Why have I been relatively quiet, I hear you ask? Well. The heat earlier in the month wiped me out, for a start. And now it’s come back, although not quite so badly. During the first bout we had our first fostering placement (which went well), and that meant that we had more people than usual to keep cool in the house. Result: I have bought a very expensive, very dalek-like fan. It was tricky to find one, because most of the UK seems to have had the same idea. It’s blissful now though and I feel very lucky to have been able to do it.
We are kicking around the idea of ‘passive ventilation’, which would involve putting either a Velux or a wind tower on the roof. We are able to open the loft hatch on days like this, which means the hot air in the house is vented upwards. On very hot afternoons it’s not as effective though, and needs some way to escape. A Velux might be the most straightforward way to solve the problem before next summer. Still with my permaculture hat on, I have realised that our washing machine uses 50-ish litres (12 US gallons) a wash and am planning either a kind of chain of old baths connected into a reed bed to filter it down onto the vegetable garden, or maybe a pipe to just deliver it to the fruit trees about 200m away.
Planning those things is distracting me from the real problem, which is that the wiring to the ‘Borehole Pump’ has finally failed. We knew this was on the cards as it was mostly kept going by my Pa, who learned his wiring between 1939 and 1945 and could probably get your tank going again, but definitely wasn’t going to get it signed off like the insurers want it. Also, he died in 2008.
Mr AL had already laid 120 meters of armored cable to replace it and we are waiting for the electrician to arrive next week to connect it all up. In the interim the farm has a £25k excess on the insurance policy for fire, and smokers are not welcome.
Luckily the house is on mains, but we are unable to water the two one-hundred foot greenhouses without a load of faffing around, changing tap connectors and fiddling with the seals on the ‘Little Pump’ which pumps from a 1500 gallon holding tank (UK gallons, sorry, I have become very particular about all this since what we will just call ‘the fish-tank dosing incident of doom’ last year) and probably dates from about 1920. It hadn’t been switched on for three years, but when it tried it last week it started first time. However, it makes a kind of screaming noise and fountains water all over the plug socket beside it, which luckily is also part of the outside wiring that isn’t working.
We have tried to run the Borehole Pump off two different generators, both of which just…stopped producing electricity…after a couple of hours. Mr AL has just been to take the hired one back to the shop to be looked at, and it is perfectly fine.
Now you know as much as we do. Generator Debacle #1057 is scheduled for lunchtime (to try to damp the heat down in the greenhouses) so watch this space I guess?
In other new, our Young Person (formerly known as Talking Child but who is now an adult and Talking Adult is not a helpful descriptor in our house) has passed their driving test! Huzzah! They have their own little car and are thoroughly enjoying getting themselves to work and social events on their own timetable.
That’s all for now!
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