Tag Archives: victron energy

Tuesday 14th April 2015 – THIS MAKES DEPRESSING VIEWING;

plasterboard taken off back wall in shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, if you look very carefully at the back wall of the shower room, you’ll see that the plasterboard has been taken down.

And that’s not all either, for half of the plasterboard on the side wall has gone too. And when all of that is sorted out, half on the other side wall will be coming off.

You may remember that I did the plasterboarding in a hurry in 2013 in between trips to belgium, and I really wish that I hadn’t, because firstly, it’s a total mess, and secondy, the studding is all wrong.

I have to fit a variety of shelves in here, and it would have been ohh so easy to have fitted them and then done the plasterboarding around it like I did with the stairs, but that’s far too simple an idea. When I was looking this morning at how to fit the shelving in, and not seeing a satisfactory solution, I thought “sod this for a game of soldiers”. It was quicker to take off the plasterboard and start again.

I don’t know how I’m going to find the space to cut it down to the new shape, by the way, but I’ll worry about that in due course.

shelving bracket for composting toilet shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis is what I should have done before I fitted the plasterboarding.

Here’s the shelf mounting for the top of the composting toilet and it took me about an hour and a half to make it, including searching for the wood and changing a few light bulbs in the barn. However, it took about 5 hours altogether given all of the messing about. And that’s sad news. You can see what I mean about having done it first rather than last.

There needs to ne another shelf bracket fitted to the adjacent wall and I’ll finish that tomorrow – I’m well on my way to doing that already.

blossom on trees les guis virlet puy de dome franceIn other news, the blossom has finally arrived on the trees. 3 weeks later than usual, but it’s here nevertheless. And it does look pretty too – well worth the wait.

And you can see how nice the weather was – another beautiful blue sky all day long.

199.3 amp-hours of surplus solar energy (and wind energy too because we’ve had a nice windy day) went into the dump load – the home-made 12 volt immersion heater. The water temperature in the dump load was off the scale (over 70°C) by 15:00 and when I went to fetch hot water to do the washing up at 22:00, it was still not back on the scale again.

I’ve finally fixed the data logger too – the new one that I bought a few months ago. And this is what I call accuracy. I checked it tonight with a 1-watt bulb and it showed a discharge of … errrr …. 1 watt. I rigged up a few other low-powered items and the discharge was 9 watts. Switching everything off again went straight to 0.

I’m well impressed with this.

I was back in Crewe on my travels, with some people who figure more in my nocturnal adventures that they do in real life which is just as well as they aren’t people whose company I would appreciate for real.

We were in one house – a Victorian semi with waste land at the side that was a zone of special scientific interest – a marshy wetland. A car driven by a woman went past, did a U-turn across the marsh, went across the drive behind my car, and out across the lawn and back onto the Highway. This had caused a huge pile of light-grey gravel to be pushed into the marsh and had totally dried it up.

Then, I had to take one of these people to see his father, and he gave me directions. When we came to what he reckoned was the house number, it was an empty plot of land in Delamere Street where the little old school used to be. Now it’s been 23 years since I last lived in Crewe, and yet I could tell the difference between Delamere Street and Flag Lane, even when I’m deep in the arms of Morpheus.

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Tuesday 2nd December 2014 – REMEMBER THE OTHER DAY …

… when i said that I reckoned that winter was just around the corner?

1st snow winter 2014 les guis virlet puy de dome franceWell, I wasn’t wrong. At about midday today it started to snow – the 1st snow of winter 2014/15.

It might not look like much, but it snowed steadily throughout the afternoon and when I knocked off at 18:00 there was a think layer that was doing its best to stick. And had it been light, I would have taken a better photo of it.

I wonder what it’s going to be like tomorrow morning.

portable power board les guis virlet puy de dome franceI finished off the portable power board this morning. Well, it’s almost finished because it needs a backing on it to keep the cables and the backs of the sockets covered up.

There’s the inverter on there of course, a 600 watt one, together with an electric meter and a timer. Then we have three types of socket – a pair of 12-volt sockets, a single European 230 volt socket, and a pair of UK 230 volt sockets.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I use British plugs and sockets on my 230 volt system because the plugs are fused, and that’s a useful thing to have.

This afternoon, I started on the new power board in the barn down at the southern end.

The bad news is that I dropped my Ryobi Plus One handlamp and broke it. That’s a tragedy because it’s the best light that I’ve ever had and I shall miss it very much.

The good news is that the power board is up and in position. The Xantrex charge controller that works the bank of solar panels is installed, and that wasn’t as easy as it might have been. I forgot how rigid the ware was and it took me ages to bend it into position and thread it through the series of holes through which it needs to pass.

Threading the wires through for the wind turbine was easier, and that’s in place together with the meter that reads the voltage and the amount of charge.

There was an hour left and so I settled down to connect up the new batteries to the system.

And here’s a thing.

Which company sells batteries that take a certain size of bolt that is supplied, so you can look at it and know which size of battery cable to order – and then sells you a meter that works off a shunt connected to the negative lead between the battery and the grounding circuit – and which takes a larger bolt?

Of course, you can’t buy battery leads with different-sized terminals on each end, so tomorrow I’m going to have to cut one lead in half and solder larger terminals onto the cut end. And my soldering is rubbish too.

I have to say that I’m not at all impressed with this company

With the snow, I lit the fire again tonight and made a mega-aubergine-and-kidney-bean whatsit. There’s enough in there for four days as usual and tonight’s helping tasted really nice. Somehow, cooking in the oven tastes so much better.

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Friday 20th January 2012 – I CAN’T SEE …

… a thing right now in my room.

There’s a gusting wind blowing up outside and it’s in just the right direction to blow right down my chimney so every couple of minutes a load of smoke is blown back down the fire and out of the air vent into the room.

I’m being done up like a kipper just now.

But I was right about the weather – it’s rained for most of the day. And it is indeed nice to see the rail cascading off the new roof on the lean-to onto the ground, well away from the wall, and everything inside the lean-to being bone-dry for a change.

I can’t believe my luck with the weather for that 10-day spell when I decided to go for broke and do the lean-to roof. It’s not like me at all.

So I did some sawing of the wood this morning, but a downside of this now is that I’m cutting it faster than I’m burning it and I’m now running out of room to store it. I suppose that I shall have to make a larger woodpile, or a taller one or something.

I could, I suppose, even dig the trench that I need to dig at the side of the house by the “other” lean-to, drop the drainage pipe in there that needs to go in there and connect it into the drainage system, fill the trench with gravel, cover it over with a weed blanket and then build the real woodshed where it is supposed to go, but that’s not the work of half an hour.

After the woodcutting (which I managed to do without any interruption for a change) I did some more tidying up, starting in the lean-to.

First job was to rescue the remaining Hawker deep-discharge batteries and charge them up.

And here I’ve hit a problem, in that the battery box I made for the previous batteries is too small – the Hawkers are taller. But anyway once they were out of the way I tidied up in the lean-to, collected all of the stray solar panels and stacked them in a corner, and then hung up the smaller gardening tools so that I’m not tripping over them.

Having moved a couple of solar panels out of the barn I could then get in there and make some space to put the old Rutland wind turbine tidily out of the way.

This led to the discovery of a circular saw, not the 600-watt one that I can’t find anywhere at all, but the old 1050-watt one that was all rusted solid having been left in a container that filled with water through a leak in the barn roof when I was ill and which had subsequently been partly-dismantled for spares.

Of course, now that I have a 1200-watt inverter all things are possible, so I gave the saw a good spray with WD40 and reassembled it with some other bits and pieces. And much to my surprise it fired up!

Even more surprising was that the inverter didn’t even bat an eyelid.

The saw needs some “attention to detail” before I can use it to cut wood, but this is definitely progress.

This afternoon, with the weather deteriorating, I restarted work in the bedroom – the first time for God knows how long. I’ve fitted the false beam at the side wall – the beam that hides all of the electrical cable – and I’ve also packed out one of the plasterboard panels that didn’t quite mate with the others.

It was then that I lost the light and so I spent the last hour tidying up in the barn again.

And despite all of this time that I’ve spent tidying up, a I really can’t see any difference at all.

This evening by way of an experiment, I brought a kettle of water up here and put it on top of the woodstove. And after about 2.5 hours it was gloriously warm and I had a lovely hot wash and shave in front of the fire.

Definitely the highlight of the week, that, and I can’t think why I hadn’t done that before.

Next step is the coffee pot on the stove, and put the produce in a thermos ready for the following morning.

I ought to be much-better organised than I am.

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Tuesday 17th January 2012 – YOU MAY REMEMBER …

victron energy 1200 watt inverter les guis virlet puy de dome france… the other day that I mentioned that there was a new digital 1200-watt inverter in the post on its way here. Well, it turned up a couple of days ago but I never had time to install it.

Anyway, that all changed this morning and after cutting another huge pile of wood I set about fitting it in the system.

It’s quite a monster and quite heavy too, and the cable is 25mm welding cable. And to fit it on my panel board it involved moving a few things around in order to make the space.

But it’s certainly impressive and if it works as well as it’s supposed to, it will be a big improvement on the current (well, we are talking electricity here) analogue 600-watt inverter, which creaks and groans under the load that it sometimes has to bear but which has kept going for almost three years, day-in and day-out, nevertheless.

600 watt inverter portable power board les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe aforementioned has now been relegated onto the portable power panel that I made the other week which I drag around the outside from place to place when I need power.

As for the 150-watt inverter that was on there that has creaked and groaned day-in and day-out for even longer, that has now been relegated into Caliburn where it will just be used for charging up the laptop and the occasional power tool once in a while, replacing the unsatisfactory 150-watt pulse inverter that only seems to want to pulse when it wants to, which is never when I want it to.

This afternoon I did something that is so unusual as to merit recording here on the blog. And that is something called “tidying up”.

That’s a phrase that is contained in the vocabulary of many people but is somehow missing from mine.

You can’t see much of a difference because I seem to be the only person in the world whose tidying up makes more of a mess that it was before I started, but I’ve recovered 7 square metres of roofing tiles left over from the roofing of the house and the two lean-tos.

I’ll put them on one side for now and think of a way of using them.

I also went into the field next door hunting for the nails that made a bid for freedom. I don’t want the farmer’s cattle to find them first. I recovered a dozen or so but that’s just a tiny fraction of the number that got away. I’ll go for another look tomorrow

But the purpose of tidying up was to clear all of the wood off the floor of the first floor of the lean-to. Where the tarpaulin had been blown away, that area of the floor was soaking wet and the wood that was piled on it, much of it new stuff, was also soaking wet and it was all stopping the floor from drying.

So all of that wood has been arranged tidily where it will receive a nice current of air, and the floor is clear so that it might dry out. You might remember that it was only 18 months ago that I laid the floor and I don’t want it rotting away quite yet.

In other news, I have two companies sending representatives around tomorrow to sell me these roof-top solar panel systems.

I hate these cold-calling canvassers who ring up at 19:15 and 19:45 when I’m trying to drink a coffee and watch a film. Worse than spam e-mails they are – at least you can delete those – and so I’m fighting back.

I can waste more of their time than they can of mine.

And in other other news, the water in the new immersion heater reached 28.5°C this afternoon. Not a lot you might think, but that was 25°C over the ambient temperature downstairs, and that’s well-worth having.

It’s not hot enough to use the washing machine or to have a shower, but we are moving in the right direction.

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