Tag Archives: electric heating

Tuesday 17th July 2012 – NOW THIS IS ASTONISHING!

You are probably wondering what the photo below is all about – but read on.

Now to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … Rosemary came round today to offer me some more help in the garden and as I had no tinned potatoes for the salad I asked her to pick up a tin or two on the way round.

Instead of tins, she appeared with a bag of new potatoes – and these needed cooking of course.

potato 400 watt vegetable steamer les guis virlet puy de dome franceIt was a glorious day – probably one of the best I have ever had as far as solar energy goes (and doesn’t that make a change just recently?) and it came to my mind that ages ago I had bought a 400-watt electric steamer – cooker.

I’d never used it although I remembered a few weeks ago saying that I would like to give it a run out some time or other in the near future. With all of this solar energy right now it seemed that the appropriate moment had arisen.

Result – 15 minutes later one perfectly-steamed pile of spuds. I’m well-impressed with this. This really is Progress with a capital P.

I remember one of my best friends (an ex-best friend now as it happens) taking the p155 out of me behind my back with all of his friends on the Land Rover forum about my plans to try a microwave oven here.

They spent a considerable amount of time calling me a few choice names and so on.

And while an electric steam-cooker is hardly a microwave, it’s still up there with the coffee machine and the electric fire that we have had running during the winter as signs that home comforts are perfectly achievable with my set-up.

As you also know, I’m running a 12-volt TV-cum-video player up here as well.

Yes, I absolutely hate being surrounded by negativity – it drags me right downhill. One of the (many) reasons why I left the UK.

Rosemary and I spent a few hours weeding and I’ve never seen the garden looking as good as this, that’s for sure. We even started to pull up the new spuds but that was a waste of effort – seems like my crop has disappeared.

rebuilding stone wall collapsed lean-to les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfter Rosemary left, I carried on with the wall of the lean-to. You can tell how much I did by looking at where the mortar is still grey and not white.

I’ve accomplished quite a lot there but there’s still plenty to go and I’m wondering if I’ll have enough stones. If not, I’ll have to go on the scavenge and see what I can find.

But the wall underneath is in a bad way – there are three large cracks running down it. Seeing this made me glad that when I made a brief start in repairing it all back 10 years ago I had made that strip of reinforced concrete underneath where the breeze blocks are.

That strip of concrete is embedding the horizontal beams of the floor and thus ties all of the thing together. But once the new bit is finished I can repoint all of the cracks.

I’ve also been attacking the hole that I’m trying to drill out, what with all of this electricity we had today, and I’ve grounded out with the circular drill bit.

Of course, I lent out my other extension to Rob, didn’t I

We finished the day with the hottest solar shower I have had for a long time, and it was gorgeous.

But as for starting the day – how about 06:35 for breakfast? When has that ever happened before?

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Monday 16th January 2012 – THE FIRST THING …

… that I did today was to empty the composting toilet.

I’ve been neglecting it for a few days, what with one thing or another.

And of course, once you get started you’ll be surprised at how many other things there are too. But the composting toilet did need to be emptied, such is the exciting life that I lead these days.

Second job was to cut a mound of wood.

I’ve been running the pile down this last week or two while I’ve been waming myself and cooking with the new woodstove and so I set about sawing up a big load of wood which should keep me going for the next few weeks.

All done by hand with this new saw, and I’m almost as impressed with that as I am with my galvanised steel dustbin, which hasn’t featured anything as much as it deserves in these pages of late.

anemometer ls guis virlet puy de dome franceThird job was to rescue the old anemometer that was formerly mounted on the side of the house and which I had taken down when I had put the wind turbine up there.

This was sitting in the lean-to not doing very much at all but it’s now screwed to the fence by the front door.

The main reason why I put it back up is that its temperature gauge is much more accurate than the one that I’m currently using to measure the air temperature.

This afternoon, with the sun blazing down and the heater upstairs working flat-out, I reckoned that this is a bit silly. There is so much more that I ought to be doing with the surplus electricity that I have.

And so remembering the heady days of spring and summer 2011 with the 12-volt immersion heater that I had made out of an old xylophene drum and a 12-volt heater element and which corroded through while I was in Canada just now, I set to and dismantled it.

I gave the important bits – like the heater element – the once-over to make sure that they still worked (and you would be amazed at how quickly it boils 1.5 litres of water) and then built another heater using a 4-gallon plastic water header tank.

I’m not sure how long the plastic will remain viable, but it should be good for a while anyway. It will hopefully give me hot water in weather like this and I can do my washing.

But all of this got me thinking – and that kind of thing is dangerous.

When I was setting out on the road of doing all of this, I remembered mentioning to someone who I thought was a friend of mine my plans for maybe having a microwave oven here.

A short while later I stumbled across a thread in a newsgroup somewhere where this “friend” and his mates were openly ridiculing my thoughts about this. Of course, such a friendship had to peter out after that.

Nevertheless, I do wonder what this guy and his mates would be saying now when here, in the middle of winter, for the last three days I’ve been running an electric heater up in the attic.

Serve them right. 

And what happened to this day off that I was going to have?

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Tuesday 16th March 2010 – Well, I moved the greenhouse!

old frod cortina greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis is where it will be staying for the foreseeable future, gale-force winds permitting.

I had to dig out six tree stumps and that tookabsolutely ages. I broke the handle on my pickaxe but luckily Claude (Laurence’s father that is) many years ago gave me a kind of digging axe and I put a shaft into it, and that came in really handy. There was a whole warren of tree roots under there and they took some moving.

This afternoon I had to dig over the patch a few times ( and that wore me out) and then dig out the greenhouse from where it used to be, in front of the verandah. In fact the empty space there makes a nice place to put my outdoor table and chairs. I rounded off the day by chopping wood but I really didn’t need it as it was an absolutely beautiful day today. The  warmest so far this year an I had 270amp-hours (over 3KwH) of electricity – enough to run the electric heater in here for 5 hours and the temperature up here reached 18.6 degrees.

Tomorrow if the weather keeps on going I’ll be moving the cloche and making the first of the raised beds – you can see one of the shuttering planks leaning up against the Cortina.

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Monday 8th March 2010 – I’ve started to move the old Transit …

moving old ford transit garden les guis virlet puy de dome france… as you can see. I’ve managed to get it about 6 feet out from the hedge and it took quite a while for that.
Firstly the front wheels have sunk in quite a depth and accumulated humus from rotting vegetation meant that I had to spend a while digging it out.
Secondly I’ve lent out my good electric winch and the not-so-good electric winch had a few issues about it which mean that it’s not up to all that much – hence I had to resort to the old hand-powered chain winch. But what the heck? hand-powered chain winches have been around for centuries and they worked well enough in those days.
moving old ford transit garden les guis virlet puy de dome franceMind you the first thing that I did was to bend two S-hooks that I was using to make a loop in one of the chains – so I had to go and hunt down a couple of bow shackles. And then I snapped a chain! – Yes, snapped a chain using a hand-powered chain winch! And if that wasn’t enough, I actually stretched the other galvanised steel chain! Yes, stretching a steel chain! It’s a flaming good chain winch this – the power I can get on the lever must be phenomenal!

But anyway, the Transit together with its load of one-and-a-half Passats is on its way across the field, and that’s certainly something to celebrate.

This morning was another bright sunny alpine day with quite a wind – just the job for a washday and so while I was doing the washing I was also unloading all of Saturday’s shopping from Caliburn. The solar energy was such that I ran the upstairs heater for 5 hours – another day with 240 amp-hours (almost 3KwH) of sun and I’m thinking seriously about the idea of resurrecting my mains automatic washing machine. I’ve also had some sales material about some fridges that use about 0.5kWH (about 43amp-hours) of energy per day. Energy consumption for electrical appliances is plummeting and it won’t be long before I can have a real fridge here too.

This afternoon I put all of the plasterboard (all 16 sheets of it) upstairs. You’ve no idea how heavy that stuff can be when you are mauling it up by hand. And then I tackled the Transit.

Tomorrow we are recording the second instalment of our radio programme. I hope they don’t lose this tape!

And in other news, you may remember that the other day I spent an hour in the torrential rain moving a car for Bill. Tonight at the Anglo-French group he very kindly gave me a box of vegan biscuits for my trouble. “I felt embarrassed when I saw the state you were in” he said. But as I said at the time, I was quite happy doing it – it brought back many happy memories of when I had my taxi business and the state I was in the other day was the state in which I lived for eight years, so it was no trouble at all. But it was still very kind of Bill to give me the biscuits and I am very grateful. After all, one might say that the efforts that I went through for him – they really took the biscuit!

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Friday 5th March 2010 – I had another good day today.

garden les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ve now finished clearing out the space where I’m going to put the two halves of the old Transit. I’ll move the drainpipe, drag them across there and then put the drainpipe back and extend it further down the hill..

That will free off a space of about 8 metres by 5 metres and that will be where the new vegetable garden will be.

You can tell how long I was working out there though as when I took the picture the light was going so that would make it about 18:45. That’s quite a departure from the norm – usually on Fridays I knock off early and have a good wash but I was on a roll so I kept on going. And I bet I’ll pay for that tomorrow, but at least it’s done now. A couple of days to dry everything out and I can start moving stuff around.

garden fire les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe weather has gone colder now. Last night it went down to minus 5.4 but today was a glorious perfect blue sunny day. I generated about 240 amp-hours of electricity, that’s just under 3KwH and a new record. I had the heater on up here for five hours.

And that’s got me thinking – a modern automatic washing machine uses about 0.9KwH for a full load on maximum wash. If I could rig up a way of having hot water to feed into the machine and running it on a standard wash I reckon I could do a load in about half of that. I’ll bring my washing machine back from Brussels and have a play with it. In the meantime I might ask someone to check the consumption of a washing machine on that kind of load.

Tomorrow is Saturday and as it’s the first of the month that means Montlucon, Brico Depot and a megashop. I’m going for all my gardening materials too. I’m going to have my work cut out for the next month or two.

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Sunday 21st February 2010 – Today got off to a really bad start.

Yes – someone rang me up this morning – at 09:41 would you believe. And what is worse is that this certain someone had already been told twice about ringing or trying to ring me on a Sunday morning while I’m having my beauty sleep – and with a face like mine I need as much beauty sleep as I can get.

The answer to this is of course simple – you transmit your message to the offender by beating it into his skull in morse code with a pickaxe handle. I have never known that to fail and it may well come to that of it happens again.

It was a gorgeous day today as well though – at least in the morning. So much so that I had the heater on in here and I also did a load of washing. But I have this magnificent way of summoning up the rain. Never mind your rain dances, or seeding clouds or whatever I just hang some washing up and down comes the rain. But not before we had 26.1 degrees in the verandah – the highest total since 21st November of our Indian Summer. Spring can’t be all that far away.

I caught up with the mailing that has been outstanding for a week and I also sent out the circular for the Anglo_French Conversation Group. And one person sent me a mail back saying “please take my name off your list”. This person is the webmaster for the Reseau Rurale – the organisation that co-ordinates the activities of the Alternative Community around here.

As you know I don’t see eye-to-eye with the Reseau following the events that I have described earlier surrounding the legendary Goatherd of Teilhet – so much so that they are refusing to e-mail me the details of their events so that I can broadcast them on my radio show (you’ve no idea how far some people will carry a vendetta – cutting their noses off to spite their faces is nothing compared to the activities of this lot).

But this takes the biscuit.

Readers of my outpourings in its previous guise will recall the events of September/October 2008 when the webmaster’s car broke down. I was out one night until after midnight trying to fix it for him and then when it was diagnosed as being irrepairable it was “run me here” “take me there” “fetch me this” “carry me that” every blasted five minutes. Not that I minded, of course – we foreigners out here are all in it together – but the moment he bought a car (and it was me who found it for him and made the appropriate enquiries about it) that was that and he hasn’t spoken to me since! That’s gratitude for you!

The answer to this though is of course “power”. You give some henpecked, downtrodden person a little bit of power and they can’t resist using it to the fullest, most extreme limits possible … and this blog is?” – ed … so really you ought to feel just a little sorry for people like that. But it makes you wonder what else goes on in their lives that they feel the need to behave like this. Still, I don’t care. I’m fed up of trying to “understand” people and “making allowances” for them – no-one does it for me after all. I think that at the end of the day the only answer is the pickaxe handle and the message in morse code.

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Thursday 18th February 2010 – I got back into the swing of working today.

batten bedroom wall insulation les guis virlet puy de dome france
I’ve started to put the framing on the wall and I’ve attached the first row of insulation to the back wall. That’s the north side of the house so it needs a good cladding. Not for nothing will I be installing the wardrobe across that back wall either.

Mind you I think that the weather had something to do with it. For the first time in weeks it was warm in the verandah this morning and when you can eat your breakfast in the warmth and the calm it makes for a good start to the day.

Brilliant sunshine for most of the day too and I ran the heater up here for almost three hours to use up the surplus electricity.

So having lined part of the wall I needed to remove a pile of rubble to get at the rest. That involved fetching a sheet of corrugated iron from the garage and that involved tidying up a bit in there. And once I’d found a space to lay down the sheet it involved fetching bucket loads of rubble downstairs. But I didn’t do too many for the ground where I’m going to put my new raised beds had all dried out already even though the thaw is only about 24 hours on. So I set a big fire and spent the rest of the afternoon weeding.

With it being light until later I was still out working until 18:15 and I was quite enjoying myself.

There’s no doubt that good weather all helps to cheer you up.

In other news, seeing as I have nothing to lose I’ve written a stinking letter to Pentax. I’m thoroughly p155ed off with their after-sales service.

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Tuesday 16th February 2010 – Radio Stars!

eric hall liz messenger radio anglais arverne gerzat puy de dome france
Well, we made it onto tape, and next week we’ll be on the airwaves! After all of the hard work that Liz and I have put into our efforts we went down to Radio Arverne’s offices in Gerzat along with Julie, our special guest for the month of March.

No-one had told us how it was to be presented so we worked out our own system of presentation and production which would have done the trick – to record the five weekly “what’s on” sessions and then do firstly the chat with Julie about her experiences in the French hospital system followed by the chat about building permits and then chop the chats up into chunks to fit around the “what’s on” bits in order to make five programmes of equal lengths.

So having worked that out, as we were all grouped around the mikes ready to go they then decided that what they wanted was for the programmes to be recorded in their sequence of events. Now how on earth can you do that when you don’t know what people are going to say in advance and you have to watch your papers, watch your guests and watch a clock at the same time?

We managed to record three programmes and we have to go back on March 9th to do the other two (March is a 5-week month). And after our recording efforts we still had to do some editing so it really defeated the purpose of what we were trying to do and they could just as well have edited it from our proposal which would have been quicker to record. Ahhh well!

We listened to some of it afterwards and it sounds terribly amateurish but in actual fact we ought to be proud of what we did. We were three people effectively just off the street with no formal training and with very little “previous” in this kind of thing and we were given no guidance at all yet between the three of us we managed to get something like three half-decent radio shows on the very first take. You can’t ask for more than that.

And I was wrong about the temperature last night. We had a mere minus 9.7 degrees. Round at Liz’s she saw minus 17. This morning in the verandah it was 1.2 when I went down for breakfast but in the 20 minutes that I took to eat it the temperature rose to 5.2. The sun was such that I even ran the electric heater up here this morning.

I’t’s 1.2 degrees outside now and everything is melting. I don’t reckon the winter is over yet though.

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Wednesday 3rd February 2010 – The really big problem …

… with making offers on properties that are for sale is that when the offer is accepted unconditionally, you always wonder just how low you could have gone. And this was what happened today. So I am now a half-owner of two more houses in the local area – or at least I will be on Friday when the signing takes place. Normally when you sign for a house here you pay a compromis – or deposit and it’s almost always 10%. The estate agents want us to sign on Friday but it’ll take a few days to round up all of the dosh so we suggested we delay the signing for a few days. But ohhh no –
“Could you manage 5%?“
Clearly they aren’t intending to wait until we sober up. It’s either a case of if we wait until Monday to sign, the houses might fall down over the weekend or else the people at the estate agency need to eat this weekend.

Rhys was wondering, with all this talk about letting them, whether we were going to let out the rooms by the hour. I said that if we were to do that he could come and be the receptionist. We would supply the high heels, fishnets and basque but he would have to supply his own whip. There would also be the question of taking the sheep for a walk every morning.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had another really good day of electricity and so I had the electric heater on for three hours. It increased the temperature by 4 degrees and with it being an oil-bath radiator it was still keeping the room something like warm even at 18:00 – three hours after I’d switched it off.

lining wall space blanket insulation les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ve finished lining the walls of this cupboard place with the insulation blanket stuff and I’ve started to fit the plasterboard. Another day would see that all finished but I’m going to be a tiler’s labourer tomorrow. Terry is tiling his kitchen floor and needs to complete one half of it so that he can move the gas oven over. Liz is going out so I got the short straw. What with all of this moving for Claude, signing for houses, preparation for this radio programme we are doing and all of this our plans have become somewhat shaken up.

And if that wasn’t enough I hear on the grapevine that there might be a chauffeur’s job coming up for a couple of months. It’s enough to drive you to drink.

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Sunday 31st January 2010 – Absolutely shocking!

Yes! You may or may not believe this but I have had some electric heating on in the attic this afternoon.

This morning was the day I’ve been waiting since November to have – a real Alpine winter’s day with brilliant blue skies and a hard crispy frost. Despite not going to bed until 03:00 I was up and about at 09:30 with the sunlight streaming in through the windows. First job was to get on the roof and shovel the snow off the solar panels. And that’s a job I won’t be doing much longer as I’ve found a place that does 12-volt trace heating especially for this kind of thing. As you might expect, it’s nowhere near Europe and it isn’t in the USA either but in Canada. They are used to this kind of thing. 5 watts per foot and I need about 35 feet of it so that’s about 175 watts in total. 5 minutes of that will shift as much snow as you like and I’ll get my charge back in no time.

After breakfast it was round to Claude’s to do another van load but he reckoned that the roads are impassable and in any case just a quick glance at him told me that yesterday finished him off for good. He won’t be lifting another box of belongings and so he needs to think again. I’ve made a suggestion to him but it’s up to him if he accepts it. It’s still amazing though, with everything that he has done for everyone else in the past for everyone in Virlet and when he needs help they just totally ignore him.

So back home to find that the batteries in the house and in the barn are fully charged and it’s only lunchtime. Shame to waste the surplus solar energy so I dug up an old oil-filled 400-watt electric radiator and plugged it in – and had the pleasure of watching the temperature in the attic rise by 5 degrees while I caught up with more correspondence.

Yesterday in LIDL I bought one of those plug-in wattmeters for mains current – the type that you plug into a mains plug and you plug the appliance into it and it tells you how many watts and amps the appliance draws. They are of course much more versatile than that and I have lots of plans for it so I took it apart for a nosey. And as I thought, it’s an interated circuit with two wires in and two wires out. So I just cut the wires off the plug and socket bits and then I can hard-wire it into my circuit. It makes data recording much easier.

In other news, the UK is now officially out of recession. At long last – the last “major” western economy to do so. The value of the Pound Sterling is steadily rising in world stockmarkets too. Earlier this afternoon one Pound reached 2.3 Maldive Island Seashells and 1.9 Zimbabwean Bongo Beads.

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