Category: Roof

Installed Second String of Solar Panels Up on P Roof

For this week, since we have built the two battery 50Volt drawers, we decided to get on with installing the second string of Solar Panels, up on the P section of the Roof, which faces the Sun during the morning hours. We didn’t start until Wednesday, removing and cutting the slates for each metal bracket position and proceeded to mount eight brackets for the first row of two Solar Panels, then another eight brackets for the next two Solar Panels and then finally ten brackets for the third row of three Solar Panels, situated up near the top of the sloping roof.
We used lengths of timber screwed to a completed line of brackets, to afford us some safe footing as we worked our way up the roof.

P-All-Brackets-

We also cut the aluminium bars into three completed sets, two approximately 3900mm long and the third set 5500mm and then painted the various parts which will be exposed, in a black colour, to blend with the dark slates.

Then on Saturday, we took up our newly painted aluminium bars and started at the top row, mounting the horizontal bars across their five brackets and then brought up three Solar Panels and clamped them down to the bars, connecting up the wires etc. We did a quick electrical test by connecting the trailing cable to the third panel and went indoors to our Utility Cupboard to measure 118Volts coming out the other end which is very good. We then, after lunch, repeated the same process for the second row, this time, two Solar panels, and then finally the third bottom row with two more Solar Panels, doing the same electrical test for each row completed and all was just fine.

P-Solar-Panels-installed

It was a very hot day in full sunshine and hardly any wind to cool us down! Phew! But we now have seven more Solar Panels installed and connected to our Solis Inverter box, generating another 2.8kWatts maximum during the earlier hours of the day.
The final task of the day was to disassemble our working platform that helped us get on and off the roof, the two platform modules had their legs unscrewed and stored back in the Swimming Lane for another occasion and the two flat tops were also stored in the lane too. We now have a cleared path all the way around the house. Lovely!

Update: Sunday was a lovely day and after a cloudy start the rest of the day was almost perfect. The P roof started generating a usefull amount of power at 8am and by 9 was going strong. It peaked @ 2.68kW (96% of Max) about 11am. The Total output peaked at 1pm @ 4.86kW and the combined system generated more than 28kW hours of energy. This is enough to charge the battery by over 18kWh.

9 October 2022
Forty Pallets of Foam Insulation Rejects is Delivered

We started at 8am today to get everything ready for the arrival of forty pallets of insulation foam boards that have been rejected by various factory or reclaimed from various building projects like a hospital having two more floors fitted so the old roof was ripped off and it had 200mm thick polystyrene foam boards. The lorry with its trailer arrived at 9am and parked up on the main road at the top of our Loke. The pallets were jammed on and needed our mini-digger with our fork-lift tongs fitted to the arm and hauled off each pallet. But, the pallets were too uneven and were not securely wrapped into a tight bundles, they only used cling-film material and only went horizontally around the layers of foam bits and pieces and didn’t wrap up and over to make sure they were secured into a square block. They measured approximately 4 feet square and about 4 feet tall and they were stacked two high on the lorry. But, some of the pallets had moved and shifted around during the journey, making them difficult to unload. We even had several pallets that has fallen sideways off in the extra trailer module so we had to reassemble a number of pallets and strapped them up with our own fabric fasteners.
We had our wonderful middle neighbours coming out to help us, helping to load two pallets on our large flatbed trolley and transporting them down the Loke and dumping them all over our garden, driveway and at the bottom of the Loke as well, while Stephen unloaded every pallet off the lorry and putting them a little way down the Loke. It was 12:30pm before we had finished that first stage of this massive task. The Loke was well and truly covered in pallets!

Loke-blokced-with-insulation

After lunch, we continued in moving two pallets at a time on our trolley and stacking the pallets around outside our house, in corners and all along the side of the Garage.

Its-quite-a-long-trek

The Loke eventually became clear and open for vehicles again at around 4pm. We tidied up some of the bits and pieces, put back our mini-digger and restored our fencing again, and call it a day at around 5pm. It was a long day!!
Then on the following day, we then moved the remaining fourteen pallets off the bottom of the Loke, with the marvellous assistance of our immediate neighbour, to break apart the pallets and move the individual pieces of foam boards and stacked them on top of our first row of pallets alongside the Garage and around the corner at the back of the house.

Insulation-all-pliled-up-1

Insulation-all-pliled-up-2

Insulation-all-pliled-up-3

Insulation-all-pliled-up-4

We tied down the great big long bundle of boards with a rope and also placed heavy concrete blocks on top, to make sure none will blow away if the wind gets up.
The last five pallets that were dumped in front of our house, were moved around to the alcove section at the back of the house, but only after we had dismantled the wooden platforms we had there from when we were doing the Solar Panels and moved mum’s plants.

It is now all tidied up and the Loke and front of the house is looking good again. We now finally have our source of foam boards to go up inside our roof rafters to complete the building shell of of super thick insulation. We will resume that particular task when we have finished construction and commissioning our battery storage and installed solar panels on the P Roof.

15 September 2022
Stage One of Mounting of Solar Panels on Roof

We started the new week with a new complete change of project, with the installation of our new Solar Panels on our slate roof. We have seventeen panels to mount, ten on the M roof (overlooking the Swimming lane, slightly West of South) and seven out on the P roof (overlooking our Patio, pointing slightly East of South), using a collection of metal brackets and horizontal aluminium rails.
But, we have to make this job as easy and safe first, so we pulled out four old scaffold platforms we had stored and re-assembled them. We put two in the alcove formed by the L, M and N segments of the house, and anchoring then to the walls by hooking a thin piece of plywood behind the window wings and joining the two module together too. We put up safety boards along the edge of the platforms to provide tactile warnings of the looming edges and then tied a ladder up against one of the shorter edges.
We did the same around the corner in the Patio area so we can gain access to the P roof section too.

One of the jobs we did prior to this point, was to paint about a third of the metal brackets with a primer and black paint, to match the black colour of the Solar Panels but also our dark slate tiles too. We didn’t want to have silvery gleam poking out around the edges of the panels.

So, we then proceeded to install these chunky metal brackets, using the black painted ones where they would be seen, and the unpainted ones in the middle. We needed eight rows of brackets, grouped into four sets, as we have four rows of panels on this M roof segment. The first row from the bottom is a single panel and it has four brackets. We twisted the slate hook sideways to release the slate and then able to slide it downwards with a strong wiggle and tugs. We calculated that the first position for the brackets would be eight rows of tiles from the bottom of the roof, aligned up on the main roof rafter underneath. We removed half dozen tiles to exposed the vertical batten and then we could screw the metal bracket using 100mm heavy duty coach screws, two of them for each bracket down on the batten and screws deeps into the main structural rafter underneath.

Remove-Slates-to-expose-rafter-and-fix-hook

Notch-slate-below-hook-and-refix

Then we put a plastic flashing protector over the bracket and cut each slate to fit around the “nose” that is sticking up above the surface of the slate tiles. Usually we needed to trim three slates and sometimes we had to remove the original hook nail and had to nail the newly shaped tile in with old fashioned copper nails instead. It was quite a task to wiggle the slates back into place, sometimes needing to remove more, just so others could go back in again.

Place-flashing-over-hook

Notch-slate-around-flashing-and-replace

It was a fairly slow process and we had thirty-six of them to do for this roof and it took us three days to complete this task.
The placement of the brackets were mapped out so that the set of ten panels were positioned as far leftwards as possible, to avoid the potential shadow created by the ridge line on the right side of the roof.

M-First-2-brackets

M-First-5-rows-of-brackets

M-All-8-Rows-of-Brackets

We were interrupted with this job by rain on Thursday and other commitments on Friday, so we worked indoors installing a 40mm flexible conduit to take the four solar panel cables, all the way from the Skylight near the Great Room, right along to the other end, routed down inside one of the rafters to the external wall position and then along the floorboard into the corner that is over the Utility Room downstairs, where we drilled a hole through the ceiling panel and the lid to the Equipment Cupboard and stop just inside. We can now thread the the four separate double insulated 4mm copper wires all the way from the control box to the panels outside on the roof. The last job, which we haven’t done yet, is to drill a hole or two through the kerb wall itself, up in the Skylight to provide that final access for the wires to get out onto the roof.

Then we installed the hybrid inverter on the wall inside our Equipment Cupboard, tucked in the corner just right of the window. There is (will be) a door above the worktop and we would be able to pull it open to read the status display on the front of this box of electronics magic!
There is a lot of safety switches and fuses that had to be installed around this Invertor, to make sure that we can at any time, disconnect any part of the system, like for example, the batteries, or the solar panels or indeed the mains electricity as well.

Inverter-and-connections

Back on the roof, we then proceeded to drill two 20mm holes through the kerb of the Skylight, one for a conduit to go straight out on the M roof and slide under the tile battens and down to the first metal bracket. The second hole had a 20mm conduit turning a sharp right angle turn and running along the kerb behind the flashing rubber membrane and aluminium strip, to end up out on the P roof, curving around to a metal bracket ready connecting to the top solar panels out there. We bent the other ends of the two conduits so it went flat along the kerb inside the Skylight and went to where the 40mm flexible conduit ended.
The next job was to thread the four cables through the conduit we had previously put in, but, we discovered a very annoying difficulty. There were too many bends and the conduit was too flexible as well, and our cable kept jamming after we had only pulled through ten metres or so. We even tried using a motorised winch to provide 250Kg pulling power but we broke the rope and cable connection and it went ping!!
So, in the end, we had to cut up our lovely conduit and threaded the four cables in sections. We finally made it and got the wires going down into the Utility Room, ready to be connected to the cut-off switch and the other ends going right up in the Skylight and going through the two 20mm conduits we put up earlier. We pulled through enough cable for both roof sections and make sure one half of the twin cables was long enough to reach the bottom of the roof too.

Conduit-through-the-kerb-before-sealing

Conduit-inside-the-skylight

solar-cable-run-along-the-skylight

Through-the-skylight-frame-and-around

the-corner-and-through-the-ends-of-the-rafters-until

it-comes-down-a-rafter-and-along-the-bottom-to-the-Utility-room-in-the-corner

The next job was to create the aluminium horizontal rails that will connect to the sticking up metal brackets and form four sets of support bars that will hold the solar panels in place. They then needed their ends painted black to disguise the shiny silvery gleam, just like what we already have done to the metal brackets.

Ends-af-rails-painted

Now that we have the wires in place, and also connected to our isolation switch back in the Utility Room, we proceeded to install the first ten of our Solar Panels, starting at the top with four panels in a line. Two aluminium support bars were joined together and then anchored to the seven metal brackets for each rail. We then carefully carried up each Solar Panel module up one by one, connecting the cable into each panel, making sure that we had every panel pointing in the same orientation, with the positive connection point upwards.

First-panel-in-place

We slowly proceeded for each new line of panels, three panels in the second row, and then just two for the next line and finally finishing off with the single panel at the bottom.

Solar-on-M-finished

To make sure that the wires were working, and that each lie of panels were ok, we connected the negative wire to the last panel in the line and measured the voltage back in the Utility Room. The first row produced 156Volts. We repeated this test every time we had completed a line and we were getting higher and higher measurements each time which is very good news.
The final measurement returned 392Volts for all ten panels.

The last thing we did for this stage of work, was to connect the output of these Solar Panels to our Inverter magic box and switch it on. It came alive and showing that we had a connection to our Solar Panels and it immediately started reporting that we were generating 2kW of electricity. This was in the evening at 6pm so that wasn’t too bad at all.

Inverter-display

One of the things the Inverter wanted, was a electricity current sensor fitted to our household mains connection going into the smart meter so it can calculate how much we are drawing from the mains and adjust its own circuits to avoid exporting any excess electricity out on to the National Grid. This is good because we won’t get paid for any exported energy and strictly speaking, we are not allowed anyway.
So we had to install a bunch of network cables from the House to the Garage, we took the opportunity to also include a replacement LAN network cable that will go all the way back to the Tech Cupboard plus also a telephone landline extension so that we can have our DECT base station in the house instead of the garage. The third cable is the connection for the mains current sensor but that one needed to be threaded up to our Utility Channel in the garage and then all the way along to the front of the building where it terminated in a network socket. We had to unscrew every other section covering the Utility Channel, screw a series of L hooks to keep our data cable away from all the mains electricity that is already crowding the bottom half of the channel and tie little cable ties to keep it all nice and neat.

I conclude this report now but to finish off with some further numbers, during Saturday, yesterday, while we were working on sorting out the network cables, the Solar Panels collected another 16kWh (kilo watt hour) or 16 units of electricity, we had the Inverter box switched on from about 9am and looking at the historical data, for this time of the year, it matches what we had generated. Very Nice!

3 September 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
Air Duct Created up in Skylight and Down Rafters

We finished off the two air ducts we started last week. We put on the extra layer of MDF boards underneath to complete the downwards chute before it runs into the PU foam boards. We coated the MDF with several layers of acrylic varnish to seal the wood material against moisture and also sealed the joints with two-part resin wood filler, to smooth off the sharp boundaries and bends to reduce the air turbulences.

DUct-through-steel-complete-1

DUct-through-steel-complete-2

The rafter had layers of PU foam boards inserted to a depth of 250mm, with a smooth surface exposed outwards. This forms one of the four sides of the ducting travelling inside the rafter, with the two narrow edge strips glued and positioned in place with long CLS pieces of timber while the glue dried.

Duct-lining-glued-in-1

Duct-lining-glued-in-2

Finally, a lid was put on, a 25mm thick layer with its smooth surface facing inwards this time, creating the fourth side for the air to be transported downwards and into the main house ducts.

A-view-inside-the-duct

The next job was to drill a large circular hole through the Skylight to provide a 100mm diameter ducting, ready for servicing the upstairs toilet and shower room.

Upstairs-bathroom-air-duct-1

Upstairs-bathroom-air-duct-2

We then had a big tidy up of all the rubbish we generated and moved things around to make them neat and tidy. We decided that we won’t continue with putting any more insulation boards up into more rafters because it is not really making any major difference to retaining the heat, the Skylight is still completely uninsulated and all the heat will escape that way. We will continue working on the Ground floor and continue in building the next room.

27 November 2021
Roof Rafters Accessible from First Floor Has Some Insulation Inserted

This week, we completed the task of inserting at least one layer of PU foam board up into the rafters that we can reach from the First Floor .. the other half of the building, along the back doing sections M, L, K, J and I.

The task we thought we ought to do next is to make a couple of unusual air duct channels, to take the hot air out of the Skylight. We used the rafter space itself to encapsulate the air duct tubing so it is hidden and does not intrude into our living space. We had one down near the Great Room and the second location is right down at the other end of the Skylight where it squeezes through a narrow opening just before the hip section of the glass.

We had to cut our way through the kerb and all its layers of material, removing everything down to the steel RSJ surface, making a rectangular shape hole but with a tapering top surface to guide the air downwards.
We used 6mm MDF sheet material to create the liner for the chute, to go over the steel RSJ beams and bend downwards to the bottom of the rafters, where the air is then transported down using more smooth insulation boards and this travels down before sweeping sideways to join into the main air duct that will be built to run around the whole house.
These MDF pieces were all glued in using our glue grade expanding PU spray foam, putting in lots of clamps to hold them in place while the glue sets.

Skylight-duct-M-1

Skylight-duct-M-2

Skylight-duct-M-3

The size of the first chute near the Great Room is approximately 500mm wide by 100mm high, with a slight squeezing as it travels over the RSJ but having a 50,000 square millimetres capacity is about half the total capacity of our main air ducting that the fan is designed to work with. It is that size because the skylight and the Great Room will be collecting a great deal of sunshine energy during those sunny days and we need to make sure we have the capacity to remove this hot air easily without struggling. It is so much cheaper to design in a high capacity air ventilation system in the first place, combined with our super-insulated roof and walls, would mean that we don’t need to burn large amount of electricity to run refrigerated air conditioning units to cool the house down. Invest the money in the insulation at the beginning, a fixed cost and avoid the running costs later on especially if the world is facing large temperature rises.
Anyway, we did the second chute as well, with a similar design using MDF pieces but only 300mm wide by 100mm high, before spreading out to the full width of the rafter like before. We also put up more layers of foam boards up and down the rafters themselves.

Skylight-Duct-I-1

Skylight-Duct-I-2

Another job we did was to drilled a conduit hole through the kerb at our ‘chimney’, to allow a 40mm conduit to connect to the bottom of the metal arm and vertical pole. The vertical pole has a 40mm conduit going up the inside and poking out the top, ready for the electrical connections to all the devices that will be mounted into and on the chimney when that is built later on.

Chimney-conduit-passing-through-kerb

That is about it for this week, we will finish off those two special ducts, plus one more that is needed for the upstairs toilet and shower room, which also has to come over the steel RSJ but we only need a simple 100mm round hole to let the flexible air ducting through. The other job to finish off is dealing with the last huge pile of PU foam boards which we will slice up and insert in places up in the roof rafters, just to get rid of them.

20 November 2021
Installing Insulation Into Roof

We had a week of slicing and pushing loads of PU insulation foam boards up into the rafters! We carried on with the task we started last week where we wanted to get rid of all the random collection of 2nd grade of expanded polyurethane foam boards we acquired very cheaply, slice it up and put at least one layer in every single rafter we could access from the First Floor. We wanted to take the opportunity of the cooler weather to get this done and also have some measure of success when we needed to heat up the whole house when we will be working through the winter months. We were half way through covering up the gable section above the Front door last week so we got the second layer of 25mm thick boards and got that finished, bringing the total thickness to 50mm. This is only the start and eventually, we want to put in at least 300mm of some form of insulation, finishing off with glass wool for the added fire protection that will afford us.
We then proceeded to start slicing up the next bunch of boards into a collection of 550mm wide pieces and sorted into similar thicknesses. They ranged from a thinly 50mm to a very fat 150mm whoppers, with most of them being in the range of 60mm to 80mm.

Pile-of-sliced-insulation

We started in the roof area near our slicing machine, the “H” section that goes along the north side of the house, that is over Bedroom Three and the Utility Room. Some of the gaps between the rafters were tight and some were loose for the foam pieces, not by much but sometimes it was very difficult to jam in the board so we had to cut a slight angle off the long edge so it reduces the friction a little, enough for us to thump the board into place. We started at the bottom of the rafters but made sure we had a cleared gap of about 200mm, ready to be filled up with more glass wool for that extra fire protection, especially since all the roof rafters all have projecting Eves and we didn’t want any flames the chance of an easy route up our roof.
The top of the rafters terminates either at the Skylight and the steel RSJ or stops with an angle on a diagonal hip or valley beam. The Skylight needed to have a vertical layer of foam board inserted above the RSJs to make it easier when we come along with the layers and layers of foam boards in the rafters so we did that little job all the way around the whole Skylight in one go first. We cut lots of 60mm thick boards into 550mm wide and then carefully sliced at 200mm an angled cut using our jigsaw positioned at the 32degree angle to cut a sloping top.

Pieces-for-skylight-kerb

Anyway, we carried on inserting pieces of foam in along the H section, getting right down into the corner with the I roof and then went back to carry on the other direction to cover up along over the Utility Room and the Side door porch extension. We turned the corner and then went along the E section, around the next corner to do the C section which includes the the main ridge beam going out over the Front door and its extension.

Insulation-in-H

Insulation-in-G

Insulation-in-D

Next was the other side, the B section that goes over the staircase and turn onto the A section that goes over the Kitchen and towards the Great room. The stairs was a bit tricky because of a somewhat large hole in the First Floor but we handled that problem by laying out a dozen pieces of CLS timber and laid four partial sheets of plywood and OSB material so we could stand on it and climb our ladders. There was only two rafters to complete here so it didn’t take too long.
We finished the week doing the A section, right up to the edge of the First Floor and the Gallery but couldn’t go any further. The Great Room will have to be tackled at another time because we will have to build and assemble some form of work platform all around the room so we could work up in the rafters and also put on the finishing plasterboard sheet materials to form the ceiling.
So having completed this A section as far as we could, we could see that we have completed over half of the rafters and we used just over half the stacks of foam boards we got piled up on the Gallery so we should have enough to finish the job if we are lucky.

Insulation-in-A

Insulation-Piles-at-end-of-week

We will carry on doing that next week and should get it finished by the end of the week. Then we can return to building the next room, installing the utility pipes and conduits etc.

13 November 2021
Sliding Door Frames Installed and Started on Insulation In Roof Rafters

Among several interruptions during this week’s work, we got on with installing new framework for two sliding doors for our stand-alone Bathroom as well as for Ensuite Two. Both of these rooms are going to have two half sliding doors, built into the body of the walls themselves (pocket), not exposed, mounted on the surface. It will be so much nicer to have our doors disappearing into the fabric of the walls, to keep them clean and much neater too. Our room doorways right across the whole house are going to be a standard 800mm wide, some 32inches wide which is wider than most normal doorways. The Side and Front doors will be 1000m or 39inches wide. Of course, some of this space will be required to hold the finishing oak pretty framing itself plus also some doorways are the more traditional rotating door type designs and this will reduce the gap a little bit. To enable the frame to be installed we had to glue a piece of 18mm OSB to the underside of the steel lintel over the doorways and then install the CLS posts in the right direction and position to hold the doors.

OSB-glued-to-lintel

Door-framing-for-bathroom

Also during the week, we took each opportunity of dry sunny weather to bring in all our remaining random heap of PU foam boards and dumped the whole lot upstairs, so we can get on with installing at least one layer of foam board up into the roof rafters as the weather is getting cooler. We calculated that we have an estimated 170 sheets of various thicknesses from 50mm to 150mm, which each measuring a rough 1.2metres by 1.1metres, will give us a coverage somewhere in the range of 180 square metres. We would be able to cover about two thirds of our roof space with “some” insulating foam board at various thicknesses. Better than nothing at all. But it does mean that we will need to order another duplicate load of seconded PU boards again in the new year to get the required level of insulation in our roof we want, to achieve our super insulated goals.

The-Remaining-Piles-of-Insulation-1

The-Remaining-Piles-of-Insulation-2

All-remaining-insulation-moved-upstairs-1

All-remaining-insulation-moved-upstairs-2

So we started on doing the two gable ends of the roof, the one over the Side door and the other over the Front door. We needed to use our 25mm thick boards to build up past the various battens we have on the walls holding the cement panels and the external larch cladding. It was a bit fiddly but it has to be done one day or another.

First-layer-of-insulation-in-Front-door-gable

Two-layers-in-the-side-door-gable

Another job we tackled was to move the entire heap of wooden sheet material off our stack which is living in Bedroom Two, sitting on the concrete floor. It has been there for several years being very useful and accessible for our sheet material but now we need to get on with building Bedroom Two and hence why we did this heavy task! The stacking shelves have been unscrewed and is now in a collapsed heap waiting to be moved out next week!

Sheet-goods-stored-in-Bedroom-2

Colapsed-storage-rack

Next week, we will continue installing more PU insulation boards upstairs in among the rafters but also start looking at building the flooring for Bedroom Two and getting the permanent pipes and conduits installed before laying down the floorboards.

6 November 2021
Patched Hole in Corridor’s Roof, Caused by a Firework!

Today, we discovered a leak in our corridor in our temporary living quarters while it was raining outside! Upon closer inspection, there was a hole right through the outer layer of the clear corrugated plastic sheet, and we found a little spent firework payload, only measuring about 12mm by 18mm!
Our neighbour, yesterday, decided to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night really early this year and was letting off some fireworks which included these mortar shells that pumped sparkling displays up into the air. One of those empty payload capsules must have went straight up and came down hard on our roof.

Hole-in-the-roof

But to be fair, our corrugated plastic roof is getting rather old and it is becoming more and more brittle as the years roll by. But, it was still amazing that such a little thing could punch clean through the first layer of our roof, and bounced off the second layer inside, we now have a permanent souvenir visible until such a time in the future when we dismantle our temporary living quarters!
So the solution was to thoroughly clean the surface, with sand paper and chemicals, and lay down aluminium tapes to try and make a waterproof patch. We will see !

We will have to keep an eye on this roof and hopefully, it will survive for another couple of years.

26 October 2020
Sun Shield Covers Corridor and Cold Water Header Tank Inspected

Today, we reinstalled our usual Sun Shield over the long corridor of our temporary living quarters. It was quite late this year, perhaps we got used to the heat coming in, or perhaps it is not so hot this year as it was last. Anyway, it now stretches across the 10 metres of the corrugated plastic roof.

While we were up on the roof, we inspected the roof surface to make sure that there were no cracks or holes.

And finally, we opened up our cold water header tank to inspect inside. It was all crystal clear and all fine. We did test our two electronic water level switches to make sure they are working. We are planning to start using them, in conjunction with a sterilising and filtration module, to draw up water from our underground rain water tank and start making use of it for domestic use.

20 June 2020