Tag Archives: wiring

Saturday 10th February 2018 – IT’S CARNAVAL!!!

And I’ve been out for most of the day.

I have dozens of photos and a good few videos but they aren’t edited yet, so you’ll have to come back over the course of the next few days to catch up with what I was up to.

But during the night I was off on my travels again and found myself, as some people were saying, in Coventry. People in a bar where I was were pointing out the cathedral down in the square at the bottom of the hill, but this was nothing at all like Coventry – the hill was unimaginably steep and it immediately suggested “Oldham” to me – I’m not sure why because in reality it was nothing whatever like Oldham either. Far too “posh”. But as for me, I continued on my way and found a rambling brick complex of buildings, now having the air of being totally deserted and boarded up. I went over for a closer look and found that the decaying noticeboard outside showed evidence of having once had writing in Welsh written upon it. Apparently it was a former school (although what a Welsh-speaking school was doing in Oldham wasn’t clear) and as it happens, there was nothing “former” about it because there were two classes still taking place, despite how derelict and abandoned the place looked. It turned out that one of the classes didn’t have a teacher and seeing as it was the Welsh-speaking class, I volunteered (not like me at all is is, volunteering and teaching?). It all seemed to be going okay until one of the fathers came to see me. He was concerned that his daughter was not doing as well as he thought she should, and that it was all my fault (not hers of course) and wanted me to inflate her marks. “And if I didn’t …”. For the next test she didn’t do so well either so he came back, insisting that I up her marks to 81%. That I refused to do so he whipped out a gun, waved it around under my nose and told me that I would. I gave a weary sigh. I told him that I was old and tired and couldn’t care less, and if he wanted to shoot me then to go ahead because I really was beyond the point of arguing with anyone.

All of this awoke me bolt-upright at 05:21, but no chance of leaving the stinking pit at that time. I curled back under the bedclothes until the alarm went off at the much-more-reasonable time of 06:40.

After breakfast I had an hour or so on the database but for some unknown reason it locked up and that was that. I’m not doing very well with this at all.

But all of a sudden, the memory stick in the hi-fi came to an end. That was the cue for some major amendments.

For the last few weeks the hi-fi has been perched precariously on the bookcase behind me, with wires and cable causing all kinds of problems. So today I moved the old computer hi-fi gear off the shelves where I keep the records and installed it there.

To make that work I had to drill four holes in the back of the unit, and feed all of the cables through for the mains power, the aerial lead and the two speakers – and lengthened the speaker wires with the cable that I bought last week.

Feeding the mains cable through the back meant cutting off the moulded plug – but I’d bought a replacement so that wasn’t an issue.

With the extra lengths of cable I now have the stereo speakers far enough apart to have real stereo sound and that is definitely progress. I’m very happy with my set-up now.

And remember the memory sticks that I bought yesterday? I made up another one (there’s four just now) and made a note of the albums that are on each memory stick so that I don’t double them up.

After lunch I went down to the carnaval to see the childrens’ procession. And I’ll tell you much more about that in due course when I’ve organised all of the photos that I took. I will say that I was impressed.

However, I did feel out of place in civvies. Exactly the opposite to the time when I was in Jerusalem and due to a misunderstanding, I was the only one at the Wailing Wall who was carrying a harpoon.

There was someone there carrying a girl sitting on his shoulders.
“What are you supposed to be?” I asked him
“I’m a snail” he replied
“And what about the girl on your shoulders?”
“She’s Michelle”.

And there was a character there dressed all in brown with little green bits stuck to him
“What about you?” I asked
“I’m a character from ‘Star Trek'”
“Which one?”
“Captain’s log”.

It quietened down later in the afternoon but by now the rain was coming down heavier (it goes without saying of course that it was raining all day) so rather than hang around, I came home for a coffee.

Later on I braved the cold and rain to go up to the Stade Louis Dior for the football. US Granville were playing the reserves of Lorient – a professional team.

And they looked it too – much fitter, quicker, sharper. And I particularly liked the way that they sped about the field to close down the Granville players whenever they had the ball. It’s long been my complaint, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that teams give their opponents far too much time and space on the ball.

But Lorient spent most of the match trying to pass the ball into the net. They had probably 65% of the possession but were comparatively ineffective up front. They just weren’t direct enough and hardly made a single killer pass. And when they did beat the keeper, a Granville defender was behind him to clear off the line.

Their big blond n°9 was quite ineffective and didn’t contribute much at all, but one thing that he did do was to continually harass the defence and the keeper whenever they were playing the ball around at the back. And he harried them on several occasions into hasty, wayward clearances and a couple of occasions into losing possession in dangerous places, situations that would have undone Granville with a more attack-minded team.

Granville were quite subdued today – the efforts of playing three matches in 7 days is probably too much, and so a 0-0 draw was about right. But it was a good match for all of that.

ON the way back I went round the funfair to see what was happening and take some photos, so that’s another pile to organise.

But again I didn’t hang about. I was frozen to the marrow and soaked to the skin. How I’m going to regret this.

A tin of ratatouille with pasta was fine for tea and now I’m off to bed. It’s Sunday – a lie in, and with 148% of my daily activity accomplished, I need it too.

I’ll be dead to the world in a minute, and I hope that I can have a really good, long sleep.

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Thursday 21st August 2014 – THIS TIME NEXT WEEK …

… I’ll be at 34,000 feet. I hope that the aeroplane will be too!

And I can’t wait to go either – I need a break. Especially after today. It took an hour and a half to sort out the difficult part of the wiring issues. The problem was relatively straightforward but it didn’t half take some fixing. What had happened was that when we must have fed the huge cable through the piping, the pipe had come away from its mounting and dropped down through the floor some way. Pushing the pipe back up had wedged it underneath the floor and trapped the wires.

Of course, now that the plasterboard has been put on the wall in the shower room, it’s not possible to reach the pipe from underneath. Consequently I had to drill out the floor from above and chisel part of it away. That freed the wires off but the insulation on the one that had been trapped under the floor was damaged so I had to wrap it in insulation tape. It’s a good job that I noticed.

But this huge armoured cable going through the pipe – I can’t understand that. Why did I choose that? Two strands of 16mm cable takes up much less room than that and will be much better at carrying the surplus current upstairs when I finally manage to move the immersion heater up here when the bedroom is finished. Consequently I pulled the cable right out.

It still wasn’t as easy as it might have been to pass this cable through the pipe but anyway, there it is. And there’s plenty of room for 2 strands of 16mm cable as well as one or two others if necessary.

Before I could restart work after lunch, Rosemary came round and we pulled up the onions and garlic. And what a crop! I’ve never ever been so lucky as to have had a crop like this. It seems that this wet weather has done some good somewhere.

That took us until 19:30 and I was looking forward then to coming upstairs and tidying up because it is a total disaster here what with me trying to pack as well as having to clear part of the attic to access this cabling.

But it’s not to be. I’ve had a phone call that means that either tomorrow or Saturday, Caliburn and I will have to take the big trailer on a rather long run. Consequently I had to empty out Caliburn and rescue the trailer from the undergrowth where it lives. Of course, there was a light out so I had to fix that too and that took me right up to 21:30 when it was too dark to do any more and I didn’t feel like tidying up at that time of night.

Tomorrow I’ll have to finish off all of the stuff for Radio Anglais if we aren’t going until Saturday. The radio stuff can’t be left and so for the moment this is the priority task.

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Wednesday 20th August 2014 – PHEW!

Yes, I’m exhausted. And I’ve only been tidying up the wiring outside underneath the fascia board.

That was meant to be a five-minute task but I’m already on the 3rd day and it’s far from finished. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong.

I started off by disconnecting the wind turbine on the fence – the one that I’ve been using as a test bed. I wanted the timer off it. I then connected two wires to it, and that was where the easy bit ended.

When I dud the roof, I ran some 6mm wire down some conduit from outside under the eaves with theaim of wiring up the wind turbine – the one on the roof – to it, but it never gave any charge and so I ran an outside wire up to the turbine. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I had another go at wiring up this 6mm wire to see where the fault was.

This is where I discovered that the charge controller is built for a maximum of 4mm wire. After hours of fiddling around I had to splice some 2.5mm wire into the 6mm wire to make the good connection. When I wired it all up to the batteries and installed a fuse, I had a bright blue flash right across the living room.

Hmmm. A dead short. THat’s why the wire’s not working.

Back on the scaffolding, I cut down the wire so that there was no excess outside, and then attached a couple of new lengths to the older lengths in order to pull them through. Anyway, that promptly stuck and it took about an hour to pull it all back out.

Next, I tried a cable puller and that became irrevocably stuck and nothing that I could do would shift it. After much binding in the marsh, there was nothing for it but to unpack the corner of the attic where all of the wiring comes through (it’s not sealed off yet) and unstick it from the inside under the eaves. And that took hours and now the attic is on an even worse mess

But I didn’t ‘arf have a surprise when I opened it all. I don’t mean the cable puller – that came out in seconds, but there was a huge pile of wire inside there.

It seems that the wire from the outside is just coiled up behind the plasterboard and isn’t going into the conduit to go downstairs. Furthermore, the two wires that are coming up from downstairs is also coiled up behind the plasterboard and hasn’t been pssed through the conduit to the outside.

I’ve no idea what I must have been thinking when I was doing this wiring back in 2009, but at least it explains why the wind turbine wire wasn’t doing anything back in those days.

It also explains the blue flash downstairs too – that’s because the wires coming upstairs had been taped together so that they wouldn’t separate, and the copper in one wire is touching the copper in the other.

The wire that came through from the outside, I pulled it out, and the one that came from downstairs, I pushed that outside for the wind turbine and at last I’ll have a circuit.

If I had stopped there, it wouldn’t have been quite so bad, but seeing as I’m putting another bank of solar panels on the wall outside and they need a pair of wires, and I had the xall dismantled and a onduit passing through to the outside, I decided to pass the wires through the conduit and inside the house so that they aren’t visible fr – om the outside.

So with 4 strands of 6mm cable trying to fit through a 16mm conduit, it called for some delicate manoeuvre and I’ve never had cable so firmly wedged in conduit before. It was inch-by-inch, on and off the scaffolding to feed it into place and then into the attic to pull it through from outside. And when you need 7.5 metres of cable coming through, you can see how many times I was on and off the scaffolding.

Anyway, I now have 7.5 metres of wire coiled up inside and the next intention was to thread it down the conduit – a 32mm pipe with all kinds of stuff coming up in it. I’ve started to thread the cable puller up from the bottom, but that’s stuck in the conduit for the moment.

So that’s where I’m at at 19:30 in the evening with my little 5-minute job. I’ll be in bed in a moment with no tea because I don’t feel like making any. I’ll have another go at it tomorrow.

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Friday 15th August 2014 – YEEUUCCHHH

Yes, it had been another one of those evenings last night. Late last night it started to pour down in spades and at about 06:00 it was so loud that it woke me up. It was unbelievable. Every day I seem to be saying that I’ve never seen anything like it, and every day I’m right because it’s just getting worse and worse.
,
It poured down for most of the morning and I did the usual work on the web site. I ended up building a shop as well – I’m slowly changing all of the links on my Canada pages from Amazon.co.uk to Amazon.ca and there’s a shop facility on there.

I need to maximise the income potential on my web pages.

After lunch, I waited until the rain subsided and then went up on the scaffolding to carry on working on the electrics. And I would make much more progress if I could find all of the stuff that I needed without having to spend hours hunting it down, and I knew where all of my tools were. It seems that this tidying up that I did throughout the winter isn’t working out as planned.

I didn’t do much while I as up there either. Despite having planned it all the other day, I’ve changed it a couple of times already this afternoon while I was up there, and it will be changed again before I’ve finished.

Not only that, I was suffering from a bad attack of dropsy. I was dropping everything while I was up on the scaffolding and I had to keep on going down to fetch it – I’ve forgotten how many times I was up and down the ladder. In the end, all that remained to fall off the scaffolding was me and so I called it a day. It’s not the place to be, the scaffolding, when you are having concentration issues.

It was however 19:50 when I knocked off – it shows you haw engrossed I was in what I was doing. And it’s a good job I stopped when I did as about 15 minutes later the heavens opened again.

So let’s see how I can get on on Monday.

– in that I was

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Thursday 14th August 2014 – I’VE BEEN SPENDING …

… my money again today.

I went out this morning to go to visit someone who was finishing off the work on his house as there were some bits and pieces up for sale. One of the items on sale was a solid, proper Indespension Plant Trailer – 4-wheeled close-coupled low-loader with built-in ramps, 3 metres long and built to carry a tank. It has low loader sides but they can be raised by boards so that the trailer can carry sand and gravel too and it isn’t half an impressive beast, especially when you consider that it will carry all of my scaffolding too as well as the Kubota tractor and whatever else is lying around here.

But not only that – it was what was on the trailer that caught my eye. I had a goot poke around at that and although it’s old, it was in good condition, not leaking and not smoking, and the price for the trailer and the load would have been what I would have had to pay for one of the brand new trailers that I had been looking at if I had to go to the UK to pick it up. Consequently, I bit the bullet and that was that.

I’ve got to go back with some money and then I can take a photo of my new toy and you can see what it is that I bought. UNtil then, I’ll leave you all in suspense.

Back here I put the second coat onto the fascia panel and the beams of the roof on the front of the house (at least, as far as I could reach). Then I went to lunch.

While I was eating my butty I was interrupted by a visit from a couple of people from the Mairie. They were newly-elected councillors familiarising themselves with the area, and they had a little moan about one or two things here.

And that was my clue. I explained firstly that the untidy and unkempt land isn’t mine but is actually the commune’s land. And why I can’t move my stuff around any better is that the commune hasn’t maintained the land for years so I can’t move stuff past it. ANd so if the commune wants me to do something, they need to do something first.

Furthermore, I had applied to the commune to buy the land. Readers with long memories will remember that I deposited my application on 8th May … errr … 2009 – over 5 years ago. And the commune has taken no action about my demand.

This led to an animated discussion that went on for an hour or two, and finally they saw my point. They promised that they would bring up the matter of my application at the next meeting of the council.

We shall see.

After they went, I spent a pleasant hour or so sanding down the facade of the house where I’d drilled through for the air vents and then filled it. That’s comparatively smooth now and almost ready to paint, but a sad discovery was that the crepi had dried out and so was no use at all. I need to buy some more now before I can paint the facade.

I then spent a while sorting out all of the electrical fittings and making a bracket to mount the outside light that I want to fit. And by the time I had everything ready, it was time to knock off.

It was a dull day today with just a couple of odd sunny spells – at least until about 22:30 when we had today’s torrential downpour. This summer is really getting on my nerves now.

-1

Tuesday 16th July 2013 – EVEN MORE WHACKED!

And that’s hardly surprising either.

Despite yesterday’s Herculean efforts I was wide-awake and up and about long before the alarm went off and after breakfast I finished all of the notes for the rock music programme for the forthcoming month;

In the shower room quite early too, and I discovered to my dismay that I hadn’t fitted the bracing on the wall at the head of the stairs. That needed doing before I could fit the plasterboard.

But that was all done, the cables re-routed and the plasterboard fitted, and all before lunch too – mind you it was 15:00 when I stopped for I wasn’t going to let anything get in my way of doing what I need to do;

Into Pionsat to buy some bread and there in the Intermarche was Rick the Trailer Guy. Seeing as it’s harvest time I greeted him with a “hey, Rick” but, being Dutch, it went clean over his head.

Keen readers of this rubbish will remember back in August last year that Rick’s cello was blown away in a freak gust of wind and badly damaged, but he has it back now, “Playing even better”, so he says and I’m glad about that.

It was a real tragedy.

shower room stud wall plasterboard les guis virlet puy de dome franceJust half an hour for lunch and then I attacked the next stage of the shower room – the false wall.

And in a fit of reckless extravagence that’s installed now. It just needs one more horizontal brace fitting ad then the shower side can be cladded with a sheet of plasterboard.

All that then remains is the false wall for the composting toilet and that, dear reader, will be that.

The plasterboard around the windows is not all that important – it doesn’t need to be fitted in order to be measured up for tiles.

If I can finish the second false wall, then i’ll be two days ahead of my schedule, which is impressive enough.

And so it ought to be too because if you think that 20:35 was late for knocking off last night, this evening we finished work at 20:50, which has to be something of a record, I reckon.

But I’m too tired to cook and I’m too tired to eat. I’m going to bed and I’ll sleep for a week I reckon..

-3

Friday 12th July 2013 – IT’S POETS DAY AGAIN

And even though I’m allowed to pi … errr … push off early because tomorrow is Saturday, “early” was something like 19:30.

I don’t know why it is, but even though I’m working from about 12:00 until knocking-off, with a break for lunch, I don’t feel like I’m wasting any time at all.

It’s still taking forever to advance and I feel that I ought to be going twice as quickly as I am.

This afternoon’s work involved fixing in the air pipe from the inside, trimming it back and fitting the bell housing. You may wonder why I’m fitting a bell housing, but the answer to that is that the smallest bathroom ventilator fan that I could find has a 125mm diameter, whereas a length of 125mm pipe wouldn’t fit down the hole that I made in the wall. The bell-housing will have to be cut back too but not until the tiling is done – it needs to be cut flush with the tiling.

air vent space blanket insulation plasterboard shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceFrom there, I fitted all of the space blanket insulation to the bathroom wall and then fitted all of the counter-battening to hold it in place and to make the air-gap.

Next task was to cut a length of plasterboard to fit in the corner over where the pipes are, drilling out some holes so that the pipes will pass through and into the room.

That took ages to do but, much to my surprise, the smaller pipe fitted perfectly through the hole with no juggling about at all, and the larger one would have done too had I cut it to the correct diameter.

But still, that’s now on, fitted, and screwed into position.

Final job was to run the wiring into the correct position along the ceiling and down the far wall.

That means now that I just need to cut 4 pieces of plasterboard, disconnect and then reconnect the wiring, fit the shower base and build the false wall that will be up against the shower base.

Doing that, I will have done all that I wanted to do, and I can measure up for the tiles.

Mind you, at this rate, it’ll take another 3 months, I reckon. I just don’t know where the time goes to.

-3

Friday 5th July 2013 – IT’S POETS DAY TODAY

Yes – p … errr … ush off early, tomorrow’s Saturday and so I did knock off early too. Upstairs sitting in my room with a good book by … errr … 19:35.

This morning I had another couple of hours on the internet with the next instalments of web pages, with just a minor interruption from Rosemary. Her car’s gone wrong and she didn’t understand the garagiste.

Anyway, I gave him a quick ring and found out that a wheel bearing  – roulement – has packed up. I duly relayed the message to Rosemary and after a little chat, I carried on with my work.

This afternoon I took off the sheet of plasterboard that I’d fitted incorrectly and dismantled the wiring that I’d assembled last week.

plasterboard stud wall shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceI then threaded all of the wiring down the channels that I had drilled, reassembled it and then fitted two (or rather one and a half) sheets of plasterboard, as you can see.

But there are two issues with all of this.

Firstly, you’ll notice a horizontal line right across the nearer sheet of plasterboard. Trying to put a sheet of plasterboard into the cutting position, I dropped it (these 13mm waterprrof sheets are flaming heavy) and it snapped.

And so I fetched another one – and did exactly the same.

I’m working in a confined space with no room to move around and I’m on my own with these heavy objects so I’m bound to have accidents.

But at least the split in this one will be below the level of the tiling and so seeing as how it will be bunged up with tile cement it doesn’t really make much odds.

The second thing though is more important. I’ve cut some of the wires too short and I’ve not much idea exactly what I can do about that. I shall have to think of something.

Last night though, I was in Nantwich. Of course I know Nantwich very well – it’s where I went to school and I like to go there for a wander around the shops and to sit by the river on a summer evening. In my dream Nantwich was very much like it is today except that although just recently that have built a new road around the back of the town, in my dream there was an old road system around the back there) that went to Winsford and Middlewich (and is much more logical that the road system of the late Victorian age). . A friend and I went for a walk through the crowds sunning themselves by the river at the back of the swimming baths and we carried on along this old abandoned road. After about half a mile, after passing some mile posts of the 1920s we came to a roundabout where the roads for Middlewich and Winsford diverged. This roundabout had all of the signs and street furniture of the 1920s and was probably one of the earliest roundabouts ever to be built, On the fourth exit off the roundabout, there were a couple of big cars of the late 1920s parked up. They were in fact die-cast models but life-size and I remember trying to lift up the bonnet of one of them.

Anyway, now I’m filthy dirty, unshaven, unwashed and in the same clothes for a week and feel totally uncomfortable.

Tomorrow, come what may, I’ll be going for a swim at Neris-les-Bains. You just watch the baths be closed for maintenance.

-9

Friday 27th January 2012 – I CAN ALWAYS TELL …

… when I’m enjoying myself when i’m working. It’s when I suddenly notice that the light has gone and it’s 18:15 and I’m still out there happily working away.

And so it was today

I did the customary pile of woodcutting and now the woodshed is looking quite impressive. There’s probably now enough cut to last me for next winter as well and there’s still a load to do out by the barn.
And then there’s all the wood from last winter, that’s still down the fields.
And then there are all the chevrons off the house roof and the barn roof.
Wood isn’t something that I’m going to be short of for a while

air 403 wind turbine replacement metal blades les guis virlet puy de dome franceOnce I had done the wood, I made a start on the wind turbine, and that is now in position.

Doesn’t it look smart with its new stylish aerodynamic blades. But I shall have to stop mounting all of these wind turbines. I’ll end up being arrested.

It wasn’t as easy as you might think, organising this wind turbine. But then again, nothing ever is when I’m involved, is it?

It all started to go wrong when I tried to mount the hub onto the spindle. And immediately the bolts holding the blades to the hub fouled the casing.

So I turned the bolts round so that the threads were exposed – hardly aerodynamic but it all fitted.

Then, tightening up the hub, the hub ground out against the casing and locked up the blades. That meant using a couple of packing washers underneath the hub.

One I had, the correct size of diameter, I had to file out the hole to 19mm. The second one, I had the correct sized hole but the diameter was wrong so I had to grind the excess off with the angle grinder and the bench grinder.

So instead of an interference fit, I now have three extra faces and so under a great deal of wind pressure, I can see the faces sliding instead of the blades turning.

Won’t that be fun?

Much to my surprise, the wiring was pretty straightforward and didn’t call for any major revision. But putting it into position was something else. I didn’t have a scaffolding pole long enough and so I had to join two together and that’s no fun trying to do that on a ladder with that kind of weight at that height pressing down on your shoulders.

It’s for that reason that, after much cursing, I invented the wind turbine pole lifting handle, and I was astonished at how easy it was once I had a lifting handle in place.

I had to lower the anenometer though – the wind turbine was fouling it

12 volt external electrical wiring air 403 wind turbine les guis virlet puy de dome franceWind turbines need a load in order to work, and so I’ve wired it directly to an external weatherproof 12-volt socket, and to the socket I’ve wired a 12-volt 100-watt halogen light.

The faster the wind turbine turns, the brighter the light will become.

It reminds me of Doctor RV Jones and his experiments into the cathode ray tube. In his book Most Secret War, one of the best books I have ever read, he describes that they tentatively connected two lorry headlights to the tube, hoping for a faint glimmer of light. Instead, they managed to illuminate the whole building before the headlights blew out with the intensity of current.

Wouldn’t I like to have something like that with this wind turbine?

-3

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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Monday 21st November 2011 – WELL, I’M STUMPED!

“Howzat?” I hear you ask.

And I’m going to tell you.

When Terry and I were doing the preparations for the new roof, we put a conduit through the wall and into this conduit we put 3 pairs of 6mm wire. 1 pair was for bank 1 of the solar panels, 1 pair was for bank 2, and the third pair was for the wind turbine.

The two banks of solar panels are wired in and doing what they are supposed to be doing when and where they are supposed to do it, but putting an ohm-meter onto the third pair for the wind turbine, there is no circuit in EITHER of the two wires.

I just don’t understand this at all. I can’t think why this should be. There can’t be a break in BOTH wires, surely?

So anyway I connected up two wires in a kind-of ad-hoc connection and they are working fine and are now connected into the circuit.

And the surprising thing about this (although not surprising if you know anything about me) is that despite the last few days having tons and tons of powerful wind, the wind dramatically dropped the moment I connected up the wires. You could not have timed it better.

wind turbine les guis virlet puy de dome franceWhat I’ve also done is to make up the four guy ropes that will hold the wind turbine mast in position.

I need some special wall anchor mountings for this and I can only get them in the UK at Screwfix. Unfortunately my last order didn’t go through in time and so I can’t get this part done until I go to the UK and come back. I don’t have my contacts to post me stuff these days.

Terry said that he’ll come round some time in the near future and help me push the pole up another metre or so – height is definitely might in these circumstances.

I’ve dismantled part of the scaffolding already and the rest can go as soon as the turbine is in its final position. Once that’s out of the way I can make a start on the roof and I’m eager to get going with that.

“Not a lot of work today” I hear you say. But this does not include the relentless string of telephone calls, and also of visits that I had today.

For once I seem to be popular. I wonder what’s up.

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Thursday 17th November 2011 – HAVE A CLOSE …

gorges de la sioule puy de dome france… look at this photo and see if you can spot where the Gorge de la Sioule might be.

It’s one thing I like about going out to Liz and Terry’s early in the morning – the fact that they live right on the edge of the gorge. And because the gorge is so deep and so steep the sun can’t shine into it until it has well-risen.

That means that the surrounding ground is quite warm whereas at the bottom of the gorge the air is quite cold and damp. And when the sun is high enough to enter the gorge it dramatically heats the cold damp air and you have clouds of condensation rising up from the gorge quite spectacularly.

Liz had to do some kind of newspaper interview the other week, in which she described the Combrailles as “The Land That Time Forgot”, and you can see clearly exactly what she means by that.

mont dore puy de sancy puy de dome franceBut it’s not just that view from here (in case you haven’t guessed, we’re at the bird-watching site at the back of St Gervais d’Auvergne again) that is spectacular. There’s a spectacular view across to the Puy de Sancy and the Mont Dore away over there.

All swathed in a hanging cloud or two too.

And if I’m not mistaken, I reckon that I can see some snow up there too. Winter is definitely icumen in. Lhude sing Rudolph

It’s a litle-known fact that when the system of départements was created, what is today the départements of the Puy-de-Dome was to be called the départements of Mont-Dore – which is after all the most significant feature of the region. However, the locals objected, saying that it sounded too much like the mont d’or – a mountain made of gold – and would give the impression that this was an extremely wealthy region.

And so today Terry and I bricked up one of the doorways (their house is two small cottages knocked into one) and fitted the window in the upper half, and then fitted the new door in the other doorway.

And it wasn’t as straight-forward as you might think either. The old doors had been made-to-measure for the doorways and of course, as we discovered as we were trying to fit everything, the door openings were not built straight. That was a complication we didn’t need.

Fitting the door was exciting though. We spent 10 minutes trying to make it seat on the hinge pins,and you’ve no idea how easily it fitted when we took out the wedge that was trapped underneath it.

And we also spent half an hour trying everything that we could to make the door close and you’ve no idea how well it closed when we took the packing strip out of the aluminium closing tray.

Ahhh well. You live and learn, I suppose.

Anyway,tomorrow I’ll be fitting the wind turbine if the weather holds, and now that I have my diamond core drills, I’ll be drilling from the house through into the lean-to and running cables there.

If I’m not careful,I might even have light and power in there tomorrow night.

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Friday 29th July 2011 – AFTER THE EXERTIONS OF YESTERDAY …

… it will come as no surprise for you to learn that this morning I was up at … errr … 06:48.

However, that was to go for a gypsy’s. No way I was staying up at that time of the morning. 09:30 was a much more realistic time to haul myself out of my stinking pit.

After breakfast I was back on the computer with the website – to see how far I can get with that today.

Later I was outside working on the wiring in the barn – there were a few things I needed to do like install some crocodile clips for charging spare batteries and the like. And once I had accomplished that, I set too and emptied, cleaned and tidied Caliburn.

After that, I came up here for an early finish and watched a film. And I’m annoyed with myself now!

That’s because when I was emptying out the apartment in Brussels earlier this year I threw away a huge pile of videotapes with loads of good stuff on them, on the grounds that they were recorded in Long Play.

But remember that 12-volt TV/video player that I bought at that brocante a while back? I’ve just discovered this evening that it plays Long Play tapes.

Hardly any surprise that I’m upset!

-7

Friday 8th July 2011 – Well I finished the wiring today

And that’s hardly surprising given the time that I had to do it, as when the alarm went off at 08:00 I was already up and about. How about that for a change of habits?

And so by 12:00 I was fed and watered, done a couple of hours on the computer and been in discussion with an American company about some stock and a dealership, I was outside.

The wires that come from the wind turbine and anemometer, and those which go to the solar panels – they are all sheathed now properly (and I seem to have got the hang of doing that now? and go where they are supposed to – down to where the new battery box will be.

And that wasn’t without difficulty either. I managed to finish off the hole in the floor that I started yesterday but as luck would have it, it’s right over the beam. So another hour or so to drill a couple of new ones and saw out between them to give me enough room to feed the conduit through. The charge controller is in place and the wind turbine is wired up to it. Let’s see what that does.

This afternoon I was working on the length of wire to connect the solar panel array to the batteries in the barn – the part of the wiring that is outside. That’s all nicely sheathed now and going where it’s supposed to. And after that, I was fitting the junction box onto the solar panel mounting rails.

That’s as far as I got, seeing as it was by then 19:00 and so a solar shower and that’s me finished for the weekend. Monday will see me finish off the junction box and cut the lengths of pipe that will stand the lower solar panel mounting rail off the wall at the correct 70°C angle. And then maybe I can start to fit the solar panels.

I’m glad that the anemometer is all mounted and that the wiring is properly installed. All I need to do now is to find the data head and I will be in business. But finding anything in my little attic room is an impossible task. Neitzsche said “Out of chaos comes order” but he had clearly never ever set foot in my attic.

-2

Thursday 7th July 2011 – I was right …

… about this wiring not being easy. I still haven’t finished it.

After a morning on the computer and another hour or two proofing this website for Dave, I had another start on the wiring. I’ve put the wiring in place on the mounting for the solar panels – that was the first thing – and then connected those wires up with those for the wind turbine and those for the anemometer and tried to feed them through the roof.

After about half an hour, perched precariously on the top of the ladder, I managed to make some progress, and so it was from there to inside the barn with the ladder to pull it all inside.

Of course, it was miles short and it didn’t look at all right. Yes, it was hooked up on a stone that was stopping it moving. And so back with the ladder outside, pull the cables back and then start again. Was it three or four times I had the ladder in and out of the barn? I dunno, but it’s finally all inside.

An added complication is that the join in the cable for the wind turbine is now right where it can’t be accessed – so I ended up back outside with the ladder, pull the cables back outside, make the join, and then pull it back again.

So now the cable is all in place, I need to cut a hole in the barn floor and I made a start on that. But going downstairs to search for something I noticed that it was 19:30. Where did the time go?

Anyway, I knocked off and I’ll have another go at finishing it tomorrow. And once that’s done, I can turn my attention to mounting the solar panels. Yes, there are all kinds of strange things going on here.

In other news, it’s not for me to comment on the affairs of the News of the Screws. All I can say is that it’s about time that Rebekah Wade got hers, but it seems that Murdoch would rather sacrifice a newspaper and 200 staff rather than a favourite acolyte. If you can guess the reasons why, write your answers on a plain brown envelope and post it to me. There will be a prize for the most interesting response.

But what of course will the usual suspects do on a Sunday morning now that the News of the Screws has gone? Well this is the whole point of this posting. A friend of mine in the newspaper world tells me that all of a sudden the domain names “Sundaysun” and “Sunonsunday” are “no longer available to purchase”. No surprise there, then.

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