Tag Archives: pascal

Tuesday 25th August 2009 – IT’S DONE NOTHING …

rainwater harvesting les guis virlet puy de dome france… but rain here all day. 11 mms in fact, so I was able to put my new improved rainwater harvester to the test.

Don’t worry about the multicoloured pipework – when I have everything exactly where I want it I can change that. But you can see that the rainwater falls down the downpipe and initially into the part that’s angled to the right, that’s a kind of sump. Anything that is heavier than water, like dirt or concrete, will drop down into there, with the bend in the pipe to stop the dirty water splashing up.

When the lower part is filled, the rainwater will go down the part that’s angled to the left and into the rainwater collector. All the dirt, stones and so on will still fall down the part to the right and collect in there.

The water in the collector certainly seems to be clean, and when I undid the screw cap at the bottom, a pile of dirty water fell out. So it’s working.

electrical panel 12 volt domestic electrical circuit les guis virlet puy de dome france
Also working is my electrical panel. In the living room I ripped out all of about 100 years-worth of redundant wiring and connected up some decent stuff. All properly connected and fused.

When it went dark at about 16:00 (it’s been just like winter with this rain) I coupled up all of the batteries and the solar panels – 780 watts-worth of panels and 920 amp hours-worth of batteries. Tomorrow morning I’ll run some wires up to the attic.

But talking of dark, I had just 13.2 amp-hours of solar energy registered from the 3 solar panels on the barn. You have to go back to 26th April to find a day as depressing as that. But the 3 solar panels on the roof of the house showed a total of 28.2 amp-hours, so that’s encouraging. Now all 6 on the house are connected, that’s even more encouraging.

In other news, Pascal came round to borrow a tyre pressure gauge to check the pressure on the caravan tyres. Later, he came round again. He’d pumped up the tyres and taken the caravan for a spin to make sure nothing was going to drop off (that was a sensible idea) but he couldn’t reverse it up the track to Claude’s.

I went round to do it for him but his car just didn’t have the whack to push it up the hill in reverse and it kept on overheating. We pushed the caravan up by hand – 5 of us.

Later, Pascal’s lad came round to tell me that Pascal had decided not to take the caravan. He’ll get a friend of Claude to deliver it next time he’s coming down. So wiser councils have at last prevailed.

That’s a much more sensible idea and if it all goes pear-shaped it will be someone else’s responsibility and not his.

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Sunday 23rd August 2009 – IT DOESN’T LOOK …

solar energy control panel les guis virlet puy de dome france… as if I’ve done very much today.

There are two circuit breakers now on the control panel. They are at the bottom right and are for the two solar arrays.

On the bottom of the board to the left of centre is the fuse box out of a late 1990s Vauxhall Astra. They are one of the reasons why I visit scrapyards in the UK so often. They have one heavy cable in and 8 maxi fuses (up to 100 amp) and 8 wires out – just the job for the 12-volt circuits I’ll be having in the house.

There’s also some of the wiring installed, and you can also see the insulation and 6 of the batteries already in what will be the battery box.

Mind you, don’t forget that it’s Sunday today so I don’t set the alarm – sleep till I wake up and so on. So at 06:55, a time that doesn’t normally exist on a Sunday morning except when I haven’t been to bed yet, I was wide away and at 07:30 I was up and about.

Another glorious sunny day was promised so I did a load of washing in the little tabletop washer that I bought for 10 Euros last year at the Virlet brocante. And I’ve had my moneysworth out of that. And while the washing was on the go I steamcleaned the verandah and I can actually get to the chemical toilet without falling over something and breaking my neck … "shame" – ed.

Following that it was lunch and then the obligatory visit to Claude’s to fix the trailerboard that Pascal can’t get working after he’s fixed it once.

This afternoon was the battery box followed by a big blazing fire in the grate in the living room to
1) aerate and dry out the house
2) get rid of a week’s accumulation of rubbish
3) cook my baked potatoes for tea.
And there’s definitely something about my own spuds. Shop-bought ones will bake easily in a hot open fire yet those I grow myself won’t cook. It shows you how rotten shop-bought spuds are, and how fresh mine are.

And we’re told that we’ll be having a storm tomorrow afternoon. I can try out my sump idea to see if it helps keep the rainwater clean. But if it’s anything like last week’s storm we’ll have 10 drops of rain and that will be that.

And today’s solar energy in the house? A mere 129.0 amp-hours.

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

battery box control panel les guis virlet puy de dome france… 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.

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Thursday 20th August 2009 – AFTER WORKING ALL DAY ALMOST NON-STOP ….

base of battery box les guis virlet puy de dome france … I’ve finished the first part of the base of the battery box, as you can see.

The floor in the house is dreadful, full of cracks that let in the damp (a piece of wood that I laid on the floor across a crack rotted to nothing in 6 months) so I started years ago to dig it up.

Earlier followers of my organ will recall me pulling up a chicken that had been cast into the original concrete floor (such pagan rites were apparently practised here in comparatively recent times) but I abandoned the demolition of the floor for another idea.

The ceiling is pretty high and there is a large step uo into the kitchen, so I’m going to put in a suspended floor and seal in the old concrete with bitumen. This will give me enough headroom to put the batteries under the floor in the entrance hall where they will keep nice and warm, and the gases can vent out via a pipe laid to the outside passing underneath the false floor.< So the first job this morning was to rearrange everything in the living room so that I had the space to work. And as the fridge is just 50cms wide and the door to the verandah is 54cms past the obstructions, I made an extended worktop in the verandah and I now have the fridge right next to where I'm cooking.

battery box sand damp proof membrane les guis virlet puy de dome franceThen I had to dig down a little further, lay a layer of sand to cover up any sharp bits that might puncture the damp-proof course, build a framework, line it with a plastic sheet as a damp-proof course, lay more sand to protect the integrity of the damp-proof course, heap a pile of rubble inside the framework and then cover with a layer of concrete.

That took me until 19:00 and then I had to go to Claude and Francoise’s. Claude has given his old caravan to his son but the electrics aren’t working and he has to tow it to near Marseilles (it’s not moved under its own steam for 20 years and the tyres are totally perished – just like the rest of the caravan).

After what seemed like hours , and me tearing my trousers on a nail that was being used to hold up the jockey wheel, I noticed that someone had wired the trailer plug up wrongly. I fixed that and after another few hours I managed to get an indicator light working.

The whole electrical circuit on this caravan is shot to pieces and the light units have all short-circuited. Pascal is going to buy some more stuff tomorrow and wants to know if I can rewire the caravan on Friday evening.

Ahhh well.

After all these exertions I’m off to have an early night. I’m totally worn out right now.

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