Category: Repair

Dealing With Desiccant Dribbling All Over Plywood Liners – Part 1

Now, we have reached a major decision to make. We have been thinking about the problem where our attempt to control the condensation up above the double glazing had failed and the calcium chloride desiccant material has dribbled all over our plywood boards that we have lining up inside our Skylight. We tried to dry this constantly moist surfaces, using both a hot air blower and even a gas blow torch, to cook the crystals, trying to break them down etc. But, alas, it didn’t work. The plywood would go wet again after a day or so, and it is not because new water was dribbling in as we had glorious sunshine and dry weather for 10 days. It is probably the original desiccant is reabsorbing the moisture from surrounding surfaces, or straight from the air.
So, what do we do?

Do we try to cover this mess up? Put a line of plastic over it to stop the moisture staining our finished plasterboards? Or, paint a thick layer of varnish on the back of the plasterboard?

But, this is not good at all. This means that the plywood will stay damp for years and years because the calcium chloride desiccant holds on to the water forever. Also, the calcium chloride liquid is slightly corrosive and we got our main heavy duty steel RSJ beams up there supporting the whole roof and Skylight.

No, we are going to play safe.

This means ripping off all the “infected” plywood and replacing it with fresh new material. We decided that we can use 11mm OSB boards instead of plywood, as it is not a structural element of the Skylight. We ordered 10 sheets and they will arrive soon.

In the meantime, we went along the Skylight, on our trusty platform, to pull off each piece. They were both screwed and glued on!! It was hard work yanking off each sheet! The glue was so strong that we were actually ripping a layer of ply off the back of the boards! We tidied up all these broken strips of ply, removed broken screws and generally got it cleaned up.

Lining stripped

A contaminated board

Now that we have removed the plywood covers, we can see in some locations where the desiccant liquid has managed to get behind the plywood and soak the timber and the top of the steel RSJ itself.

So, we need to neutralise his liquid and the web says “use soda powder, which is sodium carbonate” or “use baking powder, which is sodium bicarbonate” and this converts the calcium chloride into calcium carbonate, which is limescale. It also produces table salt, Sodium Chloride and in the case of the bicarbonate powder, also produces carbon dioxide gas.
Nice and simple!
We had washing soda in our washing supplies so we mixed a good heap of the powder into hot water and dissolved it all. We then filled up a spray bottle and went around squirting on the damp patches and saw an instant reaction where it went white. This being the calcium carbonate. We also got a large sponge and literally soaked the surfaces of the plywood pieces that we had laid out flat on top of our Swimming Lane outside. This also caused the wet patches to go white too. Hopefully, that will solve that problem and once it is dried out, there will be just a mixture of calcium carbonate and sodium chloride salts sitting there and minding its own business.

We also liberally sprayed all the spots on the floorboard where the desiccant had dripped down from the Skylight. This includes the stair case as well. We deliberately soaked a good amount on the first three steps at the top of the stairs and also wiped the next three steps down too.

But, in the meantime, we have been attempting to dry out all the condensation that managed to freeze on the outer pane of plexiglass. We had made it worse ourselves because we kept running the air fan all night as well, and unfortunately, we hadn’t realised that the air that we pumped into the Skylight was getting more and more humid, and alas, the moisture froze on the plexiglass, especially during the icy cold weather we had been having.

So, we needed to get rid of all this moisture first, before we could continue doing the repair work up in our Skylight. to achieve this aim, we rigged up an air drying chamber, using a large rubble sack, put in a water proof plastic tray and put a folded up mesh situated above the tray. The mesh held a large pile of Calcium Chloride crystals, which will grab the moisture out of the air passing through the plastic rubble sack. We made a hole at the other end and connected our air fan, to continue pumping dryer air into our Skylight.

The results of this operation is that we are slowly winning the battle against all the moisture. The Skylight windows are slowly clearing away and soon we can resume work. We have already had to empty two loads of dissolved crystals and we have just ordered a couple more bags of the Calcium Chloride. We will continue with this operation for another couple of weeks.

While all this had been going on, We have been working on our Ventilation system downstairs!!

25 March 2025
Repair and Upgrade of Storage Heater Number Two!

Here we are .. just to the start of Winter .. and we are having to service our homemade Storage Heater, to make it fully functional again. Also, we are taking the opportunity to upgrade the control board as we had a proper PCB made earlier in the year when we did some lighting modules so we included a design to allow us to put on a new larger micro-controller chip.

New Stoarge Heater control PCB

We undid all the wiring and devices from the old control board and populate the new PCB with those, plus some new extra ones too.
There were some minor corrections needed to be executed on the PCB and other slight modifications but we now have a new working control board without the forest of looping wires shooting all over the place.

The next job is to get access to the trays of bricks so we undid the front panel, loosen the wire mesh, carefully picked off the glass wool and untangle the inner wire mesh as well and bent them open to the sides. At this point, we discovered that some of the insulation was very fragile and crumbled when we touched the wires coming out of the trays, especially the top ones.
So, it was a case of replacing all the wiring with better high temperature resistant insulated wires which we found on the web. We bought two rolls of 12metres of three layers; one woven glass fibre on the outside, a middle layer of Mylar and an inner layer of more woven glass fibre, protecting a 0.75square millimetres of 10 stranded copper wire. The whole wire is rated for 500°C !!

We also noticed that the spade terminals plugged onto the elements inside the bricks, were not tight anymore and this has caused corrosion, probably caused by electric arcing damaging the surface. So we needed to solder the new wires directly on to the terminals on each element. This meant finding a high temperature solder and it turned out to be a silver copper alloy that has a melting point of 750°C to 800°C which is high enough for our requirements! We bought a tiny little syringe weighing just 5grams costing £10!! Silver is not cheap!
This syringe also has a special flux mixed in with the silver and copper particles.

Once these items arrived in the post, we proceeded to lay in the new wires, a pair for each tray, going out sideways and then up to the top of the cabinet and then up into the control board area where they were terminated with a solid caps and then screwed into a line of terminal blocks. One thing we discovered was that one of the rolls was only 11metres long and not 12metres!! What Cheek of the manufacturer! We had to borrow a short length of our old wiring for the last section going up to the top of the cabinet which is fortunately outside the hottest zones. So should be ok.

Next, by pulling each tray out a few inches, we scrubbed the two iron tabs of the elements using a ‘scotch-brite’ wheel, to clean up the corrosion and rust.
We then expose several inches of the wire, twisted the strands together and then poke the end through the little hole in the middle of the tab and wrap it around twice, before arriving back to the incoming wire where it was twisted together. We had some old flux which we revitalised and applied a blob to the contact area and using a miniature blow torch using liquid propane gas, heated up the tab until it started glowing orange hot. It said on the web that bright red for iron has a temperature of about 730°C and orange is a temperature of 930°C which is high enough to melt the silver solder.
We did the second tab the same way and then to make sure that we got a good soldered connection, we measured the resistant between the two wires up on our control board and if it reads approximately 67ohms which is the internal resistant of the element themselves, we therefore got a good connection.
We repeated this task for the next seven trays (one of them had a resistant of 98ohms which meant the soldering didn?t work terribly well so we redid it again).

Now that is all done, we could reassemble the wire mesh and put back the glass wool. But before putting on the outer layer of the wire mesh, we got some more glass wool and thickened up the two outer vertical edges and also folded a double thick layer for the upper 6inches above the trays of bricks. It was showing signs of being rather patchy.
This will hopefully help reduce various hot spots on the cabinet, especially near the top on the right side. We will see!

The final wire mesh was inserted into place and after double checking all the electrical connections to each tray again, we put the front panel back on.

The new micro-controller was tested and the software was modified so that we can now switch on any of the eight trays. The display is working, the menu button and selector is working, the mains electricity sensor to measure the current is working, the 50hz signal is being picked up, the motor for the chimney flap is working and all six thermocouple probes are reading ok too. We double checked all the electrical connections at the relays and the row of terminal blocks and we did discover a left-over wire link in the back of the last terminal block. It was reading 0ohms between the live and neutral lines and only after leaning over and cranking one’s head (a very tight gap between the ceiling and Storage heater) to see behind the terminal block, we could see this rather hidden link! The next test was to measure the resistant of each circuit after all the relays were told to switch over to the ‘on’ position and we discovered another problem. It seems that we may have burnt out the internal contacts as most of them shows very high resistant levels so we had to order a replacement eight-way relay module.

This duly arrived within a day and we did the laborious job of unscrewing all the connections to release the wires off the old module and then slide in the new one, putting all the dozens of wires back.
After testing the new relays, which are all working just fine, we proceeded to a full test where we set the temperature to a low 100°C and set the clock so it thinks it is in Economy 7 mode.
It switched on five of the eight trays at a time, using the pattern of on, on, off, on, on, off, on, off for tray 1 through tray 8 respectively. Then, every five minutes, it would rotate this pattern, one tray position, around the eight trays so that all the trays would eventually get equal amount of charging.

And ..

All is successful! It got to the required temperature and stopped charging in just under an hour. Yippeee!

Now we can reset the clock to the correct time and set the target temperature to 300°C and leave it to run overnight.

18 November 2024
Solving Condensation Issues!

Over the last three or four weeks, while dodging rain showers, we tackled the problem of moisture up inside our Skylight. See the following posts for more details:
* Installation of Skylight Double Glazing Units – Part 2
* First Stage of Improving Our Skylight Windows
The solution to this annoying problem is to ventilate the gap between the double glazing glass units and the plastic polycarbonate outer layer. We decided that a neater solution is to drill air holes between each window section and then have one larger hole drilled in the middle position, through the central ridge beam, back into the boxing underneath the solar panels, where an additional fan can be installed, to force the air through all the windows in a loop and the “moist” air returns back into the boxing at each ends.

It is quite a complicated task and we had to work from the roof side completely. We didn’t want to disturb the glass units because they were already fixed in with lots of sealant, but also they are damn heavy. Plus also, we cannot access the triangle windows over the Great Room. So, it was from the roof that we did all the work.

It was slow work, as we needed to be safe while we got up onto the roof. Towards this safety, we assembled one of our old wooden platforms and positioned it around the back of the house, in the corner of one of our extensions. We then placed our giant extension ladder, using two of its triple segments. We taped on pieces of rubber foam to the top and bottom edges of the ladder, to cushion against the nails and bumps of the slate tiles. The foot of the ladder was fixed down to the wooden platform with a block of wood and rope. Then we had a smaller ladder to allow us to gain access to the platform.

Setting up access for Skylight refurbishment

Next, the next step towards our safety regime, was to build three little foot rests that was connected to our steel wire we got running around the whole Skylight. we found some 11mm OSB left-over boards from when we were making the hot and cold water tanks, and screwed on a length of 2by4 timber along its length. This timber had a hole at each ends for a rope and a clip hook attached, ready to quickly hook to the steel wire. The other thing we did was to stick all over the underside of these foot rest with a thin layer of PU foam underlay we had lying around. This would provide some extra grip on the slate nails and also not to put too much pressure on the roof tiles as well.

Now we are ready to get up on the roof.

The first job was to undo the bird scarer. This is a set of three thin stainless steel wires stretched down the whole length of the ridge line of the Skylight. We rolled this up on a cardboard tube and then unbolted the brackets and lifted off the rain deflectors, which was in five segments. All these items were brought down to ground level and stored on our swimming lane cover for the short term.

Then, we started on the first Skylight window, which is a triangular one and we undid the clamping bars that are holding down the plastic polycarbonate sheets. Once we got the cover off, we could remove the little aluminium tray of the desiccant crystals (which is now mostly a liquid). We put this into a large rubbish trug we had up with us (it had a couple of bricks in the bottom to hold it against the chance of winds). Then, we washed the desiccant chemicals away with a damp cloth and then tackled the job of drilling holes.
We used a 16mm sized drill bit to make a good air holes.

This first window is different to the other windows because it is a start (or an end) of the sequence of windows that we are planning to allow a flow of fresh air to blow around the skylight. So one side has horizontal holes to connect to the next window in sequence, but, the other edge needed diagonal holes drilled downwards so the air could escape back into the boxing that we will build to cover up the air ducting and solar panels etc. It was all guesswork so we probed by drilling a thin drill through and we can discover where the drill came out underneath. We wanted to miss the solar panel but also avoid coming out on the bottom edge of the joist. We had to be careful because the double glazing unit is sitting right there underneath where we are sitting! BUT, when we changed to the fatter drill bit, and proceeded to drill the larger holes, we must have very slightly clipped the edge of the glass and .. unfortunately .. scattered the whole pane of glass. It was toughened glass so it broke up into thousands of little pieces as it supposed to do. We had few choice words to say out loud !!!!

Drilling a air vent and clipped the glass

Oops! We broke a window pane

We learnt a valuable, or rather, an expensive lesson! We scooped up all the broken glass into another smaller trug and disposed of that in the recycle bin.
PHEW!

So we adjusted our approach in drilling these diagonal holes and we were able to continue to produce five air holes.
And then, we drilled horizontally on the other side, to connect this window to the next one. We did have to remove the polycarbonate sheet because the drilling angle meant that we could have scratched the plastic as the drill bit came out the other side.

We then vacuumed up the wooden mess and and put back the cover, all the while in trying to minimise other dust and bits being blown in the wind. It was tricky. But, unfortunately, we discovered later on that our new air holes themselves actually allowed some of the wooden rubbish to be blown backwards into the previous window so we realised that we couldn’t rely on getting each window perfectly clear so we decided that we would have to perform a final vacuum on the return trip, once we got to the very end of doing all the windows, all twenty-two of them!!

Drill holes to join up the window spaces

As you can imagine, it was a slow job in opening up one window at a time, removing the desiccant tray, cleaning, drilling holes, vacuuming the dust and then putting the cover back on. Including screwing the clamping bar back down with two screws (there were six or seven screw in total) and then moving on to the next window. We were using our foot rests so they needed to be moved along as well. Plus, on top of all that, we would get the occasional rain shower, which meant that we had to quickly cover things up and wait. Sometimes, we lost a whole day because of little rain showers coming and going. Phew!

One different occurred for the middle set of windows, right over the staircase, because this is where we needed to provide a much larger single hole for the fresh “dry” air to get into this thin gap in the first place. We took the advantage of this situation over the staircase because there are two slightly narrower window modules so these became the beginning of the “circuit” for the fresh air to travel around all the air holes. So we drilled a large 25mm wide hole diagonally down through the central ridge beam, two of them, one for each of these windows. They popped out just below the solar panel as well, ready for tubing to be connected from a fan. More later.

Holes through the ridge beam into skylight box

Re resumed doing the rest of the windows, going towards the Great Room and arrived at the final window before the start of the solar panels. Here we had to drill another set of diagonal air holes like last time .. but we were very careful and got five holes done without mishaps this time!!

So after we had removed all the trugs of aluminium bars, dirty water and cloth and most of the tools, replacing them with the vacuum cleaner and one or two tools like screwdrivers, we started our return trip. We opened each window up in turn, vacuumed the last pieces of sawdust and put in plenty of glazing sealant on the joints of the rubber seals and then laid the cover back on and this time put all the screws back in the clamp bars. We put more sealant at the top of the clamp bars before putting the rain covers back on.

We made steady progress, working our way back along the whole Skylight and in a few hours, got back to the beginning again.

Nearly done

The final job was to remount the central ridge rain deflectors and then unwound the three thin wires back along the ridge and bolting the “arms” back into place to pull tight the wires.

We have finished the external work of this task so we took everything back down again including the three foot platforms, a rain tarpaulin cover that we had tied a brick in each corner but we never got to use! We then carefully lowered the heavy ladder and put that away too. the final tidy up job was to disassemble the two platforms and return them to the storage stack in the swimming lane.

Oh yes, one of the things we did while we had a platform assembled, was to do a repair job on the Front Porch roof. We had a slate split along an unseen fault line and half the slate had slithered out and a little way down the slope. The slate in question forms part of a line protecting the hip ridge line, on the right side of the porch. So we anchored the platform underneath the spot and proceeded to remove all the slates above the broken one, all the way to the top and levered them off their copper nails. We did end up breaking a couple more slates because the copper nails were ring shank types and really were stuck in the wood. We even broke the large central piece at the top as well! But, fortunately, we had a couple of spare large slates (measuring 300mm square). We then replaced all the slates again, including the new slates and nailed the final central slate back at the top.

Repairing a broken slate on C roof Hip

This the the broken one

Slates removed to the top

C roof All repaired

That concludes all the outside work but one of the consequences, is that we have scratched the polycarbonate plastic sheets up there and we will have to spend some future time to polish the scratches out, but when it is better weather and warmer!!

We just needed to finish this particular job by installing a small fan we ordered off the web, connect it to a length of flexible aluminium “stretchable” 100mm pipe, which in turn got squashed down into two separate smaller flexible pipe that then plugs right up through the two big holes we drilled through the ridge beam. The fan is currently just plugged into the mains socket by hand when we can see that the Skylight needs blowing out, to evaporate the condensation accumulating up there. But, eventually, we will automate this process so that a timer will control when to run the fan and for how long. And possibly, detect the humidity levels up there and switch the fresh air supply on and off automatically

Fan to ventilate the skylight glazing gap

This concludes this necessary work, in correcting a poor design choice we made at the start. We will have to live with this. But, it is now sorted!

17 September 2024
The Leak From Gutter in A-B Corner Repaired

While we had this lovely dry weather, we tackled a problem we had with our Gutters in the A-B corner of our house, above our Kitchen window and the Front Door section. We had a steady dribble whenever it rains, underneath the guttering and dripping off the fascia. It does not do this anywhere else so we had to get up there to inspect the rubber liner and interface to the downpipe module.
This involved us having to unscrew the thin oak batten that is clamping down the metal mesh and the edge of the rubber membrane. It was rather difficult because we filled the gap in among the holes in the mesh with silicone sealant and it has stuck itself rather well. After a careful teasing away the rubber material, we could finally bend back the metal mesh to give us access to inside the Gutters.
Here we discovered that the rubber liner has become unstuck off the glass fibre resin surface and therefore, allowed water to sneak backwards underneath the liner and eventually found a joint from one piece of oak to another, and dribbled out.
So, it is a case of re-sticking the rubber membrane back down again. but, will it? It is very dirty so we did a lot of cleaning and looked at the old glue on the back of the rubber, got some solvent which seems to be able to soften the old glue and start removing it.
At this point, we decided to pin back as much of the rubber material out of the Gutters, to allow the wood to dry out more thoroughly before we continued with the repair job.

Lifted the rubber in AB Corner Gutter

After a couple of days, while fortunately the rain held off completely, the Oak wood is looking much better now. We prepared the glass fibre surfaces by rubbing it down with sandpaper, some powerful solvent and also cleaned the rubber membrane as well. We then coated both surfaces with a good quality contact glue, where we then waited for those coated surfaces to dry, before we carefully rolled the rubber membrane back flat down along the whole gutter section and getting it nice and flat on the glued area. We then went to find some extra rubber membrane material and cut ourselves a piece measuring 100mm wide and about 300mm long. This went across the front edge of the downpipe channel so that the gushing water coming off the valley of the slates up on the roof, will be deflected away from the open edge of the fibre glass and the front Oak vertical cover.

AB Ruibber glued back down

We put in a little bit of mastic sealant in the edge of the rubber membrane that flattens across to the fibre glass, to make sure no water can creep into and underneath the rubber protector.

We then treated some of the timber with anti-fungal timber treatment solution, by dribbling some of the liquid down between the rubber membrane, to discourage any further fungal growth etc. before we pinned the rubber back down along the front vertical part of the guttering. We squirted a line of black sealant glue on top of the rubber strip, before bending the metal mesh, along with the wooden strip, back down and screw it all back down tight again.

And mesh back in place

Now we need lots of rain to test our work .. phew!

29 June 2024
Broken Window!

While out cutting our jungle, oops, I mean, grass, we discovered that one of our windows on our mini-digger is broken. It is the lower window on the front. It could have been broken for a few weeks as we rarely go past the digger. It is safety glass so it has shattered into lots of small pieces. There is no evidence of vandalism so perhaps a bird strike. Poor bird.
We picked up most of the broken glass and have measured the gap so we can order a plexiglass replacement. It measures 795mm wide and 530mm high. We also will try and find a rubber seal that will join between this fixed section of glass, and the moving window above it.
In the meantime, we covered up the poor old mini-digger in tarpaulin, to minimise the rain from getting inside.

The new window came a few days later and we cleaned up the seals and installed the new plastic, we applied some sealant where necessary.

Digger front window got broken

And replaced with Polycarbonate

24 June 2024
First Stage of Improving Our Skylight Windows

Today, on this lovely sunny Monday, we took the opportunity to go up on our roof, to our Skylight Windows, to do some upgrades and improve the windows. We have been having some problems with moisture getting in, but we never realised this had been happening because it is very, very small amount indeed. It is only because we have installed our double glazing units, with the moisture absorbing crystals, sucking up this small amount of rain water, and only in the last couple of weeks, some eight months later from when we installed the units, we are now getting leaks. They are coming from the metal tray of these crystals, which have now turned into liquid and running out of the trays. Yukkkk!

Sklight first leak sign

So, we got the task of finding and sealing the windows better, hence this upgrade and improvement task.After careful analysis, even removing a section of the plywood on the inside of our Skylight, to dig around in the body, to backtrace the water, it seems to be coming from the glass and these trays. The “walls” of the Skylight are not damp at all, so the rainwater is not coming in from around the edges, underneath the glass.

This leaves the rubber seals themselves that we got squashed on both sides of the polycarbonate plexiglass material. And when we inspected the window up on the roof the other week (very chilly and very windy), we noticed that the bottom edge is showing definite signs of water moisture underneath the plastic glass, inside the rubber strip. We can see quite clearly through the plastic. We then unscrewed the clamping aluminium bar that we used to hold down the bottom edge of the pane of glass, and it is very likely that the rain water is managing to slide pass the thin rubber padding we got under the aluminium bar, and dribbling into the screw holes we got through the plastic. We didn’t do a very good job of creating a seal to block off the clearance holes. Some of the holes had extra sealant in them, but no way enough substance. Not good at all. we decided that we will replace the thin rubber strip with a 18mm wide strip of butyl heavy duty black glue that is designed to be very long lasting and resistive to drying out and very very sticky. We did that aluminium bar on that day a couple of weeks ago and waited for better weather.

That day came today when at last, we had a calm day and reasonably sunny as well so we got back up on the roof, to first unscrew all the aluminium bars off all the windows, a total of 32 of them, leaving behind the one we did earlier, and take them all down to our tools room. The one thing that we nearly forgot to do, was to label the individual bars with a location code so that we could return each aluminium bar back to its original place.
We then used the bench sanding machine to clean off the old glue, throw away the thin rubber strips and then apply the new strip of the butyl black glue and get them ready to go back after lunch. They got a protective waxed paper on.

Rooflight front strips with Butyl adhesive applied

After lunch, we took a bucket of hot soapy water and a scrubbing pad to clean the dirt away that was trapped under the bar and a towel to dry it off (it turned out that the Sun was strong enough to help dry the plastic by itself) and we went around clockwise with one of us cleaning the bottom edge of the window, moving backwards and the other poked the screws through the holes and the waxed paper, polished the surface to make sure that it is dust free and dry, position the bar down on the holes and tightened the screws up again.

We completed the job at about 5pm and the last dozen windows was lovely because the built-in solar panels was hot from having the Sun shining on them so we had warm bums !!

We couldn’t do many photos while we were up there and no one to take any of us sitting up on the pinnacle of our house !

22 April 2024
Upgrade and Repair of our Storage Heater

We are facing another winter here in our temporary living quarters, so therefore we needed to service and upgrade our homemade storage heater.
This report was rather late in being created and published- November 2024!!Our first attempts of heating the bricks up was not robust as the heating wire suffered from metal fatigue, caused by the wires glowing red hot one moment and then cooling down during the day. This is what we discovered when we dismantled several of the trays. The wire was broken in one location or another.
So we went looking on the web and discovered some commercial heating elements that are designed to fit in a domestic storage heater out there somewhere, we didn?t care about that, as these would provide a much stronger replacement than our bare wires. So, we took apart the two layers of bricks, chip off the cement and pulled away the heap of heating wires. We then turned the bricks over so that the hollow part is open upwards and we grinded a series of slots to fit the new heating element in so that the second layer of bricks can come back down flat again.

We connected the spade terminals to the existing wiring and push the spade plugs on to the elements. We reassembled the stack of trays. One thing to note, is that we only replaced eight of the ten trays as the supplier were only selling these elements in packs of four and we didn?t want to take the risk of buying another pack and have two spares. We were not confident enough to know whether it will work or not. Another limitation was the power requirements as each element is more powerful than our original setup, therefore we could only connect one tray to one relay and we had only eight relays in total. So, the bottom two trays were two of the old design and we left them in the stack to act as ballast.

We reassembled the rock wool layers, stretched the wire mesh over the wool and put the front cover back on again. We rewired the relays up on the control board so that the mains is switching just one tray instead of a pair it was doing before.

We fired up and everything is running. We then set the temperature to a deliberately low 200°C and waited overnight. The five trays all heated up nicely!! So, we turned up the temperature to 300°C on the following night. All is ok again. We did 400°C and still ok! And finally, we settled on 500°C and lovely!

You may have noticed that we were only heating up five trays and the reason for this was that our micro-controller chip didn?t have enough output control pins to drive the other three trays.

We have our storage heater back again for this Winter!
We are warm again using cheaper Economy 7 prices!!
Phew!

20 November 2023
A Thorough Overhaul of our Mini-Digger With Major Replaced Parts

We have been examining our mini-digger these last few days, tracking down the reason to why it won’t work. There is no noises, just a silent nothing of no engine turning over etc.
We checked the battery and it is showing signs of being old, not holding it voltage when we turn the key to ignition mode. The voltage just falls very quickly below 12V which is not good. So we decided that we ought to buy a new lead-acid battery replacement. That duly arrived (on Saturday) but unfortunately, it didn’t solve the problem.

Digger-New-Battery-Aug-22

The starter motor still wouldn’t want to turn over. We had always had a problem with our starter motor, and quite often, we had to hit it with a hammer to ‘jolt’ something to make it work, but, it seems that it decided that it had enough .. permanently!!
So we had to dismantle the back-end of the digger, taking off four very heavy pieces of body work, in order to reach the starter motor and its two bolts!! Some of those bodywork bolts were very awkward to reach and for one set of two giant bolts, we had to put an old scaffolding pole over the handle of the wrench to get enough leverage to crack the bolt! We started testing the motor, it was getting electricity to it, but nothing was happening, so out it came.
So we surfed the web and found the starter motor part number and then found a replacement spare part. The cost wasn’t too bad @ £150, and so we ordered it.
It came today and we fitted it this morning and .. hey presto .. it worked! Every time!!

Digger-Old-Starter-Motor

Digger-New-Starter-Motor

We cleaned up various parts, checked the engine oil and put some more in and then re-assemble the body work back into place again.
We greased all the joints all over the digger, filled it up with more diesel and put grease on various handles and window latches etc. All a bit better now, for a 2002 vintage machine! We have only added 366 hours of run time since we bought it back in May 2009, on top of the 2953 hours already on the clock.

16 August 2022
Second Piece of Damage Caused by Storm Eunice, Our Wooden Fencing

We spent the last couple of days, a few hours on each day, repairing the fence bordering our Loke, that was damaged by Storm Eunice back on the 18th February 2022. She had snapped one of the metal post holders in half, leaving the spike buried in the ground, while the socket part with its wooden post still in it, and also still attached to the wooden panels, was flung across the garden and part the way out on to the Loke too. It had broken several pieces of the framework making up a panel plus literally snapping a corner out of another panel.

Storm-damage-to-fence-1

Storm-damage-to-fence-2

Storm-damage-to-fence-3

After detangling the wooden panels from the fence post, unscrewing smashed support ties and other bits and pieces to get the panels separated, we were then took each one in turn into the house to repair and reinforce them back into some assemblance of normality. We actually repaired three in total, even though only two of the panels were lying on the ground, we found the first panel had some broken structs so that got done too.
Next, was to remove the metal socket off the wooden post (it was clamped on so just a case of loosening a couple of captive bolts) and then digging out the buried spike, bringing both pieces indoors and cleaning them up using grinding discs and wire wheels to get the protective paint off so it was ready for welding back together. We found some iron strips of band and used them to reinforce the whole thing, with lots of weld points everywhere. After that we painted it green, using a metal paint to help prevent major rusting and left it to harden overnight.
On the following afternoon, we proceeded to rebuild the fence, driving the repaired metal support holder back into the ground and then slid the wooden panels back into place. We had to relevel a couple of the concrete blocks under the middle panel but everything went back pretty neatly. We screwed all the wooden panels securely on to the post again to save them from slipping out in windy conditions.

That concludes the repairs caused by storm Eunice and hopefully we won’t suffer another incident any time soon!!

27 February 2022
Storm Eunice Ripped Several Pieces of Roofing Felt Off

This afternoon we took to the sky and repaired a smallish section of roof on our Temporary Living Quarters, damaged by Storm Eunice a couple of days ago. It managed to peel off half a strip of roofing felt down at the far end of the roof and a smaller piece also down that end too. We had some spare felt in the garden shed, some nails and half a tin of bitumen horrible black sticky glue. First of all, we levered up the edge of the next strip of felt up the roof (it was going over the central ridge line), got the nails out and slid under the edge a length of the new felt. We used plenty of the bitumen glue to stick down the edge and then nailed everything together to make sure the wind didn’t pick up the felt and cause more damage while the glue is drying. Then a smaller piece slid under the previous strip we just done and applied more glue to that overlapping edge too, finishing off with another line of nails, plus a dozen nails to pin down the loose edge that bends over the edge of the roof and down the wall a little way.

Temporary-living-roof-repaired

To make sure we did not suffer the same faith again, we screwed down a 6 foot length of batten across the end of the roof, to clamp down the ends of the roofing felt, and avoid the chance of another Storm coming along and ripping more felt off our roof!

23 February 2022