Dudley’s here :-)

Well it’s 6:00AM and the wind has been steadily freshening throughout the night, not that I heard it, half a bottle of red wine and triple glazing had me soundly snoring till just recently. However the wind is coming straight off the sea from the north west, my batteries are fully charged and a look at my weather station https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/IKYLE21

tells me all I need to know.

Well I’ve just been outside to check everything is where it should be and it certainly looks like a day to be in the shed. At least it does when I finally get fired up, breaking my number one rule of ‘never drinking alone’ last night has left me with a sore head and sapped my enthusiasm Still, it was busy day yesterday, I got soaked to the skin and felt I’d earned a wee glass. Only trouble being my glass holds half a bottle and I’ve not had a drink in a while. Serves me right hey

Hydro woes

Wednesday started off just peachy

 

a full moon over the Storr and a few hinds grazing nearby.

 

Being a Wednesday Bonzo and I took the wheelie bins to the end of the drive for the binmen and then went for our morning walk. The bin lorry only comes up when I ask it, which is normally once every month or two. I see little point on dragging a ten ton truck up the already knackered road every week just for a bag or two of rubbish. I take my recycling down when I’m working and have plenty of wheelie bins for storage of everything else. Though I gotta say that the one and only thing I miss about not having a stove in the house is no longer having an incinerator for prawn shells and the like. The bin can get a bit whiffy in the summer if I don’t deposit my fish guts back in the sea

  

Walking along the track to Calum’s old house it was good to see and hear my old croft and house being worked at last. The rushes cut and the sound of cockerels being music to my ears. 

 

Once the walk was over I loaded up the Honda with my 2” water pump to get my hydro turbine primed. Then it was down to the Powerspout itself to clear a blockage in one of the jets.

 

The first image shows nothing coming out of the top left hand jet, the second one after I had removed a small stone.

A medieval toilet

Next it was along to Brochel to see how the battery bank was doing there. The poor sunlight that had seen the buoys at Sconser fail being a little concerning.

  

However, all was well with the batteries at 95% but I set the Victron controller to run the generator for an hour and went for a wander round the castle.

  

And here’s me worried about my bins getting smelly, this is where you went for a dump ‘back in the day’

Harris hydro turbine

After seeing all was well at Brochel I went over to Torran to check up on the ‘off grid’ system there, where I discovered they too had a hydro issue. The Harris turbine that supplies this property along with 1100W of solar PV had stopped working

 

It has three different sized jets and the smallest (the one in use) was blocked.

  

My diagnosis of a fish or newt causing the trouble was confirmed when I took the turbine off its base to investigate. I figured it wasn’t a stone like what had blocked mine cos of the smell, it was pretty whiffy but I soon had it back up and running.

Mr Lister

As with the system at Brochel I gave the generator a run whilst I was at it. The back up for this property being a Lister ST2 7kW Startomatic.

Leaving Mr Lister running I went home for lunch around 14:00 when it just started raining. An hour later the whole of the north end was awash

I only fried up some spuds and eggs but when I came back out of the house my generator shed was flooded

  

Water was pouring off the hill due to some blocked pipes in the burn to the side of my croft. The pipes being choked with windswept dead couch grass.

Luckily I soon sorted the drains out but my trip to Torran to turn off Mr Lister was rather wet