Early, even for me :-)

No posting last night for I’m ashamed to admit that I was in my bed by 19:30 on a Saturday night, shame on me, I was even too tired to pull the cork on a bottle of red 🙂 Long gone are the days that I could do a days work then party until the small hours and then get up at 6:30 without an alarm clock. Well I can still get up without an alarm clock just not all the other stuff.

I had, been to the Renewable energy and heat fair in Fort William http://www.lochaber-environmental-group.org.uk/fair.asp which was well attended and left my head buzzing and arms aching with all the leaflets I acquired. Every renewable angle was covered at the fair, though many of the solar PV/DHW stands seemed to by staffed by former double glazing or conservatory salesmen 🙂 Both technologies can produce significant savings to the owner and CO2 reductions for the planet but if the salesman is on so much commission that he drives a 4×4 and then jets off to Florida it kind of defeats the object 🙂 Of course not everybody has the knowledge or time to fit such a system there self and I’m sure that prices will fall as competition increases but I can’t help thinking that this whole FIT (feed in tariff) is a bit of a scam by the government. Basically if you pay someone who is MCS certified an arm and a leg to install you a renewable energy system then you will receive a guaranteed payment for every Kwh you produce for the next 25 years, and for solar PV it’s around 40p per unit.

All this would be very laudable if the government were funding it, but they’re not, oh no not a penny of it, the money comes from a levy on everybody’s electricity bill 😦 Well not mine of course because I don’t have one, so basically all the poor people who live in flats (or anywhere else for that matter) and all the old people who can barely afford their bills anyway are paying a levy for wealthy people to cover their semi’s in solar PV 🙂

What makes even more nonsense of this scheme is that I could claim the money even though I don’t export any power to the grid. Of course it has little to do with saving the planet and is all about ticking boxes, a very large box, that decreed the UK would reduce it’s CO2 output by 30% or something by 2020 (please don’t tell me I’ve got theses figures wrong cos I don’t read papers or watch TV but I aint far off). Of course this particular promise was made by a government that knew it wouldn’t be in power then, but hey that’s life 🙂

Me, I’m not convinced by this whole man made global warming carry on, the climate has been changing for millennia, that’s what it does. The ancient Egyptians, the Indian tribes of Arizona, the Minoan’s Etruscan’s and God knows how many other ‘ans’ were wiped out by climate change so it’s nothing new. What is new is six billion people and a very real ‘peak oil’ just around the corner, so if we don’t stop leaving lights on, buying cr4p we don’t need and driving places we could walk then the planet is well and truly screwed 🙂

Sorry for that ‘wee rant’ where was I 🙂

 

Well actually I was on the car park at Lidl because the Nevis Centre was full, and despite going ‘off on one’ there it was a great exhibition.

Anyway, by the time I got home I was fit for nothing other than bed as I needed to be fresh for today, the exhibition (and a good friend http://www.fast-boat.net/ ) had been pushing me towards an ASHP (air source heat pump) to heat the new house. However the fitting of one of these http://www.esavep.com/products/domestic-hot-water an ‘Ecocent’ ASHP and pressurised hot water cylinder. However living ‘off grid’ it would need to have a dedicated power supply, or at least a guaranteed one.

I’m trying to make the new house totally ‘renewable’, power, heating, the lot, we do have an abundant supply of wood but I’m not getting any younger so want to make wood just a back up. So it’s down to wind, hydro and solar. With this in mind today’s first task (after feeding everyone) was to get water flowing at the new hydro site around a mile away 😦

 

And it’s not a straight easy mile by ant stretch of the imagination, it’s hard going, but I had a good team 🙂

Loch Beag is not easy to get to by quad but if I’m going to tap into it then walking is not an option, 500m of penstock pipe and 1500m of SWA cable has to go in by mechanical means.

I’d already dragged some pipes down there on my own, the task today was to try and get them joined together and water flowing through them. The problem being that I had to get the water flowing over quite a large ‘hump’ before it would siphon. If the site is viable then I’ll get a machine down there to bury the pipe but for now I just want to see if it can sustain 3lts/sec which will give me all the power I need.

Despite the dry suit,

it was boodly cold on the hands 🙂

Eventually however we got the water flowing and I adjusted the valve to give me a steady 3lts/sec

 

before putting a few markers into the loch.

Then it was on to a spell of cutting rushes for bedding,

 

 

then we let Shona’s piglets out before shutting them in the trailer to worm them.

 

 

Just before the evening feed we took another run down to Loch Beag to see if all was well then walked down to the shore where the turbine would be situated some 70m below.

 

It was whilst wandering around here that I came across this old stone bridge,

perched on a cliff where a burn flows down it must date back to the days when Manish was inhabited, for who else would walk this way.

Unless it was for access to a boat mooring at the south side of the loch.