Tag Archives: oil filled heater

Thursday 19th January 2012 – THE WEATHER …

… changed during the night, just as I suspected that it might when I saw the clouds gathering yesterday afternoon.

I woke up this morning to a grey and miserable overcast day, and that’s how it remained all day.

The third of these cold-calling solar panel salesmen came to see me at about 11:00 and he was gone by 11:05, interrupting my woodcutting.

I need to do as much as I can of that because I want the space at the back of the barn, where I’m storing the tree trunks, for other things. Getting it out of the way by cutting it up seems like a good idea to me and I’m planning to do half an hour each day. Warm me up for other things.

Once my time was up I went to look for something in the barn and I can’t remember what it was now, but I didn’t find it, as you might expect in my barn.

I ended up doing some kind of tidying up (after a fashion) and repairing the lights up there so that I can see what I’m doing, and I found the 400-watt halogen heater that I brought back from Brussels.

The oil heater isn’t heating as much as I had hoped and it’s not keeping its heat as long as it ought to either, and so I’ve decided to go with the halogen one for now.

100 watts less, but of course halogen is much more efficient than most other forms of electric heating and I recall getting quite warm with that in the old days. I’ll be intrigued to see what it can do in a glorious alpine day.

I also found a pair of steel toecapped work shoes that I had forgotten all about. They’ve been rescued and put to good use. It’s nice to have decent footwear.

This afternoon I went about and inspected the trees overhanging the next stage of the garden development – the space to where I’ll be moving the compost bins. There were a couple of them that looked rather dodgy and so they came down.

I also cut up the tree that had fallen down in the gale last summer and flattened my spuds and onions, and moved it out of the way.

I DO like this new saw.

To finish off, I started to weed one of the raised beds where I grow my vegetables and I’m making quite a pile of stuff for burning, right where the greenhouse is going to be.

And four reasons too.

  1. it’s a nice big clear space there
  2. it’ll get rid of all the rubbish that’s accumulating
  3. it’ll burn the weeds that are growing there
  4. the ashes will fertilise the soil

But I won’t be burning anything tomorrow, and I won’t be working in the garden either. We’re having a torrential rainstorm right now outside and I’ll be intrigued to see how the new roof is coping with it all.

Thursday 26th August 2010 – Now this is exciting.

12 volt water heater barn les guis virlet puy de dome franceI told you a few days ago that Simon had an old 12-volt water boiler in his van but he had taken it out and replaced it with an Econowash unit like I have in Caliburn.

Anyway he very kindly donated it to the cause and this afternoon I fitted it in the barn wired up to another charge controller.

I don’t use much electricity out of the barn right now and the batteries in there are fully-charged by 09:30 most mornings and that’s quite a waste of power. So I’ve wired up a charge controller to act as a dump load and I’ve connected this boiler into there.

It’s only 2.5 litres and that isn’t very much at all but running the surplus current from 370 watts of solar panels into there should get that water pretty hot on most days. It’s going to be an interesting experiment anyway and it was really nice of Simon to donate it.

home made 12 volt immersion heater les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut what else I have been doing today is to make my immersion heater for the house. And here it is.

it’s a 30-litre chemical drum and I cut the top off it so that I could get inside it. I’ve screwed in one of my 500-watt 12-volt elements, the one that I had floating on a pontoon in that large bucket. That’s right at the bottom in a horizontal plane.

I then mounted a tap into the container – that’s mounted higher than the element so that the element will never run dry.

Once they were all fitted and sealed in I fitted a connecting ring made out of old tin cans pop-riveted onto the top of the bottom half and then slid the top half over the top of that. And then I wired it in.

Once I’m sure that it’s working I’m going to seal up the joint with some waterproof tape and then wrap it in rolls of insulation to keep the water warm. I’m thoroughly intrigued to see what this might produce. 20-odd degrees above the ambient temperature in an open bucket with 50 litres of  water – so what will 30 litres of water in a sealed and insulated container give me?

It’s exciting stuff.

oil filled water heater les guis virlet puy de dome franceIn the winter of course I will be using any surplus energy to run the oil-filled heater – the one that I bought earlier this year – in the attic. I had some good results from that last winter and if we mount this wind turbine when I come back from Canada things should be even better.

And if the results from the other water boiler are positive then I can put this one in the barn in the winter and see what that brings.

But what with one thing and another, things are looking quite positive around here these days and I feel like I’m making enormous progress.