November snow in France too

While the UK is getting a good early snowfall, Lessal is getting its share too, and as a result I am not too keen to start work outside on the building for the solar panels (the "salle technique" as the pool man described it):



Before the snow started I had cut some bamboos in Tony & Anne's garden, and brought them back here, fairly slowly ...



... and then using cable ties (what did we do before - use string?) made a triumphal arch for the balcony so we could feed the birds in winter, but without feeding the birds to the cats. The birds have been getting through at least a large bag of seeds a week, 5kg I think. I have had to refill the feeders every day.



Most of the birds are great tits, but we get the occasional nuthatch (sometimes two at a time), blue tits, and just one goldfinch (so far). The sparrows, chaffinches and blue tits seem to prefer to feed on the ground either on or under the balcony where the seeds fall. The great tits are very messy eaters, and throw out as much grain as they eat.

I have had the time to finish the electrical work that is part of the solar installation.



The cable going down to the building in the garden - the blue one on the left - isn't yet connected, as at the other end it is just bare wires. Eventually it will give me a useful plug point at the end of the garden, and a light in the "salle technique" for days when one wishes to swim in the dark.

Indoor plumbing

I've been working on and off at the plumbing for the solar panels. It's taken a while. Traditionally the plumber turns up but has forgotten his tools. In my case I was permanently short of a crucial and hard-to-find fitting. The local plumbers' merchants don't sell 22mm compression fittings, so these had to be mail order, while the 22mm solder ring elbows that I wanted aren't sold at all in France, and Janey kindly sent me some from England.

This shows the "pump station", which was fairly easy to instal. The pump and other components come pre-assembled, so it was just a matter of getting the pipes to enter and leave at the right places. The green garden hoses are temporary, for pressure-testing the loop. Later I'll be using them to fill it with anti-freeze, but not, of course, before the solar panels go up in the garden....



The balloon-shaped object is an expansion vessel, which enables the liquid in the - sealed - solar circuit to heat up and expand without bursting. It contains a large tough rubber bladder, which I have pre-pressurised to 2.5bar (with a car tyre pump). As the fluid expands, the bladder gets squeezed giving a bit more room for the fluid. There will be another one of these at the other end of the circuit, as I am not entirely sure that 18 litres is enough for the long loop of pipe.

This shows the new piping where it enters the hot-water cylinder. At the top there's a small bronze-coloured cylinder sitting on the pipe: that's an automatic air vent. At the bottom the larger silver cylinder is another type of air collector, designed to get the micro-bubbles out (it says here). I probably don't need both of them, but they make filling the system simpler.



The entry and exit from the cylinder are one inch BSP threaded connections, made with bosswhite and hemp. The bottom one is a special elbow (which had been safely stored in the top of the cylinder by the professional plumber who installed it - it took several weeks before we found it) with a pocket to take a temperature probe.

I tested the system by connecting it up the mains and sealing it off at mains pressure, 2.5 bar. As there were 22 compression joints, 18 soldered joints, and ten metal threaded joints there was plenty of scope for leaks. But to my surprise the only leaks were in the compression fittings: four of them dripped a little. I took these apart and put a little PTFE tape round the olive. This has certainly cured three of them, and I'll check the fourth later though it may need another go.

And we've also made a little progress towards getting the "salle technique" looking more respectable: the local builder came and put a first coat of render on it:



They say they'll be back to put the finishing coat on when the weather improves, perhaps not in the immediate future (it's snowing right now). In the meantime we have their large concrete mixer sitting outside our front door as a promise that they won't forget us.

back in the holes

It was surprisingly hard work backfilling the short remaining trenches: too many rocks in the earth to make putting the spade in easy. The digger couldn't do it as he'd gone home before the chap from the pool company could put his hoses and wires in. So it was a bit of vigorous excercise with a shovel - the one leaning up against the pile of earth in the middle of this picture:



As I also put in four or five cubic meters of sand - black sand, visible on the left of the site, where the pool pump etc used to be, and apparently it's volcanic in origin - I'd hoped to have a bit of earth left over to level off other areas of the garden here. But after building up the stone wall just by the "salle technique" and infilling behind it, there was only a little. I think the man with the digger may have slightly raised the level of the track on the right, and this accounts for some of the missing earth. The rest was probably the hole where the pump and filter used to be.

After it was done I tried to clean the surface of the grass as much as possible with a rake, in the hope that the grass would grow again. here is what it looks like today:



I put some grass seed down too, despite the late time of year. Maybe it will grow: it's quite mild right now and there's occasional sunshine too.

The buried pipes were manhandled quite a bit, and it took a good deal of heaving on a rope to pull them through the conduit. So I was worried that we might have pulled a joint loose, buried somewhere I wouldn't be able to find it. So this morning I pressure tested the buried pipes - using this:



I pumped the pipes up to 2.5 bar - quite enough just using a car footpump - and the pressure has stayed nicely at that level for the last few hours, so I am optimistic that it's all in good health. The brush and jamjar contain washing-up liquid to detect leaks in the test equipment - and there were none there either.

The picture also shows the conduit emerging from the wall of the boiler room with armaflex pipes and an electrical cable, and the yet-to-be-installed pump station which will eventually circulate the solar fluid. One other job yet to be done will be to install a power supply.

It wasn't all digging:



This fine Harris hawk (called "Flossie") belongs to the visitors staying in our gite, who are in the process of moving house from Brittany to Maurs.