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:



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:



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:



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:



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:



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.

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:



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):



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:



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).



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.