clean when I lived in my apartment in Brussels!

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Wednesday 7th July 2010 – We’ve almost finished this roof

We started off by changing many of the chevrons and fitting the laths. All of this lot, in fact. But despite what it looked like, it didn’t take long at all and it was finished before midday, even with the little alterations we needed to make.

But I now know why there was a very large overhang on the other side. The two sides of the barn roof are different length and we’ve put the sheets on the wrong side of the roof. Hence we were struggling for space here and I had to cut the ends off some of the chevrons on this side.

>But after an early lunch we started to put the sheets on and by 16:00 we were finished.

All that remained for today was the fitting of the ridge sheets but that was another story. I managed to fit half of one and that took half an hour. It was no fun mauling them over the apex of a hot tin roof in a scorching sunlight. They wouldn’t bend where they were supposed to and when they did the screws weren’t long enough to fasten them down.

There was no point getting frustrated and so in the end we called it an early day. We’ll have another go tomorrow and use some longer stainless steel screws, some silicone washers and a couple of speed clamps. And if that doesn’t work we’ll use a pilot drill and some pop rivets. But I’ll get them on somehow.

Once they are done, there’s just trimming the sheets, fixing the guttering and then dismantling the scaffolding and that will be that. And I won’t half be relieved. I was so knackered that after Terry went I sat in a chair and crashed out until 18:00. But another solar shower (the fourth consecutive one) brought me round.

And that’s Friday’s job – working on the solar shower.

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Sunday 4th July 2010 – Even though it was Sunday today …

… I’ve been working today. Yes, it does occasionally happen.

In this photo you can see the huge stack of wood that I treated with xylophene wood treatment – the stuff that kills all of the nasty beasties.

In fact it didn’t take all that long to do – not if you line all the bits up adjacent to each other and attack them with a paint roller soaked in the stuff (that’s what the black container is for). All you do is to whallop the stuff on, turn the wood on its side and do the next side and then keep on going until all of the sides and all of the pieces are done.

Before that I was up a ladder repositioning a gutter mounting bracket and then taking down the mast for the wind turbine – that’s going to be mounted elsewhere as you know. And I took the opportunity to hunt down a spare blade (and that wasn’t easy either) to replace the one that broke a while ago.

Lieneke came around for a chat too – she’s going to talk to Terry about some work. And once she had gone it was shower-time, and we aren’t talking about the Open University Students Association either. 36°C the water was at 18;20 when I knocked off and so I took full advantage. After all, I missed the swimming baths yesterday.

This morning though I didn’t do too much. After all it is Sunday. 2 telephone calls one after the other summoned me from my reverie at some ungodly hour … “you mean 10:10” – ed … and after breakfast I entered the stats onto the computer, something I hadn’t done since March and there was a lot of catching up to do.

And talking of stats, on the 1st of July I started a new record book as the old one is now full. August 2007 I started keeping records and there were just four items that I recorded. Today there are about 35 entries that I need to make each evening. But filling the first book is definitely progress.

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Friday 2nd July 2010 – Up until about 21:00 this evening …

… the weather was magnificent. In fact it was far too magnificent to work.

This morning we put up a small scaffolding at the southern end of the barn and while Terry was drilling and screwing into the wall for the mounting brackets I was sawing and cutting scaffolding pipe to make a framework to mount the solar panels that are on the roof of the Luton Transit.

I’ll be fitting them permanently onto this end of the barn along with the wind turbine that we took down from the north end of the barn.

But we were defeated by that most unusual phenomenon – overheating batteries. When they went flat in the Hitachi SDS drill (and what a good purchase that was!) they were too hot to take a charge. Mind you, it was only 37°C today – the hottest of the year.

Not to be outdone however we started on the guttering of the barn as you can see. I told Terry that there are four classes of people in France

the peasants – the ones with the leaky roofs
the lower class – the ones with roofs that don’t leak
the middle class – the ones with guttering on their barn …

“What’s the fourth class?” asked Terry

“The ones with drains to take away the water!”

But having seen how dry the house walls have become since I put guttering up, then my barn will have it too. I’m sick and tired of being up to my neck in mud. But I’ll have to wait a bit for the drains though.

The chevrons are much too short for the roofing (I went for a long overhang) and so a fascia board is out of the question but they did have at Brico Depot yesterday some galvanised straps with the facility for a sliding attachment. If you bend the straps so that the sliders are at about 60° there’s still a good 9 inches or so on the straps and they fit nicely onto the chevrons and you can bolt the gutter mounts to them and they are then perfectly vertical.

We did what we could bearing in mind that we had no joints (moving the scaffolding out to give us clearance was fun) but by 15:00 it was no longer possible to work up there. The combination of a searing hot metal roof, blinding sunlight and tools too hot to touch made us call it a day.

I did a little some while later and then history was made by my not only having a solar shower (and this LIDL garden shower thing needs some attention) but a solar shave as well. And no surprise – the water temperature was a phenomenal 46°C

We had a barbecue round at Clare’s tonight. Esther hosted it and very kindly invited me, and of course Strawberry Moose met some of his admirers. James and Julianna drew some good pictures of him too.

But by 21:00 we were having thunder and lightning and we even had some rain. But nothing like as much as we need. And right now the sky is a clear cloudless starry night promising much more sun for tomorrow. I have to go to Commentry to look for joints and downpipe and then it’s a toss-up as to whether I come back to do the guttering or go for a swim.

We shall see.

-7

Friday 25th June 2010 – If you compare this pic …

… with the pic from yesterday you’ll notice something of a change. In fact we’ve put the new woodwork on the roof.

Putting the chevrons onto the ends of the beams was exciting. The beams were so perished that there was little to nail to. All these years of exposure to the weather have taken their toll. The chevrons however went on quite easily but getting the old ones off was quite something else. I’m going to have to buy a bigger crowbar.

Some parts of the main woodwork have been attacked by the damp and by the beasties and so I’m going to have to treat them to some xylophene. In two places I’m going to have to put some strengthening pieces into take some of the weight. I think that I am just in time with this roof – it wouldn’t have held out for much longer.

Disposing of the old wood was quite easy as you can see. But it’s made something of a mess of my garlic bed

The original plan was to keep the old wood as it might be trimmed off to do for the shorter lengths that are required for the other side. But most of it is in a pretty poor state and there won’t be much to salvage. And I won’t be short of firewood either.

Seeing as it was Friday we knocked off earlier and just as Terry was leaving, Lieneke my Dutch neighbour came round. She was impressed with my new parking space and she was also impressed when I told her about Terry’s new business. She’s going to have a chat with her husband over the weekend and then have a chat with Terry on Monday. As I have said before, there are three secrets of success for the kind of business that Terry is undertaking with his homme a tout faire and they are “talk” “talk” and “talk”. Everyone around here has jobs that need doing but they don’t know how to go about them or they don’t know who to approach for advice and assistance.

Lieneke had the usual conducted tour of the premises and after that I set about having a solar shower seeing as the water in the bucket was a delightful 41°C. But the water pump in the new (well, new last year) shower kit has stopped. The impeller that pushes the water round is only an interference-fit (or push-fit) onto the shaft and it has worked its way loose. Cheap substandard Chinese rubbish. Whyever couldn’t they make a splined shaft? Is that really too difficult?

In the end today I went into reverse-technology mode.and dug up the old footpump-action pump out of the caravan and used that. It was quite nice being outside and showering but I’m fed up of these electric pumps – it’s the third one that has failed on me. Trying to find a decent reliable low-volume submersible 12-volt pump is proving to be quite difficult. I reckon that at the end of the day I’m going to go into even more reverse-energy mode and go for a gravity shower – that involves building a framework 2m high so I can put the bucket on that and then stand underneath it.

Tonight was a very important meeting, the AGM of the Pionsat Football Club. And it went totally out of my mind and I clean forgot about it..

-4

EPIC HALL

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