Sunday 28 June 2015

Travelling

We've had a very pleasant weekend, although one with rather a lot of driving: we went down to meet our new (and first) nephew in Surrey, travelling down on Thursday evening (with much roadwork and traffic caused delay, sadly). After lunch on Friday, we went around London to David and Ann's, and stayed with them until Sunday. Marvellous barbecue on Saturday, and a good walk around their area, with hogweed foraged to boot. On Sunday, we went home via Cambridge, and had lunch at a reunion event at college, which meant we also saw a lot of other friends.

Sunday 21 June 2015

Irrigation

Having got the taps ready, today we installed the irrigation system for the two patios (kitchen and dining room), and the front garden. The colour wheel is simply a hose leading to a bar sprinkler. We didn't have time to do the herb garden, other than to lay the supply hose. The 4mm branches, and associated sprinklers/sprays will have to wait. The other big achievement was to finally repair the leak in the dining room hot water pipe, by doing the bypass I explained yesterday. This seems to have worked, and now means that the leaking pipe is no longer used, and the route hot water takes through the house is much shorter, which should also make it hotter. As a side benefit, the pipe we've taken out of the circuit also appears to be the one that was making the water mucky, as it's now running clear. The repair might have taken six months to solve, but we're finally there, and with a much better set-up.

Saturday 20 June 2015

Plumbing

We spent a rather long time on Saturday morning working out how we were going to finally fix the pipe that's been dripping from the ceiling of the dining room. It's been doing so for five months, and all my attempts to fix it have been thwarted by poor access and adjacent pipes. That's made re-making the pipe, re-brazing it, or properly applying external sealant, impossible. We applied brain power to the problem, and, with a bit of investigation of the pipes hidden in the floor beneath the old house bathroom (now the sewing room, above the back half of the kitchen), we think we've worked out a plan.

At present, the cold water main goes from the kitchen, along the front of the house between the floors, then cuts across, goes into the loft of the porch, and gets to the boiler room. Here, it feeds a garden tap, as well as the top-up loop for the central heating, the emergency quench for the boiler, and the cold supply for the domestic hot water heat exchange built into the accumulator tank. The hot water so generated runs down the pipe that used to be the hot water circuit feeding the hot water cylinder, meaning that it runs the same route back to the other end of the house, where it was plumbed into the hot water circuit...running all the way along the house to feed the taps.

Thus, hot water coming out of the taps in the downstairs toilet had gone along the full length of the house three times, twice while hot: this was noisy, and thermally inefficient, as I suspect you would never get piping hot water out of that tap.

What we've figured out, with the benefit of opening the floor in the back guest room to pass cables along on Wednesday, is that we should be able to bypass some of this. The hot water coming from the boiler can be fed into the hot water circuit from the opposite end, near the downstairs loo, in the loft above. This will feed—in order—that loo, the guest en suite, the master en suite, the kitchen and utility room...and then be capped off.

The leaking pipe is the pipe that would have run from where we're now going to connect to this lot, all that way to the other end. Although it'll be redundant, I won't try to remove it—it's not worth the effort.

In further plumbing exploits, we installed a pair of outside taps outside the utility room, taking a valved spur off the cold water tap. That's in order to hook up an irrigation system to water the kitchen patio; the dining room patio; the front garden; the herb garden; and the colour wheel, as well as leave an accessible tap for filling watering cans, and so on. We also planted out the last of the dahlias (Bishop of Llandaff and Twynings After Eight) and cosmos (white Purity), in the colour wheel beds, and near the beech bench.

We've also acquired a new sofa bed from the latest neighbours to move out: it's gone into the converted garage, which can now function as a guest room.

Wednesday 17 June 2015

Cabling

Today's been a mid-week day off for us both, which we've spent running a new power cable from the electricity cupboard in the utility room, up into the loft, all the way along the house, down the back of the guest room, into the floor space, through into the loft of the porch, and then into the garage loft. We also ran a shielded Cat 6 cable at the same time, as well as a second unshielded cable as far as the LAN nexus in our dressing room. In doing this, I also changed the route of the telephone extension cabling, and the LAN cables going to the garage, to take advantage of the way into the porch loft we found. Previously they'd gone along the edge of the floor in the dining room, which I didn't like: this is much neater.

The unshielded LAN cable is so that I can have an LAN port in the utility room (I don't have anything in mind, but while I was messing about, it seemed sensible, as there's not one in the kitchen already). The shielded cable is in order to hook a sensor up onto the main incomer from the national grid, to measure the electrical import/export; and to do the same on the cable from the solar panels, to measure generation.

These sensors will then be used by a controller to modulate the power going to an immersion heater in the accumulator tank, so that only electricity we're generating, and would otherwise be exporting, will be used: we won't import electricity to heat the water. The rest of the work will be done in a couple of weeks time: the job today was getting the cables through the house, which was always going to be a tricky, dirty, and time-consuming job.

Sunday 14 June 2015

Chippings and Chopping

Earlier this week, I had a large load (about 6m3) of chippings delivered by a tree surgeon. He was very accommodating, as well as offering a good price, and they're split between the driveways, meaning they've been easier to move. The first task has been weeding the hedge up the side of the orchard, and giving it a thick layer of chippings. The plants are looking better than we feared, actually, and hopefully the hedge will grow on well over the next twelve months.

We also weeded the apple walk, and finally spread a good layer of chippings over the weed membrane that goes up the centre of it. More still went around the beech trees at the edge of the games lawn, and over the path in front. We've finally laid out membrane along the two paths of the herb garden, and covered with more chippings, and done the same up the two bare paths through the Colour Wheel to the future patio. We then topped up the paths through the kitchen garden, and, finally running low, used the last to weigh down some membrane in the copse, which we're going to slowly start bringing into cultivation, and not leave grassy.

Today, for a change, we chopped firewood.

Sunday 7 June 2015

Holly Tress

The main work this weekend's been taking down a stand of holly trees in the middle clearing of the hillside, which have gradually died. We can't find any evidence of disease, only signs of a rabbit warren under them, which I'm blaming. We felled the wood and burnt the brush wood as we went. The main trunks we've cut, chopped, and stacked.

Although it's a shame to have to fell them, the stand was definitely not adding much, as it's been dead, or dying, for a couple of years, and the clearing is now rather a nice space, which we'll have to work out a plan for.

Wednesday 3 June 2015

Gadgets

I've had a day off today, and have got on with a number of jobs. Firstly, I've made myself a couple of gadgets to help guide cables or hoses around the garden, prompted by the fact that there's nothing stopping the mower cable falling into the pond as I go round it. The guides are made from a 60cm length of dowel, 25mm diameter, which I've sharpended at one end (to push into the ground). The other end has a 12cm slot cut into it, leaving two arms. Between these, at the end, is fixed an old horseshoe, which is free to rotate, fully, between the two arms. The effect is that you can push the rod into the ground, then trap a cable or hose in the horseshoe, against the rod, but take it back out easily. I've painted the rod with the same green as the sheds, and the horseshoes black gloss.

I've cut back the ivy and Virginia creeper on the front of the house, and also cleared the gutter at the garage end, which was blocked and overflowing. That, admittedly, has been a problem for six months, but I've not got round to it. The over-flow has probably been most of the reason for the bike-shelter roof's paint wearing off.

The last of the rubble from the work on the house has gone, off to Chris's silage storage ramp: there's some tidying up outside the back door to do, but it's very nice to have seen the last of the backs of plaster and rubble.

The high winds over the last few days brought down a largeish branch from one of the silver birches above the Colour Wheel garden. It hadn't broken entirely free, though, so I've got it down, using my very long pruning saw, and tidied up the break. Hopefully it'll recover reasonably quickly. I am conscious that silver birches aren't the longest-lived of trees, and we may, in our lifetime, have to fell these trees, and work out how we replace their function of a visual, noise, and wind barrier along that boundary.

While Liz was weeding, I've made doors to the two ends of the newly re-covered fruit cages. These are designed to slot onto the top of the door-frame, meaning that there's no gaps for birds to find. Hinged doors would have been nicer, in some ways, but the unlevel ground, and nearby vegetable beds, made it unlikely to work, so I found another solution. Each one's a frame of 2" wood, with corner braces and a 'handle' plank half-way up; they're then covered with 2" chicken wire.