With daytime temperatures hovering around 25°C and evenings as low as 12°C autumn has finally arrived in Santa Marta. Where is that?
Well take a map of Spain & Portugal and a ruler. Lay the ruler on Lisbon and Madrid. Find the midpoint and the N521 road connecting Trujillo and Cáceres. Midway between the two towns and to the north lies our village - Santa Marta de Magasca - our home for the last 20 months.
There are about 520 people on the electoral roll and about 800 properties many of which are owned by absentees who live and work in Cáceres or further afield in Madrid - 260 Km and 30 years away by road.
Val & I are both retired and are here permanently.
The next job is to run a second satellite cable into the living room so that the second free-view receiver can be connected to the FM transmitter. This really useful set-up will provide a means of recording TV while watching another channel or providing UK FM radio programmes all over the house and garden. This will satisfy Val's need for constant Radio 4 and get me a shed-load of brownie points. I now have a one metre drill bit - £26 from Screwfix - which will reach through the house's external walls at ground level enabling a neat installation with no wires to run along the skirting tiles inside the house.
Once this connection is running I'll be able to re-route the original feed cable with a 30% reduction in length.
Friday October 19 2007
I was rudely awakened this morning at 4:45 by the arrival of the dust-bin lorry and by the curse of advancing years which involves a trip to....... we all know where! Returning to bed sleep had deserted me and I turned on the radio. Aaaah BBC World Service thanks to my new satellite receiver cable which frees me from having to leave the TV on all the time. I was asleep in minutes. Now at 10:00 in the morning I'm again awake and feeling guilty about sleeping in when I've so much to do. It's an interesting observation on retirement that I know I share with many other people in the same situation - how did I ever find time for full-time employment?
So what's to do today? Well the second satellite receiver won't install itself. I need to connect the second receiver to the dish so that one receiver can be used to provide day/evening TV and the other to deliver BBC Radio 4 FM to keep Val sane. The second receiver will also allow us to record TV programmes while watching another channel - one thing that normal satellite TV doesn't permit. Then we'll have a hard disk recorder full of programmes that we'll never have time to watch!! Why do we do this? Is it akin to mountain climbing? Yes that's the reason - because it's there ie because I can. I'm sure this is just a "man thing" because my female friends always roll their eyes and smile when I try to explain the technicalities - my wife included.
Enough! Time to shower, eat and get on with it.
Tuesday 30 October 2007
Well the new dual satellite system's working well. We can watch free-to-air TV and still have FM radio all around the house and garden. If we want to record any programmes all we lose is the FM radio. This is because we use the second satellite box to feed the stuff we want to record directly onto the DVD/HDD recorder. Meanwhile we're watching via the other box - neat! The final job to be done now is to run a third cable from the dish along the same route as the second one so that the original cable, which snakes all the way over the roof, can be removed leaving us with two new cables following a much shorter route.
Val's been spending hours tidying out the kitchen food storage cupboards and now we can find everything again.
There then remains one last winter job - the new stove chimney.
When the Jøtul 602 stove was fitted we were advised to use 120mm diameter black, single walled chimney pipes - wrong!! As flue pipe it proved useless as it allowed the gasses to cool far too much with the result that a lot of solids ended up condensing in the upper parts of the system. This condensate hugely reduced the efficiency and the stove began to smoke so badly that we had to stop using it.
Well now we've traced a source of double walled insulated pipes which are €82 each but will do what we want.
At the moment the piping exits from the top of the stove and rises for a metre in the room before going through the wall at 45° and, emerging outside, straightens out again heading for the roof. This involves two 45° elbows.
The new design has the pipe exiting from the back of the stove, continuing straight through the wall and then performing a 90° turn and thence up to a point above the roof to escape. All of this new pipe, including the 90° bend will be made from well insulated double walled stainless steel piping. The flue gases will be hot all the way up and will cause the stove to burn much more vigorously, leaving little, if any, condensation to spoil the draft. The 90° elbow is, by the way, a "T" with access for sweeping.
This new system will be expensive but firewood locally is not too bad at around €110 per tonne delivered and we would prefer it to using butane catalytic stoves whose contents can last less than a week in winter. The butane "bombonas" contain about 14.5Kg of gas which costs €12.50 (and rising!). It's possible to use two/three a week for space heating in a house as big and rambling as ours. This outlay, of say €30 per week, will get us about 300Kg of wood which will take more than 2 weeks to burn. In addition the Jøtul stove will push out more than 8Kw for a short time if it's allowed to and this amount of heat will rapidly warm the entire ground floor structure. This effectively stores heat in the heavy stone structure and this makes the whole house feel more comfortable.
Last winter I'll swear that the neighbours were making excuses to pop around for a warm up. Heating is not something they go in for. Moaning about the cold is a favourite winter sport!
Friday 30th November
Well the new stainless steel chimney pipes and fittings cost me €660 but it was really worth it. The stove's been running for a week now without going out. A few changes were made to the plan on the way....
Instead of using a piece of 120mm single wall black pipe to go through the wall I used a metre of the new 125mm stainless steel double walled pipe. The logic behind this was that the stove exit requires 125mm pipe but had been fitted with a reducer to use the old black pipe. Had I used the black pipe for the wall section I would have needed another 120mm >125mm adaptor where the pipe exits the wall and connects to the 90° "T" elbow whereas now the pipe end emerging from the wall is 125mm stainless insulated new pipe which connects much more neatly to the 90° "T". The installation went quite well....
First the new hole through the wall was drilled and the pipe, already connected to the rear of the stove, was pushed through from the inside. This was lined up accurately and then held in place with small pieces of mudstone. Plenty of mortar was then applied around the pipe on both sides of the hole and was left to cure overnight. The following day the "T" was added and carefully aligned and a single one metre of pipe was added with a support bracket. More mortar was added to the gap in the wall. The next day we made up the final four one metre lengths of pipe and with me on the roof supporting the stack and Val down below in the patio steadying from below the length was hauled up and lowered into place. The coolie's hat top cover was then fitted to the last half metre of pipe and this bit was added to complete the job. The we fired it up and enjoyed a lovely warm evening without the butane from the gas stove. Lovely.
I'll be adding a few pictures of the final arrangement soon.
A note about wood burning stoves.
We last used a wood burner of the same design in the 70s when we bought a Reginald stove made by a firm in Waterford, Eire. We installed it in our new end-of-terrace town house in Tamworth and had a good four years use out of it before we sold the house. The Reginald was an exact copy of the Jøtul we have now. We bought it from Traders in Brightlingsea as a flat pack. The assembly at home ensured that the base, sides and top were all fixed tightly together with plenty of refractory cement filling any potential gaps. This was where the Jøtul failed badly. I ordered it from TodoChimeneas is Málaga and it took an age to arrive. When it finally put in an appearance, having come all the way from Norway, it was just before Christmas 2006 when it arrived "fully assembled" on a wooden pallet. The fully assembled bit was a laugh since I had to buy a tube of refractory silicone sealant to finish the job myself.
The basic technique is to burn off some small logs to get a good base of glowing embers and then to put two or three thicker logs on the embers. These logs are then allowed to burn fiercely for a minute or two before closing the door air inlet vent almost completely. The load then burns slowly for about four hours before any further attention is needed. Then one maximum size log can be squeezed in to last for the rest of the day. This régime keeps the whole of the groundfloor comfortably warm all day at about 24°C with an outside temperature of around 8-10°C. For the evening this procedure is followed again with two big logs being added about fifteen minutes before we turn in for the night. In the morning it's a joy to walk into the living room and to find a nice bed of embers ready for the day.
At this point I push aside the embers for a moment and shovel out the accumulated ash leaving just a 3 cm bed. Clearing the ash daily leaves plenty of scope for filling it up again during the day.
Tomorrow (well today now) I'm off with the trailer to collect another load of logs from my Dutch estate agent's orchard to where our 4000 K load was delivered. Perhaps this is the time for me to thank the good old UK government for just having paid me my 2007 £200 winter fuel allowance. This has more than covered the 2 tonnes of wood I've got leaving me with enough to buy five butane refills - it all helps.
No comments:
Post a Comment