Alas Poor Fiat

 

It's a sad, sad day on the farm. My Fiat X1/9, that I've had for the last fourteen years and driven the length and breadth of the country, has failed it's MOT. Not just a little bit failed - no handbrake adjustment and off we go this time. Welding is involved.

Or, it would be involved if I could justify it. With two kids, a wife and pickup truck to support, the Fiat was a bit of a guilty pleasure. With 103,000 miles on the clock and nearing it's 20th birthday it owes me nothing and now that I'm facing a big bill to keep it going, it's time to send it on it's way.

So, if anyone wants a winter project and a fun little runaround that is a joy to drive and still suprisingly practical, make me an offer and it's yours. There will be no messing around waiting for over-optimistic values. The best offer I get by September 9th will get the car.

Raspberries

 

These raspberries are a late fruiting variety, but it's their first year so some of them seem to be jumping the gun a little. They taste perfect with a little bit of cream or ice-cream.

 

We quite often have balloons coming over early in the evening at this time of year, dipping low to get the best view of the Cam as they go by. The roar of the gas burners is quite subtle at first but regular enough to get noticed and cause a mad scramble for the camera and a long lens. This one was obliging enough to be taking a slow breeze directly over our house, so I got a few photos. It'd probably help to have a polariser and lens hood (and be a better photographer), but I'm still quite pleased with the image.

It looks like the gremlins aren't being fed enough. These are the things that are sorely in need of mending right now :

Push chair	One bent axle
Toaster	Only cooks one side
Video Recorder	Won't wake up
Camera Lens	Out of focus
Cell Phone	Not recovered from bath incident (glug)
Caravan Floor	As straight as a bouncy castle
Car undertray	Hanging loose
Remote car key fob	No response
Son	Projectile vomiting

Of all of these, the most important and most distressing is the last. First Born Son has no symptoms other than the obvious (oh dear me, it's obvious allright), and is suprisingly happy given that his body has learned a whole new trick that's keeping him awake at night.

All of the others are survivable, except for the fact that we can't record Doctor Who. Ever get the feeling that life is getting on top of you?

It's Hard Work Being Green

Sometimes I'm not sure if some of the energy being put into going green is misplaced.

Standing on the back of our pickup truck gives me an excellent view of the wide open fen landscapes, and early in the summery evenings a view of dedicated joggers doing the loop out of the village and back again. It's also where I have to stand to shovel the half tonne or so of manure out of the truck onto the compost heap. It's very tempting to call over to one of the passing runners and suggest that they could usefully keep fit by helping me dig rather than gasping their way round back to where they started. Certainly after a day of moving compost about, digging over vegetable beds and fighting the good fight against nettles I ache in a way that suggests there might be such a thing as too much exercise. Either that, or I'm unfit.

Our plot isn't that big, but it is hard work to keep on top of all the garden tasks. It puts into context just how much work can be involved in going green. I've read of a few people who've bought enough land to provide a significant portion of their annual food needs, or others who have bought woodland with the aim of being able to grow their own fuel for wood fires. Whilst it fills me with admiration, I can't help but feel that they are going to ache quite a lot. They're also going to be spending plenty of time outdoors when the weather isn't doing the current fresh faced limber up to summer heat.

There again, they'll probably be a lot fitter than I am.

Plumbing - Miserable Work

After over a year of irritation I finally got round to replacing the mixer tap in the caravan. I'm sure new washers would have drastically improved it, but it had got into the habit of turning itself on when off and off when turned on. Whichever would be the most inconvenient. Not only that, but the arm of the tap had become so stiff that moving it threatened to pull the sink from the kitchen surface. No doubt these problems could have been fixed with a complete disassembly and overhaul, but for a few pounds we could get a brand new tap from our local DIY store that had nice ceramic washers, quarter turn taps and a silky smooth arm. Even if it had worked perfectly, the old tap was a fiddly awkward thing so replacing it was an easy descision to take.

Except then I had to fit the damn thing. Half a day of crouching under kitchen tops, cutting my fingers on tortured copper, getting soaked, covered in grease and rushing to get to the main valve in time reminded me why I hate plumbing so much.

Electrics are fine. Plumbing... less so.

I don't mind wiring (though with the new regulations, it's not so much an option these days). Electrical work can be checked and is either right or wrong. At no point does the current in the wires attempt to force them apart. A simple physical inspection shows you if you've made a good job and then the connections are very unlikely to leak 'just a bit', or slowly get worse with time.

By way of contrast, you can connect up a tap and wait for a few minutes before the joint that you thought was soundly tightened goes bang and geysers water out of the cupboard that made it so hard to reach in the first place. At this point there's no convenient trip switch that switches off the water. Instead you have to do the hundred yard dash to the stopcock whilst the kitchen erupts into mayhem. Then after a bout of mopping up, it's time to make the connection again, wringing its neck with a couple of spanners hoping to find that magic point where it's tight enough but not so tight as to strip a thread or twist itself into collapse.

When we start on our house I'll happily run cables around. Might even plug a few things together if it can be inspected to pass regulations. The plumbing though - that'll be someone else's job.

Fine Tuning

The biggest problem I've had with making our biodiesel has been dirty oil. Though our friendly local restaurant is good enough to give us oil that is pretty clean, some of it is less than crystal clear. Leave it a few days to settle, particularly in warm weather, and the bits of fried food and what I assume to be flour sink, leaving a top layer that is clear to the naked eye.

So far I've been pouring that top layer off into our holding tank, from which it is sent through a 5 micron filter. The filter soon clogs up, but as there's no hurry, it can be left to drip through into a drum as slowly as it likes. The end result is a drum of 'clean' oil that can be tipped into the processor and turned into diesel that is good enough to go straight into the car.

However, that leaves a certain amount of oil that never settles. Often it's only a couple of litres in the bottom of a twenty litre drum. Sometimes though, we get given a drum that barely settles out at all. Up to now, the unsettled oil has just been accumulating whilst I've tried to work out what to do with it.

Thanks to Meare Solutions (http://www.mearesolutions.co.uk/) it looks like I've cracked the problem. They sell 32 inch long 'sock filters' which fit neatly inside a tiny space-saver water barrel that was on discount at our local DIY store. The 'sock' can take at least ten litres of dirty oil at a time, allowing the filtered oil to drip into the barrel through the sock wall and leaving a thick layer of 'dry' debris inside the filter. All I need to do is to top it up each morning. By the following day pretty much all of the usable oil has been extracted and the sock can be topped up again. In only a few days I've got through nearly the entire backlog of dirty oil.

The end result is more oil for biodiesel, and conveniently dry waste that can be much more easily disposed of. The only question remaining is how long the socks will last, and whether they can be reused by tipping out the dry waste.

Cough

Cough, splutter, hack, hack..

Little jobs here and there, but no energy whatsoever, with all of us gripped by a rather malicious cold. First born son and beautiful daughter are no doubt suffering the same headaches, stiff joints and hot-behind-the-eyeballs symptoms, but have not yet discovered how to tell us the full gory details. We can see the snot without them having to learn to speak. We can see the snot from a long way away. Buy shares in tissues.

Luckily they are both remarkably stoical in the face of illness, and it's only when they want to sleep but can't that they need us to make things better. Dad definitely gets the best part of the deal here, as I'm the only one who can take the full range of prescription drugs without having to consider whether I'm too young or breast feeding. If you have ever breast fed, you'll know just how many innocent products say somewhere on the packet:

"if you are pregnant or breast feeding, please consult your doctor before using this product"

Once you discount those, you're basically left with water and jam, neither of which have been known to have that much effect.

Unfortunately, even prescription drugs don't do much about the very disturbed nights, so I'll write up some of our little victories later.

Rejected... Not Dejected

The news I've been hesitating to post about is that, just before Christmas, our latest planning application was rejected. The grounds were simple - the new house would 'dominate' the barn, and will be 'detrimentally prominent' in the landscape. They're points that we dispute, particularly as the design has gone through a number of revisions to fit in with the constraints imposed by the Planning and Conservation departments and the Environment Agency. It's hard not to feel that they'd much rather we didn't live here at all. Certainly it's difficult to imagine any design that would fit all of the demands of the powers that be without being a messy compromise. Is that what informs architecture in the UK?

So now we'll go through our plans and decide if the reasons for our choice of design are sound and defensible. If they are, we'll appeal. Regardless, we'll do what we can to take on board the constraints we face and see if a useful alternative design can be reached.

Watch this space.

Foul Weather..

..and rather a lot of it at that.

The weather has been consistently horrible lately, with just regular enough downpours to turn the driveway to mud. Normally the free draining fen soil does a great job of shrugging off rainy days. Now though, as we try to drive in and out of the yard, spinning wheels only help to make the already slippery mush even worse. Despite heavy off-road tyres on the pickup, it's now stuck in four-wheel drive to make progress somewhat more confident. Yet all this is on a site that is almost completely flat. I can only assume that if we were on a hill, at least all the water would have somewhere to go.

This morning we woke to one flapping roof - a corrugated steel lash-up that was quietly rusting on one of the sheds. Armed with a bag of six inch nails and a hammer, I've done the best I can to stop things going too far astray. The repairs aren't pretty, but neither are the sheds.

Slightly more worrying was the wide open door on the chicken coup. Perched on the rail, Ginger was looking out and squawking noisily. None of the chickens had escaped - they just seemed rather annoyed at the sudden loss of privacy. The strong winds were managing to force the door open, so for now a screw is keeping it shut, but I'd better put a proper latch on it soon. I think I'll nominate the cheap rechargable screwdriver I got from Sainsburys as the most used tool on site at the moment - it'd always at hand for a quick fix and though the bits that came with it were rubbish, some new ones allow it to do the job it's needed for with no fuss.

Rather Busy

The reason for our silence in the last few weeks is quite simple. We're very proud to introduce Rebecca Grace, born on 8th December and weighing 6lbs 2oz. She's a lovely little girl even if she hasn't yet got the hang of going to sleep when everyone else has. Mother, brother and dad are all well if a little shell-shocked by a busy Christmas visiting family and friends with a new born in tow.

Snail's Pace

 

Here's one of the interlopers that take advantage of the condensation on the bathroom window. The baby snails (and sometimes slugs - ugh) sneak in through the vents and make themselves at home in the cool damp autumn evenings.

The big news for this last week is that we have - at last got our plans registered with the planning department. Now all we can do is wait, answer any questions sent our way and hope that the council will smile on our efforts to produce an acceptable design.

It's hard not to want to jump ahead of ourselves and start looking at all the secondary details that we've found out about whilst designing the house. We'd been planning an environmentally friendly home even before it was such headline news. We hope to have solar hot water, clean and energy efficient heating, a productive garden, natural pond and a healthy environment to live in. The jury is out on a wind turbine, but our location appears to be quite suitable. There are lots of things, big and little that will make this our home and we can't wait to make them real.

Just yet though we have to hold back and see if we will be allowed to put down the bricks and motar. Wish us luck. 

How to Keep Warm in Winter

Here's a little video I've made about the hot air blower we're going to use to keep ourselves warm this winter. It's the first video I've made, so it's rather simple, but I'm pretty pleased with it.



Now that we've sucessfully made biodiesel from the oil we've been collecting, we can use it to run a heater. It's a very sophisticated device, burning the fuel like a little jet engine and using a heat exchanger to warm up nice fresh air. The heater pushes out an enormous volume of hot air and will be connected to warm our bedroom and bathroom. Though it sounds pretty noisy in the video, once it's warmed through it settles down to be much quieter. Adding a silencer and hiding it away under the caravan should let us keep it on throughout the night without disturbing our sleep.

Monkey!

 

I was going to put up a picture of the 'repairs' I've done on the shower in the caravan. The plastic it's made out of is old, yellowing and rather brittle. When the caravan was used irregularly for the previous owners' holidays it was certainly up to the job. Now that we've been showering regularly for over a year of continuous occupation, the cracks are showing.

Literally.

The disturbing sign of leakage isn't wet feet or musty smells. Instead the chipboard that the floors are made out of starts to sag where the water has penetrated them and softened the glue. These little dips that bounce as you walk over them act as a map showing where the shower has sprung yet another leak.

So, knowing that plastic like this can only be stripped out and replaced, and that a specially caravan sized shower will no doubt cost way too much, I've botched it. Fibreglass repair tape and resin used to build and repair small boats does a fantastic job of holding the edges together and keeping the water in place. It's not pretty - not even slightly - rough and browning as the resin reacts with daylight. But it works, so I'm happy.

However, having taken a photo to share online, I realised just how ugly it looks. So instead here is a picture of Monkey, one of William's favourite toys who unexpectedly got thrown into the bath and has had to be given a seat to dry out again. 

Hyacinths

If you were watching Gardeners World on BBC tonight, you might have seen a piece on the National Collection of Hyacinths. We're just around the corner from them, so we're bitterly disappointed not to have been asked to feature as the National Collection of Nettles.

The Chickens Have Landed

The lovely Pam of Fenland Fowl came today and brought us four young bantams.

We have a Maran, a Hamburgh, a Wyandotte and a Leghorn x Legbar cross. So far we've not named them, but they've settled in well and managed to ignore the scrutiny of our cats and William (who was more interested in banging on the coup).

In a few weeks' time they should start to give us multi-coloured eggs - very dark brown from the Maran, blue-green from the Leghorn x legbar cross and brown and white from the Wyandotte and Hamburgh. Now we've just got to look up all of our best recipes. Hopefully some of them will include courgettes as the veggie patch is making a last stand before Autumn and we can't pick them fast enough.

Baby Steps

No one big piece of news to report on at the moment.

Chickens should arrive... next week.
First batch of biodiesel... next week.
New set of house plans... next week.

I've also got a very uncomfortable sprained muscle in my back, so the ongoing war against nettles is suffering a slight set back.

On the positive side, William brought back his first painting from nursery on Wednesday. He's just like his dad - more paint on the boy than on the paper. My usual approach to painting things is more or less the same, cover yourself in paint and throw yourself at the target.

Can you tell what it is yet?

Putting this together has been very, very satisfying. It seems I've not quite grown out of meccano. There are a few more bits and pieces to add yet, but once it's finished it'll be a biodiesel reactor.

Add used chip shop oil and a bucket of chemicals, leave for a few hours and (with some luck) out comes diesel. It should be good enough for running the truck and heating the caravan and will cost quite a bit less than normal diesel. Best of all though, it's carbon neutral - recycled fuel made with recycled plumbing.

The Often Forgotten Fifth Teletubby

The shed roof is (was) corrugated asbestos. Strangely the beams that I thought were holding it up stopped six inches short of the lintels that should have been supporting them. There's no evidence the two ever met, so it seems the roof was holding up the beams, which I'm pretty certain is the wrong way round.

It's taking a while to dismantle it - dressing up like a grubby teletubby soon gets very warm the moment the sun comes out. The other sheds will (hopefully) be taken down by someone else, who can do all the messy work. In the mean time I need to sort this one out, so - after a long cold drink - it's back to the protective gear. 

Harvest time

This time of year is an absolute favourite. We both grew up working on farms and bringing in the harvest was a great job.

The combines are out, running on past sunset until the dew comes down and makes the grain too damp to store. Trailing behind them like lost puppies are the tractors and trailers waiting for the auger to swing up from the side of the combine - ready to unload again.

I couldn't help smiling today as I was walking back from the village and stopped so William could watch the big old combine starting a new field. Even in the face of modern farming techniques and mechanisation everyone helps on the harvest, keeping every tractor, trailer, combine, grain blower and shovel moving. True to form the tractor following the combine was being driven by a skinny teenager, sitting proud in the cab and obviously full of the importance of his job. I bet the radio was on loud.

Now the air is damp with dew and the bats are out chasing insects. The smell of dusty straw is sweet and mist is coming up from the fields. Time for bed.