When we woke up on Monday morning, everywhere was white! It’s snowing again right now!
As I mentioned in my previous post, when I went to refill the central heating system with water, the water in the header tank just stayed there. Here’s a picture of the tanks in the loft.
The cold water tank is the big one at the bottom of the picture. The metal cuboid one in the middle is an old tank that has been left there as it is too big to go through the loft access hatch.
I have highlighted the central heating header tank.
We’re having new windows and folding doors put in soon.
The installation of the new doors in the dining room are going to involve cutting out some brickwork. This brickwork currently has radiators hanging on them, so we have to move them.
A picture might help. Here is what it looked like before I moved the radiators:
After ripping up the floorboards and a couple of days and cutting my thumb quite badly, i managed to move them.
This is what I did:
It’s been getting rather cold recently, and Mary had bought a load of wine so I thought I’d rig up some temperature sensors to neon (the server) and have it monitor and plot some graphs so we can see how the temperature varies over time. I read that the ideal temperature for wine is 12°C, so, from the graph, we can see that to store wine in the larder long term, we would need to have some sort of (cheap) background heating in there.
It’s quite clever as the sensors work off of a 1-wire bus. Well, you need a ground, so it’s only two wires. You connect them ( loads of them ) all in parallel and connect it to the controller. The controller sends a pulse down the bus and the sensors have a capacitor to store up this charge and then reply with its temperature, attached to its own unique ID, so the controller can tell which is which. I’ll eventually have the sensors all over the house and I can see a project getting it to control the central heating, such that the heating comes on and switches off optimally for comfort and energy consumption.
Most of the time was taken in routing the wiring to the sensors. Will put in some permanent wiring for more sensors when we have the floorboards up.
As you can see, it’s been getting colder …
“Node0” is the server room. Also interesting is the spikes in the temperature in the larder when we open the door to it to get a snack.
Never made Cantucci before, so here’s my attempt. Almonds in the front row, pistachios in the back row. Going to try some chopped dried apricots. Another idea is to have a chocolate flavoured layers and then roll the dough so we get a spiral pattern. Have to try when I get a moment.
Mary was away in Glasgow for Orla’s Hen so I thought I’d sort out a few bits and pieces around the house. One of these is removing an obsolete instantaneous water heater from the kitchen. This is good because the water supply pipe to it goes across the bottom of the window ledge and we’re having the window opening enlarged downwards to get a biggger window in, so we get a better view and more light.
The first step is to disconnect the electricity supply. If you look closely, you’ll see the cable go to a wall mounted switch and then up along the corner and then disappear into the ceiling. Obviously, you can’t just cut the cable. I needed to trace it back to the junction box. So I went upstairs to pull a few floorboards. It was a good opportunity to learn more about the structure of the house. Continue reading ‘Plumbing!’
Today was absolutely fabulous and we made the most of it. Met Scott & Sarah in Wokingham to Geocache. A new town to explore, some lovely buildings, it must of been 22C, we started off with a multi-cache, much to Sarah’s doubts……we did it……lots of numbers to collect, we stopped off for some refreshments did some simple maths and bada-bing, we have new coordinates to find the cache…… A lunch-box of treats…..filled in the log and moved on. Next cache was missing…..need to check the website to see when it was last found. Continue reading ‘A beautiful day for Geocaching’