Tag Archives: usb socket

Tuesday 16th December 2014 – WHAT A DAY!

It’s deen yet another wet, miserable day today – rained non-stop from morning to night. It’s been 12 days since I’ve had any decent solar energy and aren’t I glad that I changed the batteries over at the end of October and put the new ones in otherwise I would be struggling.

I knew exactly how it was going to be. Even though I had another early night, I woke up to hear the rain pounding down on the roof so I turned over and went back to sleep for another hour.

After breakfast I was back outside – or, rather, in the barn. I’ve sorted out all of the tools that I’ve been using and also done some tidying up there. There’s a dustbin completely full of rubbish that I’ve sorted out. I have, as you might have expected, found a few things that I had mislaid in the past and that’s always useful.

Another thing that I’ve done is to change a few plugs over. You remember that I bought a job lot of North American plugs a while back, only to find that they aren’t handed, which is a nuisance. However, there were several lights of various descriptions that I’ve found and of course the polarity of lights isn’t important. Consequently I changed four of the plugs over and that enabled me to recover four handed plugs and use four of the unhanded plugs instead.

I’ve moved the Ryobi Plus One 12-volt charger into the barn and that’s wired into the circuit, and I found a USB socket on a cigarette lighter plug – one that I had thrown away a while ago. But I managed to make it work this evening and so that’s now wired into the circuit too and the little *.mp3 player is currently being charged up on it.

There is also a row of hooks screwed into one of the roof beams and I’ve been hanging stuff there out of the way where it will still be to hand.

That’s all that I’ve done today. And it”s not surprising. With the miserable day that we had today, anything at all was better than that.

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Thursday 10th July 2014 – WHAT THE …?

Yes, I’ve spent ages this afternoon looking for a black jump lead. I save all the old ones as they come in useful as a cheap source of heavy duty cable, and I can find no fewer than 5 red ones, but there’s not a black one anywhere to be seen. I just don’t understand this.

During the night I was in Calveley with my father and a few other people, visiting the farm that belonged to my father’s parents. All of the outbuildings were still there but the farmhouse was a prefabricated type of bungalow. It seems that the farmhouse had burnt down and my grandfather had erected a kind of mobile home to replace it, with no planning permission. The uproar that this had caused led to a variety of court cases against my grandfather, all of which he lost, and the farm had to be sold to pay the legal expenses and grandfather went bankrupt. My father was in tears when whoever it was told this story.

So when I woke up and after breakfast I carried on with the website for the customary couple of hours, and then as the driving rain was preventing any outside work, I started to tidy up the bedroom.

This led to a couple of discoveries, one of which was a halogen table light. After lunch (I had to go into Pionsat to buy some bread) I rewired it and fitted a LED bulb in it, and that’s now illuminating my new comfy chair.

I also found a multiple cigarette-lighter socket with USB socket and so I rewired that and fitted it on the control board downstairs.

While I was there, having been told that the bad weather is to contine, I emptied the 12-volt immersion heater and ripped the wiring out. When I made it, I had forgotten to insulate the terminals and that’s not been helping the circuit, and the cables are scorched as I suspected. This led to a couple of design modifications, and then the search for heavier cables, such as old jump leads.

At about 19:15 that up until tomorrow and knocked off work. Rosemary rang up for a chat for about an hour, and then I had tea.

I’ll continue the search for the cable tomorrow.

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