Wednesday 14 December 2011

Bathroom floor

The floor is now in place and grouted, but I haven't yet cleaned the surface mist of grout off the tiles. It's best to wait until the joins are fully dry.

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It's been heavy rainstorms interspersed with lighter ones all day long, so the air is very damp and I expect it will take a bit longer to dry than usual.

The local tiler has kindly offered to lend me his big tile cutter for the wall tiles, and I hope to be able to start those fairly soon. Though I'll be starting with the washbasin surface, which has to be cemented in place and then tiled before I do the walls around it. I am not looking forward to cutting the large format tiles to produce exactly sized holes - the one for the tap has to be just big enough for the pipes, but not so big that the body of the tap falls through: as near as posible just 28mm diameter.

I'm pleased with these first results.

I'm slightly less pleased with the night-time visitor we had on Saturday:

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Eventually it took half a dozen farming neighbours and a tractor with a telescopic arm to get the cow out. She appears to be no worse for her chilly experience.

Friday 2 December 2011

Putting it back together

I'm still working on the bathroom.

The first job I tackled was bolting down the framework for the suspended WC. The cement floor however proved to be a bit brittle, and the rawlbolts seemed to crack it rather than provide a good hold. The water pipes were a bit in the way, and I had to cut away part of the metal framework to get it to fit against the wall in the right position.

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The best bet seemed to be to cast a block of cement round the feet and hope that would provide a better anchorage. The cement didn't quite fill up all the way to the front of the shuttering but it will do pretty well.

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The framework is also bolted to the wall at the top, definitely a belt and braces approach. So this is what it then looked like:

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The next job was to clad the outside of the framework with "carreaux de plâtre", the material I have also used for the shower's freestanding wall. These were the thinner versions, just 5cm thick. When the tiles arrive this whole structure will be tiled, and only then can I actually fit the WC to it. But I am reasonably confident it will be good and solid.

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As all the pipes and the mechanism are bricked up inside it, I hope that it is all properly assembled with the pipe unions done up sufficiently tightly - I did check it all with water under mains pressure before the cladding went up and nothing was obviously wrong. It appears to be possible to change the internal mechanism through the front flush panel, though I wouldn't want to try to do it myself. The picture above also shows a bit of the re-wiring: I've cut a channel into the wall for the wires (in conduit) for a new lightswitch by the door. And I've filled it flush with the wall surface.

Finally, I've finished the shower's freestanding wall, and done the structure for the washbasin. The grey surfaces are Wedi-board, hopefully waterproof, and they will all eventually be tiled. In fact everything in this picture except the doorframe will be tiled .... eventually. The light on the lefthand wall will I hope become a razor and electric toothbrush socket, and there will be an illuminated mirror above the washbasin. Again the wires for this are now in conduit below the surface of the lefthand wall, and then along the top of the shower wall (embedded there too).

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Of course, this kind of work tends to spread over all adjacent surfaces. So the kitchen is looking a bit sorry for itself right now:

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I still haven't worked out how to get the pipe tails for the shower into the right place, and I am reluctantly coming round to the conclusion that I am going to have to cut out a section of the plasterboard to let me get at the gaffer tape and the pipes lower down. The wall will be tiled so it shouldn't matter too much.

Sunday 20 November 2011

Inside and out

Yesterday I had loaded up a trailer-full of earth from our soon-to-be neighbour's building site. This is hard work, so I left off the task of unloading it for today.

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It perhaps doesn't look all that much but I would guess it's a ton or more: the car felt pretty heavy with the full trailer, and it's a good thing that the round trip isn't much more than half a mile (or for the metrically inclined, substitute a tonne and a kilometer).

It's going to smooth out the slope at the edge of the grassed area by the terrace, so that I can eventually mow the grass up the slope, rather than let the weeds grow on it until I can get the strimmer out (once a year, maybe). I don't quite have a "before" picture, as I had already dumped one trailer-load in there earlier in the week. I'd also removed, this morning, some lumpier bits at the top to get a better slope. So this is what it then looked like:

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and then the picture below is definitely "after". I also cut away a couple of the apple-tree's lower branches, as I didn't want to be poked in the eye while standing on the trailer to shovel out the earth.

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After that I had a go at a bit of tidying up in the kitchen of the farmhouse. The corner where the dustbin sits ("poubelle corner") usually has a small wooden table to cover the dustbin. Without it, there's a nasty gap at the end of the tiling, where the pipes all showed, and a hole in the tiled wall originally giving access to the stopcocks (and drain valves) for the bathroom water supply. All pretty ugly.

So I slapped up a bit of plasterboard over the gap in the end, and, preparatory to putting a small cut piece of plasterboard in the access hole, I glued in a tile behind it to stop the plasterboard just falling through the hole. Like this:

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The tile is almost the same size as the hole, but it goes in diagonally and fills enough space to do its job. The glimpses of blue in the top corners of the hole are the new PER water pipes feeding the bathroom: the black mould at the bottom edge is, I imagine, due to the drain cocks soaking the chipboard a couple of times a year for the last thirty years.

Now the corner looks like this:

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and, yes, it is a pity I couldn't find enough of the original tiles to fill the gaps completely. But normally it's a dark corner behind the dustbin. I was lucky to find a very dusty and even more cobwebby box in the attic with the few tiles to do the more visible bits. But, maybe, next time I might use white tiles instead?

The wall isn't very vertical, is it? It'll all look better with some grout and a dab of white paint.

Wednesday 16 November 2011

On the floor ....

... there is now a cement screed (it's actually a 6:1:1 mix: sand, cement and lime).
It seemed like a good idea at the time to bed in the first few blocks of the wall:

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this will form the side of the shower and the back of it is where the washbasin will go.

I've been trying to make friends with the feral cat (kitten, really) that arrived here a month or so ago. It is now almost tame - probably tame enough to be treated for fleas. We caught him, as he then was, in a trap a week ago, and took him down to the vet for a little snip - it'll never miss what it now hasn't got. We were told to keep it in for 24 hours after the operation, so we shut it into the boiler room. Little did we think it could climb:

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Judging by the smell afterwards, he (as I suppose it's kinder not to make too much of his new not-quite gender) left us a small present up there. The smell has now gone. There was of course no way of cleaning out inside the ceiling.....

Tuesday 15 November 2011

Getting a new bathroom ...

Having polished off the last of the shutters, it's now time to get serious with the bathroom. All the fittings were showing their age (early 1970s I'd guess), some were cracked, and the bath was beyond repair. So I turned off the water and took a sledgehammer to the bath, a cast-iron thing that really must have weighed a third of a ton, and shipped the resulting pieces to the tip.

The bathroom then looked like this:

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The holes in the floor were my efforts at finding where the drainpipes went: successful too, as I did find them. The hole in the back wall was the previous plumber's access to the tap connections for the bath, though how anyone could have worked on it through that hole is beyond me. Not very nice for anyone using the bedroom on the other side of the wall, either. So I bricked it up and put up the framework for the plasterboard:

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Surprisingly, the metal structure is all nicely vertical or horizontal - it's the camera that's lying this time. The one bit that looks absolutely askew is a bit of gaffer tape holding a pipe away from the structure.

The new plumbing is plastic "PER" pipe, which I'd not used before, but it has seemed quite easy to get good watertight connections. I've run the new piping back as far as I can towards the mains, down into the cellar, as the copper pipes are not just very small diameter but are also in poor condition - odd leaks in various inaccessible places.

Putting up the plasterboard was something of a struggle by myself, but it went up with only one regrettable gap on the lefthand side: all nice and tight to the walls and ceiling elsewhere. There's a handcrafted hole built into it for the soap and shampoo in the shower area, though I am now wishing I had measured the height of a standard bottle of shampoo. It'll be OK for the soap, at least.

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The fitting for the shower taps etc is likely to pose another problem. I now know that I shouldn't have taped the pipes to the metal framework, as it restricts the amount you can move the pipes: after the fittings go on, they are supposed to be pushed back into the wall. They are presently not easily pushable. I may have to play around with a long thin (curved?) knife and cut the gaffer tape by fiddling about through the little holes.

Next thing is to put down the new floor, ready for tiling. Though before the tiles I have to build the wall between the washbasin and the shower, then build a support for the washbasin, tehn box in the suspended WC and ..... well, quite a bit more I suppose. And it would probably be best to get the ceiling smoothed off before starting work on the floor - and do the electrical work so I can have lights in there. Hmmm - a week or two to go yet I think.

Sunday 16 October 2011

Still Shuttering

It's still sunny, and I'm still doing the shutters.

This pair shows the before and after stages, but it doesn't do full justice to how well the wood comes up with sanding and varnishing:

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The one on the right is the one seen in the previous post, and its finished surface would be suitable for a table-top, smooth and with a very interesting colour to the grain, given by 80 years of weathering. What has been taking a lot of time has been the state of the mortises. They are broad and cut all the way through the bottom or top of the side uprights. But in a number of places the wood beyond the mortise has split right through, allowing the joint to open up like a crocodile's jaws. So in these cases I've dismantled the framing entirely, cleaned out the inside of the mortise and the tenon edges, and put it back together with glue. I've held the joint together with as many clamps as I could find, while replacing and gluing-in the wooden pegs. This has reconstituted the mortises quite well - we'll see how long they last. Where wood is missing entirely I've replaced it with a resin-based filler.

For the average shutter I've needed all the clamps I have, so I can only glue one at a time. And the glue needs 24 hours to set.

When it comes to the final coats of weatherproofing "varnish", I can do two shutters at the same time, and I even have a way of doing both sides without waiting for the first to dry:

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There's one last pair of shutters to go. I will then be able to stop inhaling powdered oak for a while: it really is a very dusty job, though I have been able to do a lot of it outside, giving me slightly cleaner air some of the time.

Saturday 8 October 2011

Shutters

As the weather is now beginning to feel autumnal, and rain might actually be a possibility soon - it's been a very dry summer - I've started to renovate the shutters on the farmhouse. The shutters are oak, and when new back in the 1920s must have looked pretty good. Now they are in very poor condition.

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The picture above shows one of the corners, which are of course the most damaged areas, and the picture below shows one that I have dismantled:

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The bolts on the hinges had to be ground off with the angle-grinder before I could take the framework off.

Here's a shutter in the course of being glued back together, though the original construction doesn't seem to have used any glue, just wooden pegs through the six mortice & tenon joints. The holes for the pegs can be seen in the picture above: the pegs knock out surprisingly easily with a drift. Quite a few were missing already.

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The shutters below - a pair I did last week - could be dismantled without taking the hinges off, as the joints were open at the ends: the cross pieces could simply be slid out, either up or down, and reassembled with the four vertical planks of the shutter still together.

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These have come up quite nicely, and should be good for a few more years - the weatherproof treatment will help, anyway. I am not so sure about the pair I am currently working on, as the wood is in worse condition. I will need to use some filler on a couple of the corners, but the resin-based stuff works very well, even though it shows afterwards: it doesn't take a stain.

The hardware shop didn't have any black japanned bolts for the hinges, so I am painting the mushroom heads, which will sit directly onto the wood, before fitting the bolts in place. That way I should be able to avoid getting paint onto the wood:

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and I've put a coat of paint on the hinges too. I'll paint the other end of the bolt, the end with the nut that will be tightened up onto the hinge, when I've cut it to length and the shutters are finally back together.

Before starting today's shutters, I finished wiring up the lights in the workshop, so I should now be able to work there at all hours of the day. It's been quite cloudy today so without the lights it would have been too dark inside to see what i was doing.

Wednesday 28 September 2011

Back to work - on the workshop

After a break for summer visitors (and to let my back recover) I've been getting my workshop fitted out. A lot of it is still temporary. I hope to build a proper woodworking bench when I can persuade our next-door neighbour to cut me some thick oak planks. And I also hope to replace the metalworking area with a bench on proper supports rather than concrete blocks stacked rather haphazardly. With a vice, too.

Here's what the workshop looks like now:

Inside

I have also been able to use it to make something - a bracket for the chimney. I made a form by filling a plastic drain-pipe with concrete, then bending the bracket to size (150mm diameter) around it. Here's the finished bracket:

Better bracket

And this longer shot shows where the bracket is in relation to the stove. Before installing the bracket the flexible pipe (which you can't see, in the chimney above the ceiling) prevented the stainless steel pipe from the stove from sitting straight (too many joints). It had a permanent flex in it near the top. The bracket seems to hold it all quite rigidly now.

Chimney

I have yet to transfer the remaining contents of the old workshop - this one:

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and thanks Alan, it's a lovely painting - over to the new one. And in fact there's at least one more shelf to go in, to complete the Heath Robinson effect. I tell myself it is because all the shelves are fastened to the ceiling rather than standing on the floor, but no doubt I could have done better. Still, virtually everything is re-cycled. Palets were very useful, and left-over roof timbers.

Tuesday 16 August 2011

Stage management

With welcome help from my son-in-law Mike and from Jim and Lydia, together we got the mezzanine floor put back into the hangar.

The first part was to add solid wood at closer centres (40cm centres, though Lyd says I should call it 400mm) across the existing oak beams. These can be seen in the picture below, which shows the finished floor from underneath. We drilled through the new wood and even then found it hard to get the nails into the old oak.

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This involved a certain amount of balancing on joists while hammering hard. In the middle of it, our elderly neighbour had a fall (Caro went to help) and the doctor was called out - he has sent her off to hospital. The doctor asked after my compression fracture (of an upper vertebra) but sensibly Caro said it was a lot better without mentioning what I was actually doing at the time.

We then heaved the floor panels up (18mm OSB Kronoply - chipped and oriented plywood) and screwed them down - it was a surprisingly quick job and it was all done well before lunchtime:

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This is the last time ever it will look like this, as I hope to shift a large quantity of old timber up there over the next few weeks, with a view, eventually, to getting a concrete floor down on the main part of the hangar. The loose dry dirt there at present is diabolical stuff: drop anything small and it's lost.

Thanks to Mike for the pictures - a wide angle lens.....

Saturday 9 July 2011

The new workshop

A hot and dusty day today. Meteo-France's website has been assuring me that it has been raining gently all day, but in fact there's been scarcely a cloud in the sky - almost a month since we had any significant rain. Working in the new workshop is a dusty job too, but I have now put up the first shelves.

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These are 100% recycled (all except the screws holding them together). The uprights are floorboards from the old ceiling, and the shelves are dismantled pallets. This is "power tool corner" and it's good to get the plastic boxes finally up off the earth floor where they have been for the last three years.

Thursday 23 June 2011

Clearing out the crud

..... lots of it, too.

More work on the ceiling for the new workshop. Up there the previous owner kept her chickens, along with faggots for burning in the bread-oven. The result of many years of neglect is a laminate of thin twigs and larger sticks, stuck together with thick layers of chicken-poo. Very dry and dusty, with an unmistakeable smell.

First task was to get the access up there organised. With full concern about health and safety, I constructed the temporary access:

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It's secured to a bit of rafter with blue polypropylene rope, and in fact turned out to be really quite steady. The stepladder wasn't quite long enough, but I think the concrete blocks work very well.

I was then faced with this:

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The pile of twigs and droppings conceals a floor that is full of woodworm, not nailed down, and missing in places. An ideal location to be working. I shoveled it all up into a plastic dustbin, and hauled it down the steps and out into the woods to be burned. This added a new dimension to the smell.

After the first day it looked something like this:

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And substantial amounts had fallen through into the workshop below. Rather too late, I wished I'd put the tools away (or at least covered them up). For the final bits I put the wheelbarrow underneath and raked the muck straight down, and I now have very little floor and a large pile of ashes in the woods:

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The boards on the left hand side are loose and only temporary. In the next week or two I am hoping to remove all the old flooring, cross the existing oak beams with joists at right angles (on smaller centres than the 100cm for the beams) and panel over with ply.

I will then have a dust-tight workshop and a storage area where I can admire the view out of the door formerly used for putting the hay up:

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Solar heating

It's almost exactly six months since I installed the solar panels, and the electronic controller tells me that the pump has been running for 680 hours. That's a measure of how much useable sunshine there has been since December: an average of about 3 and three-quarter hours each day. It's not a record of the amount of sunshine, as the panels gather some heat even if it's slightly overcast - equally, there are a few hours each day when the sun doesn't fall on the panels (early morning and late evening between the spring and autumn equinoxes). Since April we have only had to use the boiler for hot water on three or four days at most, for a total of less than ten hours.

Monday 13 June 2011

The New Atelier

The workshop I am using at present has a number of disadvantages, one of which is the absence of a wall. I'd probably mange well enough with that but it also has a dirt floor and little chance of changing it for concrete, as the open side of the building slopes a good half-meter down to the inner side. Put down a concrete floor and I have a pool when it rains rather than a workshop.

Here's a picture of the present workshop taken one night when I forgot to turn the lights off:

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The new workshop will be at the other end of the hangar, in what was previously a row of stables. So far I have installed an electrical distribution board (there was no electricity supply for the horses):

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This provides a convenient way for turning off the elctricity to the old atelier (previously I had to go inside the farmhouse to do that) and lets me wire up the sockets in the new workshop one by one (there is a socket just to the right of the board for the circular saw).

It's also possible to see in this picture that I had to replace one of the ceiling beams, using a spare bit of the balcony structure. Fortunately only one of the beams was rotten (something to do with keeping chickens up on top of it).

It is a bit tricky fixing the electrical works to the walls, as they are schist and it's hard to get rawlplugs and screws in where you want them. So I've opted for hanging everything (almost) from the rafters:

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with the intention that later I will add a shelf along the top which will be at a convenient height for small tools etc. Even with this arrangement it's not easy to fasten the blue conduits to the wall (luckily they run in concrete under the floor most of the way).

The bench on concrete blocks is very temporary (well, I hope so) and the ceiling has to be re-done entirely as the boards are visibly rotten and it provides a floor upstairs for bulky (but dry) storage).

I have also re-plumbed the solar heating for the pool. I found that when the pool heat-exchanger was in operation, it cooled the solar circuit so much that the water in it circulating through the domestic hot water cylinder was cooling the cylinder rather than heating it. Now the heat exchanger for the pool is on the return side of the circuit, after the solar-heated water has gone through the cylinder, and this works much better though it isn't quite as neat as the previous arrangement (see April blog).

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I hadn't expected the heat-exchanger to be so efficient, but in fact solar-heated water coming into it at 80 degrees left at 22 degrees, or whatever the pool temperature was.

Tuesday 19 April 2011

Finishing the solar heating

I've been finishing the solar heating, by connecting up the heat exchanger for the pool to the solar panels. The idea is that surplus solar heat can be used to warm the water in the pool. I'm not expecting the pool to reach blood temperature - as the area of solar collectors isn't big enough - but it should make some difference, and maybe let us swim a little earlier, and later, in the year. But whether that will be months earlier, weeks, days or minutes I've no idea.

The pipe-work for the connection had to contain a two-way diverter valve, so that in the winter, and in high summer, the solar heating need not go into the pool heat exchanger. This valve - a manually operated one, as I am not a great believer in automated systems and electric valves always go wrong - had to be supplied from the US where I think it is normally used in very high pressure applications. Also in the new section of pipes is a stop valve (which will let me work on the solar panels without draining the rest of the circuit, a pressure release valve, and an expansion tank. The last two provide for very hot sunshine: the expansion tank supplements the similar one at the top end of the circuit (in the barn), and if despite the extra expansion capacity the pressure rises further, the steam can be vented off, I hope safely, close to the hottest part of the circuit (the collectors).

This was the pipe-work before the connections to the solar circuit were made. The loop of black insulated pipe is the temporary route of the existing circuit. The light blue tube at the bottom is the Bowman heat exchanger.

Pipes

I thought it would be best to pressure test the new pipes before making the final connections, as I didn't want to have to drain down the circuit more than once. So I connected it up to a garden sprayer, and pumped it up to 2.5 bar (the most I could manage):

Pressure

Using soapy water I was able to find a couple of leaky joints, and I fixed these. The pressure still dropped slightly overnight but I couldn't find where the leak was, so I decided that air might leak out where water wouldn't. Or at least that if I had a water leak, I'd be able to see where it was. In the end, there weren't any leaks in these pipes when the circuit was refilled.

It's been very sunny weather for the last few weeks, and I didn't wish to have the solar collectors empty and in the sun, as I didn't want them to overheat. So I covered the panels with a blind:

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It's a section of the cover from the pool, the old cover which one of Jean-Louis cows walked on and split. I've found the bits of the spoilt cover extremely useful before, and for this it was almost perfect, just a few inches too narrow. And it kept the temperatures down quite nicely.

I then drained the circuit and made the connections. I also replaced two sections of copper pipe at the base of the collectors on the outside (where I hadn't had the proper fittings back in December), and it goes without saying that it was one of these soldered connections that leaked, so I had to drain it all down a second time, cut out that section of pipe, and replace the soldered joints. The second time it was all leak-free.

Here's the finished pipework inside the garden shed:

Installed

The blue conduit held on with orange tape contains the electrical connection to the temperature probe at the top of the collectors (it runs up to the barn and into the controller for the circuit pump). I haven't got the right size pipe clips for it, so that's a job to be done later.

Recommissioning the solar circuit was a nail-biting experience. The top of the solar collectors is only a little lower than the filling point in the barn, and as a result there was a substantial airlock in the circuit. I could tell it was there, as I knew how much fluid had come out, and it hadn't all gone back. I tried to push the air out with the garden spray, but the 2.5 bar testing pressure had burst a seal, and I couldn't get the fluid to displace the air. I thought that perhaps the electric pump for the solar circuit might shift the airlock, and to get that working I uncovered the panels (it relies on a temperature difference between the collectors and the hot water cylinder in the barn). Alarmingly it didn't, and the temperature of the fluid in the collectors rapidly got to over 100 degrees and the automatic air vent at the top of the panels started venting out steam.

Eventually by turning the pump on and off, and opening and shutting the valves in the barn I succeeded in getting the fluid circulating again, and the temperature went back down to something safer. I tell myself it was a useful test of what might happen if we have a power cut on a hot day. There's still quite a bit of air in the circuit, so I am gradually venting it off whenever I can, but it isn't enough to stop the circulation.

So far what I have found is that the pool heat exchanger does what it is supposed to do, and remarkably efficiently too: solar heated fluid goes in one end at 70 degrees or more and comes out the other at 20. I can't say the pool water is perceptibly hotter, but the heat must be going somewhere. We'll see what it's like after a week or so. The trouble is, fluid at 20 degrees doesn't heat the domestic hot water in the barn. I'm hoping that when the pool pump isn't circulating pool water through the heat exchanger (and it goes on and off on a timer) there'll be enough solar heat for the hot water in the barn. It might help if I insulated the heat exchanger too.

If none of that works, I can try putting the diverter valve into an intermediate position, so that the pool and the barn share the solar heat.

Saturday 2 April 2011

What we do when the sun shines

What we do when the sun shines is, of course, put down five and a half cubic meters of concrete. It took several weeks to get the three locations prepared, which was hard work but not very interesting - which is why I've posted nothing recently.

But at 2.30 on Friday afternoon the lorry arrived, and started manoeuvring to get into place for the first pour. This usually results in a lot of churned-up mud, but today, despite all the rain last week, it wasn't bad at all:

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The first load went into the stables at the end of the hangar, straight out of the chute, where Paul and his father spread it out. The second went by barrow to the bit of terracing by the barn, and this warmed us up. But what got us all really hot was the last load that went into the farmhouse cellar.

This needed a number of executive decisions:

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and quite a bit of careful consideration:

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With an occasional break when the lorry hiccupped and the concrete got held up inside:

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From time to time it was possible to stand up and stretch:

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The concrete then had to be tamped, and afterwards smoothed off with a large plastic float, getting it just at the right point when it was firm enough to walk on but still soft enough to be levelled.

The end results were pretty good. The stables now look like this:

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with conduits for the eventual cabling set into the concrete floor, hopefully in the right places for the long workbench that will occupy the whole of the right hand wall.

The cellar was previously earth sloping gradually up away from the doors. Now it is three separate flat areas, one of them very small right by the doors which inconveniently open inwards. It now looks like this:

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and it seems a lot bigger than it was before (though strictly it must be smaller, after putting in a couple of tons of concrete). Probably that's because for the first time in 80 years the cellar has been cleared of all the junk. Just the septic tank and the stairs showing. The stairs now have a new concrete bottom step instead of a surprising large drop after the last wooden tread.

And the final bit of terracing looks like this:

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This morning we spent some time sifting and shifting the pile of earth to get a level surface, ready for seeding. That should get finished off tomorrow.

It was very heavy work (my back is still complaining) but it's a great improvement in all three places. There'll be quite a bit more to do fitting out the workshop, and some small bits of additional home made concrete to finish off each of the locations, but there's a real feeling of achievement.

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