Tag Archives: mains inverter

Friday 20th January 2012 – I CAN’T SEE …

… a thing right now in my room.

There’s a gusting wind blowing up outside and it’s in just the right direction to blow right down my chimney so every couple of minutes a load of smoke is blown back down the fire and out of the air vent into the room.

I’m being done up like a kipper just now.

But I was right about the weather – it’s rained for most of the day. And it is indeed nice to see the rail cascading off the new roof on the lean-to onto the ground, well away from the wall, and everything inside the lean-to being bone-dry for a change.

I can’t believe my luck with the weather for that 10-day spell when I decided to go for broke and do the lean-to roof. It’s not like me at all.

So I did some sawing of the wood this morning, but a downside of this now is that I’m cutting it faster than I’m burning it and I’m now running out of room to store it. I suppose that I shall have to make a larger woodpile, or a taller one or something.

I could, I suppose, even dig the trench that I need to dig at the side of the house by the “other” lean-to, drop the drainage pipe in there that needs to go in there and connect it into the drainage system, fill the trench with gravel, cover it over with a weed blanket and then build the real woodshed where it is supposed to go, but that’s not the work of half an hour.

After the woodcutting (which I managed to do without any interruption for a change) I did some more tidying up, starting in the lean-to.

First job was to rescue the remaining Hawker deep-discharge batteries and charge them up.

And here I’ve hit a problem, in that the battery box I made for the previous batteries is too small – the Hawkers are taller. But anyway once they were out of the way I tidied up in the lean-to, collected all of the stray solar panels and stacked them in a corner, and then hung up the smaller gardening tools so that I’m not tripping over them.

Having moved a couple of solar panels out of the barn I could then get in there and make some space to put the old Rutland wind turbine tidily out of the way.

This led to the discovery of a circular saw, not the 600-watt one that I can’t find anywhere at all, but the old 1050-watt one that was all rusted solid having been left in a container that filled with water through a leak in the barn roof when I was ill and which had subsequently been partly-dismantled for spares.

Of course, now that I have a 1200-watt inverter all things are possible, so I gave the saw a good spray with WD40 and reassembled it with some other bits and pieces. And much to my surprise it fired up!

Even more surprising was that the inverter didn’t even bat an eyelid.

The saw needs some “attention to detail” before I can use it to cut wood, but this is definitely progress.

This afternoon, with the weather deteriorating, I restarted work in the bedroom – the first time for God knows how long. I’ve fitted the false beam at the side wall – the beam that hides all of the electrical cable – and I’ve also packed out one of the plasterboard panels that didn’t quite mate with the others.

It was then that I lost the light and so I spent the last hour tidying up in the barn again.

And despite all of this time that I’ve spent tidying up, a I really can’t see any difference at all.

This evening by way of an experiment, I brought a kettle of water up here and put it on top of the woodstove. And after about 2.5 hours it was gloriously warm and I had a lovely hot wash and shave in front of the fire.

Definitely the highlight of the week, that, and I can’t think why I hadn’t done that before.

Next step is the coffee pot on the stove, and put the produce in a thermos ready for the following morning.

I ought to be much-better organised than I am.

-3

Tuesday 17th January 2012 – YOU MAY REMEMBER …

… the other day that I mentioned that there was a new digital 1200-watt inverter in the post on its way here. Well, it turned up a couple of days ago but I never had time to install it.

Anyway, that all changed this morning and after cutting another huge pile of wood I set about fitting it in the system.

It’s quite a monster and quite heavy too, and the cable is 25mm welding cable. And to fit it on my panel board it involved moving a few things around in order to make the space.

But it’s certainly impressive and if it works as well as it’s supposed to, it will be a big improvement on the current (well, we are talking electricity here) analogue 600-watt inverter, which creaks and groans under the load that it sometimes has to bear but which has kept going for almost three years, day-in and day-out, nevertheless.

The aforementioned has now been relegated onto the portable power panel that I made the other week which I drag around the outside from place to place when I need power.

As for the 150-watt inverter that was on there that has creaked and groaned day-in and day-out for even longer, that has now been relegated into Caliburn where it will just be used for charging up the laptop and the occasional power tool once in a while, replacing the unsatisfactory 150-watt pulse inverter that only seems to want to pulse when it wants to, which is never when I want it to.

This afternoon I did something that is so unusual as to merit recording here on the blog. And that is something called “tidying up”.

That’s a phrase that is contained in the vocabulary of many people but is somehow missing from mine.

You can’t see much of a difference because I seem to be the only person in the world whose tidying up makes more of a mess that it was before I started, but I’ve recovered 7 square metres of roofing tiles left over from the roofing of the house and the two lean-tos.

I’ll put them on one side for now and think of a way of using them.

I also went into the field next door hunting for the nails that made a bid for freedom. I don’t want the farmer’s cattle to find them first. I recovered a dozen or so but that’s just a tiny fraction of the number that got away. I’ll go for another look tomorrow

But the purpose of tidying up was to clear all of the wood off the floor of the first floor of the lean-to. Where the tarpaulin had been blown away, that area of the floor was soaking wet and the wood that was piled on it, much of it new stuff, was also soaking wet and it was all stopping the floor from drying.

So all of that wood has been arranged tidily where it will receive a nice current of air, and the floor is clear so that it might dry out. You might remember that it was only 18 months ago that I laid the floor and I don’t want it rotting away quite yet.

In other news, I have two companies sending representatives around tomorrow to sell me these roof-top solar panel systems.

I hate these cold-calling canvassers who ring up at 19:15 and 19:45 when I’m trying to drink a coffee and watch a film. Worse than spam e-mails they are – at least you can delete those – and so I’m fighting back.

I can waste more of their time than they can of mine.

And in other other news, the water in the new immersion heater reached 28.5°C this afternoon. Not a lot you might think, but that was 25°C over the ambient temperature downstairs, and that’s well-worth having.

It’s not hot enough to use the washing machine or to have a shower, but we are moving in the right direction.

Thursday 12th January 2012 – WHAT A GORGEOUS DAY …

… it was today!

Well, up until about 16:00 anyway.

A heavy frost overnight followed by a glorious alpine blue sky and so much charge in the batteries that I ran the electric heater up here for an hour or so this afternoon.

I never managed that last winter.

First thing that I did, seeing as how the nice weather was, was to dash outside and take a photo of where I finished in the dark last night.

It’s a highly significant photograph as it shows the first row of recycled plastic slates that I put on there. It’s significant because regular readers of this rubbish will recall all of the vicissitudes that we have had over the last 10 years to reach this point.

This is the climax of the work that I’ve been doing for the last 6 months or so since I was wondering what to do with that left-over bucket of cement in the mixer when we were doing Lieneke’s roof in the summer.

But returning to our moutons, as they say around here, up on the roof I managed another 7 rows today – that means that I’m about a third of the way up.

But it’ll be slow going from here onwards. It gets harder the higher up you go, as the actress once famously said to the bishop.

Up to now I could manage by leaning on the scaffolding. As of tomorrow I have to do it off a couple of ladders and that’s not easy. But nevertheless, it’s all looking good on the roof.

And so it was until about 16:00, when the temperature plummeted and we had a hanging cloud. It looks like winter has finally arrived and we shall have to see what the weather holds for us now. The weather is going to be deciding where I’m working and what I’m going.

In other news, the 1200-watt digital inverter that I ordered a few weeks ago – that’s finally arrived. I’ve not had time to play with it but I’m quite looking forward to the possibility.

That’s something else I’ll be doing when the weather changes for the worse.

-1

Saturday 7th January 2012 – I’VE BEEN SPENDING …

… my money again.

And it’s not as if I have too much to spend either, but there you go.

In Carrefour in St Eloy les Mines I spent a mere €12 or so, most of which went on a jar of coffee seeing as I seem to be rather down on that at the moment, and won’t that be a catastrophe if I run out?

In LIDL I spent €25 or something – with nothing much to show for it except some wire brushes for the angle grinder. I’ll always pick up a few packs of those when I see them.

But there I met a couple of people whom I knew – some friends of Bill’s whom I had met at one of his soirées, and Jasper and his mum (who have featured previously in these pages) were also there.

But then went to Cheze – the hardware shop where the Intermarché used to be when I first came here.

The bread box was trashed in the hurricane so I need to make something new, and Cheze was the likeliest place to find some bits. I didn’t find what I wanted but I still spent €52 in there.

Yes, it was sale time there and even more importantly, a clearance sale. There was a big bucket of hardware like door knobs, adjustible feet, special bolts and so on, at 50 centimes a pack. I had tons of stuff out of there.

There was also a LED spotlight with a dusk-dawn sensor, powered by a solar panel, reduced to €8:00. That will make a handy work light or torch for when I’m down the garden late at night.

Pride of place though went to this beautiful machine – a chop saw.

I’ve been after a low-powered one of those for ages and I’ve hunted high and low but without success. But here at Cheze were three or four end-of-range chop saws, quite small and all rated at 1200 watts, all for the price of €34 each.

At that price I just had to have one, especially as there’s a 1200-watt inverter winging its way to me in the post even as we speak. After all the time I spend chopping wood by hand, and how easy it was doing the tongue-and-grooving back at Expo when I had the battery-powered one.

The width of the blade and the instability of the machines means that they aren’t ideal for precision work, but where precision cutting isn’t 100% essential, this wil ldo just fine, so I hope that it does what it says that it will do.

BUt I didn’t stay out long. It’s rained non-stop today, all grey and drizzly and depressing. I took advantage of the morning by writing the additional text for the radio programmes we shall be recording at the end of the month, and I’ve watched the odd film or two.

Tomorrow I’m going to start my presentation for the Trans-Labrador Highway.

I have to do that on Feb 24th, so no time like the present to get going.

-1

Friday 6th January 2012 – IT’S BEEN …

… an exciting day today

Having been pondering over the battery situation here – to whit, the house batteries are losing charge when there’s no current and I had ample proof of that yesterday as I attached a little voltmeter to the battery bank and watched it go down and down – I decided to have a butchers at the battery bank.

I reckoned that there might be one battery that was overheating but I was wrong – there were in fact two of them all swollen up. No wonder the batteries were gently emptying themselves.

So I pulled those two out and I’m now down to just 8 batteries.

I’ve been suspecting that these 90 amp-hour batteries are just too small to handle a surge of about 50 amps on a regular basis and this seems to be confirming things. There’s four now that I’ve had to change, and it’s always been the one in the centre of the bank.

You may recall that I went to Paris to the supplier just before Christmas and they had some 200-amp-hour batteries on special offer and so I bought 8 of those. That will be a battery bank and a half.

Ideally I need even-bigger ones but an issue presents it self with that in that these 200-amp-hour batteries weigh 58kgs. While I can pick them up and walk with them, I can’t go far very quickly. Imagine twice the weight.

You might be wondering why I didn’t go the whole hog and fit them today. Believe me, it was my intention. But the battery cables that I have – 225mm – aren’t long enough. I’ve had to order some 375mm cables and they won’t be here until Thursday next week.

This afternoon, tired of manipulating inverters, timers and the like around, I made myself a plug-in electric board.

We start off with a two-pin American plug with 6mm cable wired into it. This goes to a 300-watt inverter screwed to the board. From there it’s into an electric meter and from there into one of the hour meters I bought in the UK.

Finally it ends up in a 13-amp UK socket.

All I need to do now when I’m carrying out some work somewhere around out of range of the main inverters is to take my little board with me and plug it into the 12-volt circuit.

After that I went to the bank to pay in a cheque, reorder my bread and then go for coffee and a chat with Marianne to catch up on the gossip.

It’s her birthday tomorrow, and that set me thinking about all the other people I know whose birthday it is in January. Krys, Marianne, Marianne from Brussels, Mandy. Those names spring straight away to mind and I bet there are loads more as well (so apologies if I have forgotten you).

It really is astonishing.

-5

Tuesday 15th November 2011 – IT’S NOT AS EASY …

… as you might think putting up this wind turbine and despite a good day’s work I’ve hardly scratched the surface of it.

First job was to reposition all of the planks on the scaffolding so that they are where I want them to be, and then to put the ladder where it should be as well. And that wasn’t the work of five minutes either.

After that it was to cut up an old scrap scaffolding pole (I bought a couple of those with just this kind of purpose in mind) to make the horizontal battens on the wall. There’s an overhang on the roof of about 70mms and so I’m having to invent something to stand the upright pole 70mms out of the wall, and that’s not easy.

Next task was to drill the holes for the mounting brackets to take the horizontal battens. And with the hard stone that we have around here this was playing havoc with the batteries on the Hitachi battery-powered SDS drill.

And then I had an idea.

I have a mains SDS drill – about 750 watts-worth but it’s pretty lightweight and not any better than the Hitachi. That’s always been down here but back in Brussels a few years ago I recalled buying a really heavy-duty 1050 watt SDS drill – with rotostop and everything. And that would make short work of drilling the holes.

And so I had to hunt that down somewhere around the house or the barn and eventually, much to my surprise, I actually discovered it.
And then it was to wire in the 1500-watt mega-inverter that I bought for the barn.
And then it was to trail an electrical cable all around the side of the house from across the barn.
And then look for an adapter because the drill is still wired to a European plug.

But now you see why it’s taking me so long.

But once I was up and running, that drill went through the stone like a hot knife through butter.

After much manipulation I have one of the horizontal battens on now, and that cement mastic stuff is excellent. But I’m going to have to take it off because I’ve thought of an improvement and I shall be doing that tomorrow.

What with having to manipulate the heavy upright pole (and that wasn’t easy either) I was exhausted and in any case heaving heavy pipes around 10 metres up in the air by the light of a torch is not recommended.

We talked the other day about the film Tony Rome. Now that film is from the mid-60s and one of the things that was going through my mind was “is this the earliest ‘mainstream’ film to have a reasonably-explicit lesbian love scene in it?”

I spent all afternoon trying to think if there was one any earlier than this but nothing came to mind, apart from some subculture stuff in the 1920s

Secondly, I was watching an episode of The Prisoner this morning at breakfast – “It’s Your Funeral” – and one of the actresses in it caught my ear. And I mean that too because while I didn’t recognise the face, the voice was ringing in my ears telling me something.

And it wasn’t until much later that the penny dropped. It was no one other than Annette Andre, which might mean nothing to you but her most famous role was as Philia, Michael Crawford’s sidekick in the film version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

That film which, although excellent in its own right, was notorious for dropping Frankie Howerd from the lead role in favour of the dreadful Zero Mostel and featuring a cameo of Buster Keaton, two things done simply so that the film would have a wider audience in the USA.

Wednesday 20th October 2010 – I ALMOST FORGOT TO BLOG TONIGHT.

Yes, I was about to go to bed for an early night. I’m in Corner Brook for my last night in Newfoundland – a B&B in a private house at $50 for the night and they even let me use the kitchen to cook my tea from my supplies.

So a cheap night tonight – but it needed to be, because this morning I had a nasty surprise. Casey had a flat tyre. 2000 miles down the worst roads in the world and not a thing, and a puncture on the Trans-Canada Highway. And so off to Canadian Tyres it had to be.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom because they were having a sale of inverters – and I picked up a 75-watt and a 150-watt for just $19.98 for the pair.
And then, incredibly, at Walmart, a 40-watt slow cooker for just $9:99. So off to the dollar store for a pile of tins and so on and I now have all that I need to cook my meals in the car as I drive.

We’ve talked about the Newfoundland railway before and every so often I’d been encountering relics that looked very, very railway-like.

Here from my good spec up on Joey’s Lookout, whoever Joey might have been, near Gambo, I had this view and I don’t think that I’ve ever seen anything looking more like a railway line than this. It’s ironic in a sense that the railway, the 20th Century form of transport, has cut off access to the bay for boats, the previous method of transport around here

Another good stroke of fortune was that the Air Museum at Gander was open and while the girl in charge knew nothing about the missing artefacts she did know two authors of aviation books who are “friends” of the museum.

One of these men worked on the project for the replica flight of Alcock and Brown’s Vimy to celebrate the 75th anniversary. So if anyone knows anything about these objects one of these will.

Outside the museum was a fur trapper selling rabbits that he had trapped.

This took me by surprise. I thought that they only did things like that in the Last of the Mohicans but here he was – a genuine 21st Century trapper doing his stuff at the side of a main road in the middle of civilisation. If you were to read this in a novel you wouldn’t believe it.

A little further on I can actually get in touch with the railway line.

This is a beautiful bow girder bridge across the river at Elmwood. And having been for a little walk along the line, I can tell you that it’s single-track and judging by the radii of some of the curves, narrow gauge too.

So now I know.

So now it’s an early night in my guest house at Corner Brook.

There won’t be a posting tomorrow as I’m spending the night on this 7-hour crossing to Cape Breton Island where I’ll be picking up where I left off from my 2003 voyage.

And if I don’t blog the night after, it will be either because wherever I will be staying won’t have internet access, or else the ferry will have sunk. And don’t laugh about that either. On October 14th 1942 the Caribou, one of the predecessors of the ship I’ll be sailing on, was torpedoed by a U boat while crossing over the Gulf of St Lawrence.

And the ship I’ll be sailing on – it’s the first voyage since its rudder and steering gear have been repaired. So anything can happen – and it probably will, but I’ve got my Strawberry Moose to keep me warm.

-1

Thursday 3rd September 2009 – IF YOU LOOK VERY CLOSELY AT THIS PIC …..

… you can see that although I’ve only done half of the polystyrene insulation (so no chance of it being finished by tomorrow) we have some electric cable now in the picture.

Two light fittings for the 12-volt halogens, and 1 light fitting for 230-volt. And all with trunking, Terry.

Took me ages to get the wiring right as it needed quite a bit of thought (and quite a bit of cable, and quite a bit of time looking for the cable and so on) and I really don’t have much of an idea about what I’m doing …“it’s never bothered you before” – ed… but I’ve cracked it now, I think.

I’m having 4×12-volt halogens switched in 2×2, and 2 mains lights on one switch. I wasn’t actually going to bother with mains lighting as I can do everything I want with 12-volt, but it makes sense to have it, especially as the Studer inverter (if I ever get it back) can run all day idling away and drawing no current. And I have a few compact flourescent bulbs.

Threading the wire into the conduit took ages and so it was 14.30 when I stopped for lunch. And a late lunch means that you’re all out of sync and it was 19:20 when I stopped. And I still would have been working there now if the phone hadn’t rung – another client!

Tomorrow I’ll finish off the insulation between the rafters and then pretty myself up. It’s shopping day on Saturday and I have to go to Brico Depot.

-6

Friday 21st August 2009 – YOU CAN SEE IN THIS PHOTO …

… why it is that I need to move the batteries. They are blocking up the front door. And if I’m going to start some kind of serious work inside, I need the front door off so that I can bring messy stuff in that way rather than in through my little room.

Today, I put a row of breeze blocks down on the concrete base that I laid yesterday. I can’t build it right up as just right now I don’t know how high the suspended floor is going to be. But tomorrow I’ll be putting a layer of 40mm polystyrene on the base and around the sides, and dropping 10 batteries (thats 920 amp-hours in total) in there.

I’ve also started building the control panel as you can see. There are three charge controllers on there right now. From right to left, we have the charge controller for the 2nd bank of solar panels (the one for the first bank is currently nailed to the front door and will be moved onto the control panel in early course), then in the centre is the charge controller for the wind turbine, and on the left is the charge controller for the overload.

In case you don’t know, when the batteries are fully-charged the charge controllers shut down the charging circuit. And that’s a waste of energy. So what I’m doing is having an overload controller that will divert the surplus current into a “dump load” – in this case a 12 volt water heater element. So that way I’ll have plenty of hot water.

There’s also a bus bar or two on there. These are for connecting loads of heavy duty wires and cables together. Bus bars range from sophisticated professional jobs down to flattened copper pipe and self-tapping screws, but for many years now I’ve been developing the “ring terminal onto long bolt with butterfly nut” and it works just fine, so there’s no reason to change.

There will be a few other things on there too, like a mains inverter, a couple of clocks, some circuit breakers, a fuse box and all that kind of thing. Here is one I made earlier, but that has undergone considerable … er … modification since then.

And what do you think about the wallpaper in the house? The house as you know is built of stone and they plastered over it on the inside, and then put up some wallpaper of … er … stone. Why didn’t they just knock the plaster off?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Claude’s son came round this afternoon. he’d been rummaging around in one of his dad’s many sheds and came across a trailer board.

Well, a sort-of trailer board. The lenses on the lights were smashed and all the cable was missing but I cleaned it up, cleaned all the contacts and rewired it, and now there is in theory a working trailer board. I say “in theory” because there are no bulbs either but I have a 12-volt piazzo tester and when I connected it up to the contacts for the bulbs it did what it was supposed to do at the time it was supposed to do it.

So all Pascal needs to do now is to buy some lenses (they are “standard trailer – small” and some bulbs, attach it properly to the rear of the caravan, and there you are.

I checked and adjusted the brakes on the caravan too and during the course of the evening I learnt that
1) The caravan is over 40 years old
2) Pascal has never towed a trailer (or indeed anything, for that matter) before.
All I can say is “good luck” to him, taking that over the “Cote de Maille” between Puy-en-Velay and Montelimar at night.

-2

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: mains inverter

Friday 20th January 2012 – I CAN’T SEE …

Tuesday 17th January 2012 – YOU MAY REMEMBER …

Thursday 12th January 2012 – WHAT A GORGEOUS DAY …

Saturday 7th January 2012 – I’VE BEEN SPENDING …

Friday 6th January 2012 – IT’S BEEN …

Tuesday 15th November 2011 – IT’S NOT AS EASY …

Wednesday 20th October 2010 – I ALMOST FORGOT TO BLOG TONIGHT.

Thursday 3rd September 2009 – IF YOU LOOK VERY CLOSELY AT THIS PIC …..

Friday 21st August 2009 – YOU CAN SEE IN THIS PHOTO …

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