Tag Archives: solar shave

Monday 12th March 2012 – WHAT AN EXCITING DAY!

The first exciting thing that happened was me lying wide awake in bed for ages thinking that I may as well get up – and finding when I did so that it was all of 07:45 – a good half-hour before the alarm goes off.

And not only that – with having had the fire on up here last night to cook a pizza, it was 16.6°C in here too, and it actually felt warm as well.

So having had breakfast and another load of coffee I did a pile of stuff on the computer. And then it was off outside to survey the house and barn – something that, quite surprisingly, I have never done.

It was not only glorious sunshine but a really strong wind and once more the wind energy today exceeded the cumulative total since I installed the power meter. And all of that was totally exciting as well.

Knocking off at 18:30 I discovered that the water in the dump load was heated to over 68.5°C and that’s a record this year. I had a gorgeous hot wash and shave with the water at that temperature and that made me feel so much better

At the Anglo-French group tonight we had two new attendees, Isobel from the Comcom at Marcillat en Combraille and her friend. We all had a really good night down there in St Gervais d’Auvergne.

And on the way home, the stars are the brightest that I have seen for a while. There are thousands of them out there, and Jupiter and Venus are wonderful. I can’t see Uranus from here though.

Back here, the water in the dump load was still 61°C and so I rounded the evening off by doing the washing-up with it, saving the gas supply for tonight.

So you can see what I mean about “exciting”, can’t you.

But in really depressing news, it’s three years tonight that Liz left us all. Time travels so fast these days but it can’t dim the lights.

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Friday 2nd July 2010 – Up until about 21:00 this evening …

… the weather was magnificent. In fact it was far too magnificent to work.

solar panel mounting kwikstage scaffolding barn les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis morning we put up a small scaffolding at the southern end of the barn and while Terry was drilling and screwing into the wall for the mounting brackets I was sawing and cutting scaffolding pipe to make a framework to mount the solar panels that are on the roof of the Luton Transit.

I’ll be fitting them permanently onto this end of the barn along with the wind turbine that we took down from the north end of the barn.

But we were defeated by that most unusual phenomenon – overheating batteries. When they went flat in the Hitachi SDS drill (and what a good purchase that was!) they were too hot to take a charge. Mind you, it was only 37°C today – the hottest of the year.

guttering barn roof kwikstage scaffolding les guis virlet puy de dome franceNot to be outdone however we started on the guttering of the barn as you can see. I told Terry that there are four classes of people in France

  1. the peasants – the ones with the leaky roofs
  2. the lower class – the ones with roofs that don’t leak
  3. the middle class – the ones with guttering on their barn …

    4. “What’s the fourth class?” asked Terry

  4. “The ones with drains to take away the water!”

But having seen how dry the house walls have become since I put guttering up, then my barn will have it too. I’m sick and tired of being up to my neck in mud. But I’ll have to wait a bit for the drains though.

The chevrons are much too short for the roofing (I went for a long overhang) and so a fascia board is out of the question but they did have at Brico Depot yesterday some galvanised straps with the facility for a sliding attachment. If you bend the straps so that the sliders are at about 60° there’s still a good 9 inches or so on the straps and they fit nicely onto the chevrons and you can bolt the gutter mounts to them and they are then perfectly vertical.

We did what we could bearing in mind that we had no joints (moving the scaffolding out to give us clearance was fun) but by 15:00 it was no longer possible to work up there. The combination of a searing hot metal roof, blinding sunlight and tools too hot to touch made us call it a day.

I did a little some while later and then history was made by my not only having a solar shower  (and this LIDL garden shower thing needs some attention) but a solar shave as well. And no surprise – the water temperature was a phenomenal 46°C

We had a barbecue round at Clare’s tonight. Esther hosted it and very kindly invited me, and of course Strawberry Moose met some of his admirers. James and Julianna drew some good pictures of him too.

But by 21:00 we were having thunder and lightning and we even had some rain. But nothing like as much as we need. And right now the sky is a clear cloudless starry night promising much more sun for tomorrow. I have to go to Commentry to look for joints and downpipe and then it’s a toss-up as to whether I come back to do the guttering or go for a swim.

We shall see.

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