Tag Archives: 12 volt coffee machine

Thursday 1st March 2012 I’M GOING …

… to have an early night in a couple of minutes. All of this paperwork in the morning is wearing me out

But still, it’s nice to be up early (well, early for me, anyway) and spend the morning with a pot of coffee.

Ohh what luxury!

But once the paperwork period was over, I excelled myself by doing a little tidying up in the bedroom where I’ve been working. I can actually see some floor now, and that’s real progress.

I’ve also been tidying up a little in the barn, and outside I’ve fought my way further down the garden and hacked out a load of brambles.

What I’ll be doing tomorrow afternoon if it stays nice (and today was easily the nicest day of the year with over 120 amp-hours on one of the solar banks) will be to have a garden fire and burn a load of dead vegetation, and then move one of the compost bins to its final position.

Won’t that be a cue for a torrential rainstorm?

The hour-meters for the solar banks, those that I installed yesterday, are giving me the results that I expected, but the hour-meter on the overcharge is not quite so good.

It seems that there’s some current seeping through the overcharge controller once the voltage passes 13.4 volts. Not much – a question of a couple of milli-amps or so – but it’s enough to start the hourmeter working.

These things are so sensitive that this one is feeding off the current that is seeping. The old car clock that I was using before couldn’t detect that current, and so tHe figures are going to be a little distorted as from now on

Another thing that I’ve been doing, or at least, trying to do, is to continue to drill this 48mm hole through the wall between the lean-to and the house in order to pass some electrical cables through.

But for some reason, the first 25cms went through without any real effort whatsover but ever since then it’s been making no impression at all, and I’m not halfway yet. Today with an hour or so, I reckon that I made almost one centimetre.

There’s definitely something not quite right about this

0

Wednesday 29th February 2012 – I’VE GONE …

… onto summer hours!

Yes, already! It’s now light enough to be still working outside at 19:00 and so that’s what I’m doing.

And the computing activities that I need to do, well I’m doing those from 10:00 until 12:00.

So with an early night after my dithering about, I had an early morning as well, just for a change. And on went the coffee pot again because if anything it was even nicer today than yesterday.

So much so, in fact, that I ran the electric heater up here. Not because I needed to, but because it was a shame to waste the energy.

One of the things that I needed to do was to print off about 50 pages of stuff that I need to complete. And I think that I’m having printer issues. The black ink didn’t work at all and in the end I put a new cartridge in.

That worked fine for a few pages and then we were back to the missing lines and dirty heads again. I cleaned the heads, and that worked fine for a while and then we were back in the missing lines and dirty heads.

I don’t know why that is. Printers never seem to last very long with me.

This afternoon I had a pile of fun.

I’ve had a few parcels delivered these last couple of days, and one of them contained the half-a-dozen 12 volt DC hour meters similar to the 230 volt ones that I bought to run with the mains inverters.

control panel solar energy wind turbine timer overcharge meter les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe purpose of these 12-volt hour meters is to wire them into the solar panel circuits to see for how long a solar charge is received by the panels (to help in resiting them to an optimum position), to wire into the wind turbine circuits ditto, and also to wire into the overcharge circuits to see for how long surplus energy is created.

And so I spent a happy afternoon wiring in the overcharge timers and the solar timers. I’m not able to do the wind turbine timers as I need diodes to stop the backflow of energy from the batteries and they haven’t come yet.

The wind turbines are connected directly to the batteries with no charge controller so if you wire a timer in there without stopping the current flowing back from the batteries, the timers will be running 24 hours per day, feeding off the batteries.

I also did some tidying up of the panel that I made a couple of months ago – the one with the 600-watt inverter, the electric meter and the electrical sockets, that I’m using in the barn. That looks neater and tidier, and works better than before.

But I forgot to say that when I was in Brussels at Christmas, Marianne was chucking out an old hair drier – something like 400 watts or so. Anyway, I chucked it into Caliburn and brought it back here.

The reason?

Every now and again I use heat shrink insulation on bare wires and while you are supposed to shrink it using a hot-air paint stripper, I don’t have enough power to run a hot-air paint stripper.

I do have enough though to run a 400-watt hair drier and while it’s slower and not quite as effective, it does in fact work well enough.

I’m quite impressed with that.

-2

Tuesday 28th February 2012 – I’VE SPENT …

… most of the day on the computer today.

One or two things have needed doing rather urgently and that was what took up most of the day.

But there was so much bright sunlight that I could sit up here with the luxury of a coffee machine on the boil all day, which I refilled as necessary. The last time that I did that was probably back in 2007 when I was still living in Brussels … "it was just a week or two ago actually" – ed.

But I ended up not having ny tea last night. The fact was that it was far too warm to light the fire up here and what with feeling a little weary this evening I didn’t really feel like going downstairs to cook anything.

It’s hard to summon up the enthusiasm thse days and I don’t know why.

It’s not as if I’ve been working hard, is it?

0

Sunday 19th February 2012 – AFTER THE EXERTIONS …

…or lack thereof yesterday and having crashe dout without any tea, I was out like a light until all of about 07:00 on Sunday morning.

Of course, that time of the morning is far too early for a weekday, never mind a Sunday, and so I rolled over and went back to sleep. When I did wake up I noticed that it had been raining.

Liz even mentioned that at about 09:00 round by hers it had been snowing, but what do I know about 09:00 on a Sunday?

I did almost nothing at all today except deal with some payments I had to make on eBay – although I did make myself two pots of coffee with the 12-volt coffee machine.

The height of decadence.

Later on I went round to Liz and Terry’s at Sauret-Besserve to rehearse our radio programmes. Liz must have known that I hadn’t had my usual Saturday night curry, because she had made a gorgeous chickpea curry.

And not only that, she made me up a doggy bag for tomorrow and that has made my day as well.

-4

Saturday 18th February 2012 – WASN’T SATURDAY A WEIRD DAY?

The temperature in here was 15.4°C when I woke up this morning. And during the course of the day it actually increased without any heat input at all. So much so that at one stage we had 20°C in here.

Mind you, that’s not surprising. Outside we had as much as 16.3°C and in the verandah, over 25°C.

It really was an exceptional day.

12 volt coffee machine les guis virlet puy de dome franceSo what to do with the surplus electrical energy? After all, no point in heating up here, as it was warm enough on its own.

No point in doing any washing either because although there is a lot to be done, I wasn’t sure if enough water had been melted.

The answer was to resurrect the 12-volt coffee machine. it needed a good clean as it hadn’t been used for a year or so but once it was up and running we managed a good pot of coffee. And why not?

What with electric heating, coffee machines and so on, it does make me wonder what I’m going to be having running next though.

But one of the drawbacks to the warm weather is that the fire, when I finally did light it up, never reached anything like hot enough to cook anything. I was burnt out of the room long before the fire warmed up.

Not that it mattered though because for some unaccountable reason I crashed out at 22:00 and apart from a brief 10 minutes of consciousness to take the readings and to switch off the computer, that was that.

0

Sunday 14th March 2010 – I had coffee in bed this morning!

Those of you with long memories will recall that about 2 years ago I bought a 12-volt coffee machine – the kind that truckers have in their cabs. I discovered it the other day while tidying up (I do that every now and again) and so last night I filled it full of water, put a filter and some coffee in, and left it by my bed. When I woke up I switched it on and stayed lying in bed smelling the aroma for a while.

It wasn’t very satisfactory and it needs some fine tuning. And it doesn’t half sup the juice but nevertheless it was very nice to be lying there having coffee in bed. Last time that happened was when I stayed at Liz and Terry’s in the summer, and I can’t remember when it was before that.

So having drunk coffee and had breakfast, today I did … nothing at all. I’ve been up here all day either reading or working on my website. I noticed that the last time I updated it was in June 2009 and a lot has happened since then! I need to extricate my digit a little bit.

There will be a lot happening tomorrow too. If the weather stays fine I’m going to be burning the leftovers from the garden-tidying and then digging up tree stumps. Luckily the weather has warmed up a bit so the soil might be workable.

-4