… with tonight’s image otherwise you would have seen that I now have plasterboarding on three quarters of the walls of the attic.
You would also have seen some extra wooden battens in the corner of the room opposite where my desk is going to be. That’s because I’m going to build a cupboard in there. I’m going to miss my target of the end of the month – I’m about two weeks behind – so I may as well do this kind of work while I’m at it as it won’t make much difference to my schedule.
But the insulation is certainly doing its job up there. 2 degrees warmer than in my room and at one stage I had to open all of the windows in there as it was so warm. It’s going to be interesting in there in the winter. Especially as Simon has now returned and he has my woodstove with him. I must go and rescue it this weekend.
It’s just as well I spent the last winter cutting down all of those trees, and this stove will also give me an incentive to do some more woodcutting this winter too.
But talking of timber, I’ve been putting together a project for a Dutch mushroom farmer whom I met at the timber yard when I was there with Liz. He wants 3.5Kw of electricity each day – that’s quite a lot, and so a 12-volt system is quite out of the question. Imagine all of the heat in the cables.
I’ll have to develop the 48-volt system and run on mains power with a really decent inverter. That should be exciting.
Back in the attic, tomorrow I’ll be finishing off the plasterboarding, except for one small corner. That’s where the cables are that run from the solar panels through where the bathroom will be and down to the control panel.
They need to be disconnected and run through some kind of trunking and that requires some careful thought as it’s fraught with all kinds of problems such as short circuits and the like. It’s the kind of thing that needs to be done at night when there is no current in the cables but I don’t think clearly enough after 19:00 at night.
