The big digger

It's been a busy weekend.

I spent a day or two preparing the armaflex pipes and getting them into the conduit. As the pipe lengths weren't as long as we needed, there are two joins inside the conduit. I made the joints - first attempts with corrugated stainless pipe - then pressure tested them with a footpump up to 3bar. They didn't leak. My first attempt at insulating the joins proved to be too fat for the conduit. I should have known that 110mm conduit has the outside diameter of 110mm: inside it's more like 95mm.

Eventually we (Paul and I) succeeded in pulling the armaflex through the conduit. This was where we'd got by Thursday lunchtime:



We then spent Thursday afternoon digging a hole in the ground at the end of the barn, and then knocking a hole through from the boiler room to the hole. This took time, but luckily the wall was reasonably solid, and held together well even with a hole in it. The first spadeful disturbed a fire salamander, a handsome creature:



We found him a new hole to retreat to. And then Paul went and washed his hands: these animals secrete quite an unpleasant poison as a defense mechanism. But they do a lot of good in the garden, eating all kinds of invertebrates (and some smaller rodents too).

So then we had a little hole .......



.... and we just had to wait for the man with the digger. He arrived with an enormous lorry and the digger on a trailer behind it. The digger turned out to be slightly to wide to get along the lane where it is narrowest (near our hole) so his first job was to carve away part of the bank. But once through it didn't take long before he was working his way back down the hill - and cutting through some satisfactorily solid bits of rock just by the corner of the barn, which makes me think we don't have to worry much about the barn's foundations.



As he couldn't leave while the trench was open, we put the conduit in, and he filled it back up (working well after dark - he finished about 8pm).

Next day the lane looked like this (muddy):



And the back garden looked a bit like the western front - Nicolas who is reconnecting the pool pipes to the new shed couldn't finish in the dark, so that his trench has been left open. The remains of the old buried housing for the pump and filter are just to the right of the new shed (elevated by Paul to a "salle technique"): there wasn't much left intact after the digger ripped it out of the ground. We'll have to put up with these piles of mud and rocks for a day or two, but hopefully it'll all be done very soon.



We also finished off the roof on the shed: it has the ridge on, and is sheeted up at the back too. Next job: install the solar panels. Though I might just pressure test the piping again. It would be a disappointment if it turned out that heaving the pipes through the conduit had sprung the joins open. And digging it all up again would be rather tricky.

raising the roof

I collected the roofing panels this morning, ten days later than promised, and this afternoon we started putting them on - two complete novices, Mikey and I, but it didn't seem to be too hard.



You can see that we have an over-long panel, the one on the right. We have one left over that is the right size, so we'll probably swap them rather than try to cut the one already fixed. The colour looks slightly different too, but that will hardly matter as almost the whole of the roof will be covered by the solar panels.



Mikey was invaluable: I couldn't have got them fixed by myself. The other parts of the roof (edge-pieces, and the ridge) should be a lot easier, though if Mikey is still here I'll try to rope him in again. The edge pieces will give us the extra couple of centimeters we need - had I known the size of the roof panels, I'd have made the roof to fit them, rather than just a bit too wide. I'd also have spaced the rafters differently. Virtually all of the coachbolts project on the inside (as they miss the rafters) and will need to be cut off with a grinder before I stab one through my head.

You can see that we were working until quite late ....



but it was surprising how quickly we got this main part of the work finished. I have to work out later how to get to the upper part of the roof to put in the final bolts. It can be done from a ladder on the right, but on the left the slope drops away too much.



The roof has been uncovered just a bit too long - the roofing felt isn't designed to be left exposed to sunlight, and it is already showing some signs of crumbling.

I don't imagine that professional roofers use clamps to hold the panels in place while putting the coachbolts in, but we found that it works, and really that's all that matters. And although we have a slight tilt by the time we got to the final panel, it's so little that they will pass pretty well for vertical.