Roasting Saturday
In case you were wondering – yes, as more people read my blogs I’m noting the load on the servers increasing and so I’ve put page breaks to make the home page a little more speedy – you’ll note “read the rest of this entry” links appearing and they’ll take you to the full articles.
Saturday was once again roasting hot here in Andalucía (though today the sun has now gone away – a shame as we were planning a trip to Orce pool). Galera pool is not yet open but I notice that it has been nicely painted up – looks great.
Our (American) friend Marsha is staying with us – Maureen and her are lifelong friends and so this is a good time for me to find projects!
We’re having a blissfully peaceful and quiet time in our little corner of Galera – the girls were out and about for part of the day yesterday and I’ve been working on the Pergola, replacing old controls with new and at long last making the green LED lighting variable so that I can turn the intensity up and down depending on the time of evening, hence saving (battery) power later on at night.
I’ve even gone so far to to put labels on everything in the new control box – which is out of character for me – essentially what you’re looking at here is power coming in from the solar panel and out to charge batteries and control stuff.
I also permanently glued a little prototype sensor unit (the little blue PCB near the display in the picture over on the left) only to find this morning that it has a fault.. that’s what I get for being neat and tidy.
Inside the box is a WIFI-connected new controller I just put together (details on the tech blog) and essentially this mess of wired turns things on and off, up and down and monitors and logs voltages so I can see if I’m overdoing the load (not had any really bad, consistent weather recently to test that – even today with clouds the solar panel is having a good go at chucking 30 volts out).
We headed down to the Galera Hotel for dinner last night and came back only to find I’d screwed up the software for the new lighting and so after all of that came back to a dark cave –now fixed. Lots of things coming up, including another wine tour and a trip to the coast. The hot-tub solar heating incidentally is working just fine but I need a MUCH better system for the water pipes which are prone to falling out – and of course then draining the tub!!!