… visitor at the front door this morning.
I’ve no idea what Bugs was doing there but he looked as if he was at home there all the same. Anyway he soon cleared off when I came to the front door and I was lucky to be able to squeeze off a slightly out-of-focus shpt as he scurried back up the drive.
So having been at one with the local wildlife, I carried on with work today.
First thing was to deal with the issue of the solar water heater. The temperature was 59°C in there this morning and at an average of 8°C per hour in the kind of weather that we have been having just now, then once the batteries are fully-charged, the water will boil up before the sun goes down tonight.
So what I did, and for the first time ever, was to drain 20 litres of water off it. Two buckets full, and I simply left it in the buckets to cool down. When the water started to heat up this afternoon, I simply tipped the buckets of lukewarm water into it. As a result, the water didn’t rise past 65°C, and that was fine.
Another thing that helped keep the water temperature down was to run the coffee machine for the first time this year.
850 watts at half an hour produced a nice pot of coffee as well as swallowing up some of the surplus energy, and I’ll have to do this more often. In any case, it saves on the gas here.
As for the work, I carried on in the shower room today.
First thing, I fitted the second batten for the shelf that will form the top of the composting toilet. You can see it here, at right angles to the shelf that I fitted yesterday.
There’s a third shelf too, but that’s in the false wall that I’ve temporarily dismantled while I’m working. The fourth shelf will be the top of the front panel, but you’ll see this in due course as the work progresses.
I’ve also finished the rest of the battens in the bathroom (for now at least).
You’ll see on the left just underneath the window the batten which will support the worktop into which I’ll be fitting the sink. This is something that I’ll be tackling sooner than you might think.
As for the battens, I’ve finally found my mitre gauge and with setting it up to 13mm (the battens are 26mm) I can mark off the mitres with some kind of accuracy. And even with my slightly-bent mitre saw with a couple of teeth missing, and my 100 year-old wood chisel, the level of accuracy that I’ve been managing has certainly astounded me.
So I’m having a well-earned rest and I might even have an early night too.
. This is another one of the 
kind of books that were written 30 years ago forecasting how the world would look at the turn of the 21st Century. And while many predictions were totally wide of the mark, many others were surprisingly, if not astonishingly accurate.
