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.