The Dipper Bird (by sarah)

We apparently have a dipper bird Albert Barbaras gardener informs me - this is a bird that looks like a big wren with a white waistcoat and dives into the water from low laying stones and then 'walks' under water catching things to eat!

I really really want to get a photo of it - its responsible for the strange sounds I've hearing too!

Big Voltmeter (by alaric)

My mate Seth brought me back a lovely big AC voltmeter from India, where the power distribution systems tend to reflect an earlier, more exciting, time where things arced and crackled, and everything was made of Bakelite.

Anyway, it's meant to mount on a panel, and the rear of it just has two exposed screw terminals. So I had to do a bit of work to make it usable.

Firstly, I obtained some crimp terminals - a nice set with eighteen different kinds, including rings, spades (male and female), forks, and butt splices in three different sizes.

Anyway, I really wanted it for the ring terminals, which would securely attach to the screws on the back of the voltmeter. So upon returning to home, I went to Maplin and obtained a large enough box, then spent a pleasant hour or so in the workshop with my father in law drilling holes in the box so that I could mount the voltemeter on it. We also scraped away some paint from the inside of the mounting holes, exposing the bare metal, so that I could attach another ring crimp terminal to the mounting bolt as an earth connection. Better safe than sorry!

The end result is a nice box with the voltmeter mounted on it, with no exposed live metalwork, and a standard mains plug on the other end so it can monitor my mains voltage. This is a pretty useful tool, since we do get power cuts and brownouts and so on quite often out here, and the lights often change brightness at random...

As I write, it's reading a bit over 230v, while earlier, it was reading more like 225v. At some point I'll ask Sarah to turn the shower on (our biggest load) and we'll see how much the voltage drops - because I know the lights usually dim when the shower comes on 🙂

People leave cool things on the kerbside in London (by alaric)

Like this rather large power supply, spotted on Tottenham Court Road:

I'm glad I didn't have the van, or I'd have felt compelled to take it home and try to fix it!

This Weeks Disastors (by sarah)

Wednesday - the Rainbow man came and drilled wholes in our floor and concluded that we are still quiet wet.

Thursday - stomache v.v.v. bad wondering if boiling the spring water is actually killing the e-coli that resides within.

Friday - Barbara tripped over the leads of one of the fans that are drying her house out and hits her head and shoulder queit badly.

The weekend was fine as Alaric was about and so dispersed mine and my dads bad luck fields. Except for Sunday when we discovered that there may have been a double booking of the hall cuasing an issue with Cubs and Scouts.

Monday - broke Moo Cow glass that my friend Helen got me for my birthday yonks ago. Chipped one of the mugs that belongs to the nice set we got as a wedding pressant whilst unloading it at the Big Yellow.

Tuesday - Discovered that the Doctors have lost my blood tests so I have to have it all done again including starving. Discover that Jean has head lice and whilst out getting nit stuff the van breaks down and I discover that my RAC card is not where I thought it was. I trip over the rolled up carpet in the mill and jar my pelvis so that it is once again going clickity click. Confirmed issue with the Hall for cubs and Scouts - start trying to contact everybody.

Wednesday - Jean wakes me up with cries of 'Mummy, oh dear poo! Mummy oh dear water wet, Mummy oh dear cot floor icky yuck.' She had had a server containment breach of the nappy kindwhich resulted in bath, and all bedding washed including, 'MY TEDDY! Bear, bear no!' Teddy and bear and hopsital bear and kitten and Mrs Seal all had to go into the washing machine somehting that Jean was most indignant about with tears an' all.

Backup Power (by alaric)

As I have mentioned before, we have a petrol genset that we use to keep things going during our frequent power cuts. Immediately after the flood, too, when we had to shut down the house power since one of the outlets was submerged, I ran the computers off of the genset.

However, it is a pain to have to run the nice cable I made around the house, reach behind a filing cabinet to unplug the UPS that feeds the computers from the wall and plug it into the generator cable, unplug the fridge freezer, stretch cables about, etc...

So the logical next step would be to fit a second consumer unit, move the 5A lighting circuit over to it, and run a 15A circuit to a few strategically placed sockets around the house - where fridges and freezers are likely to ever be, and of course, up in the office where the computers live, and where the incoming phone lines are (where the ADSL router goes).

This consumer unit can run from a single 30A fuse in the main consumer unit (the slot currently taken by the lighting circuit will do nicely), but via a pair of 32A IEC 60309 connectors. The circuit from the main consumer unit would come out via a female socket, and the feed into the new consumer unit via a male socket.

Then the two can be connected by a short length of 32A cable with appropriate plugs on each end. And when the power goes down, I can turn the emergency circuit off with the master switch on the secondary consumer unit (because it's bad to use a plug and socket as a switch, interrupting a flowing current and arcing in the process), unplug from the useless incoming circuit, and plug into the genset's output... The genset can only produce about 10A; in practice, that's more than enough to run everything, and it has a 16A outlet on the front, but I'd feel compelled to see if I could find a 10A circuit breaker nonetheless, since with proper sockets stationed about the house, it might be easy to accidentally overload it. But I'm designing the system around a standard 15A socket circuit and a 5A lighting circuit, so that in future, I can get a bigger genset and power more stuff without needing to rewire it all.

What I wonder, though, is if this arrangement would actually be legal under the stringent UK wiring laws. As far as I know there's nothing wrong with having a 32A socket coming from a 30A fuse (after all, a standard 15A circuit feeds many 13A outlets); the question is, is it OK to have a lighting circuit and a set of outlets coming from a consumer unit fed from a 32A inlet socket?

I hope so, since it'd really make switching over to backup power easier than it currently is. And since anything I connect between those two sockets isn't a fixed part of the house wiring it would, I presume, not be governed by regulations, so fiddling with alternate power sources (such as turbines and battery arrays) would be a lot easier.