Certainly been a grey day here, not a bad day, just boodly damp and miserable minus the wind and rain. Certainly not a day for sight seeing but fine enough for working outdoors if your waterproofs were handy. I was up early enough to do a little blogging before feeding pigs, eating number one breakfast then walking Bonzo down the drive to catch my lift. My neighbour Gavin having offered me a ride to the south end to collect the Disco which had been sat at the ferry terminal since my son departed for Uni a couple of weeks ago. Don’t suppose it was doing any harm down there but when you own something as reliable as a Land Rover it’s always better to have another one nearby just in case There’s a good chance at least one of them will let you down at the most inopportune moment
I speak from 40 plus years of ‘hands on’ experience
Whilst down there I called in at our local community shop https://raasay.com/raasay-community-stores-2/ for a few vegetables and took the ‘low road’ home via Oscaig, collecting a few duck and chook eggs along the way.
It was just as boodly dreich there and at Glam and Brochel,
where I also called in to give the generator a whirl.
The batteries being pretty low, no doubt due to the abysmal amount of sunlight.
So using the Victron GX panel https://www.victronenergy.com/panel-systems-remote-monitoring/color-control I set the Stephill 6kW generator to run for 3 hours then shutdown. This being a far handier (and easier to use) method than on my own SMA system which only gives you the option to run for 1hour, manually or automatically. With the Victron system you can set the timer for whatever time you want
That done, I rearranged ‘Calum’s’ wheelbarrows so they didn’t stick out into his road and went home for breakfast number two.
A strange number involving fried mackerel, potatoes and of course Oscaig eggs
Almost pigging
Having successfully ‘pigged’ (cleaned out) one of my hydro turbines and learned a few lessons along the way. I set about preparing for the difficult one. The one I did on Friday being relatively easy to access with only 40M of head and a penstock around 250M long. My next task would be a whole different animal with 70M of head and 900m of penstock pipe So the first thing I did was spend the whole of what was left of the morning and a good chunk of the afternoon tidying my shed
Just like finding important things to distract me from my tax return I’d manged to come up with an excuse to delay launching my ‘pig’
I needed to access my couplings but could not reach them safely without moving a whole load of wood, metal and roofing sheets. This of course took me until 14:00 when I finally set off (on foot with Bonzo) to my turbine to sort out the pipework so I wouldn’t get power washed and hit by the foam bullet that would be my pig
Bonzo being much more enthusiastic about this than boating yesterday.
After removing a section of pipe after a 2” gate valve and figuring a 3 and1/2” foam pig with 70M of head behind it would squeeze through no problem. I went upstream to the first (last) joint where the 90mm pipe connects to the 63mm pipe.
This joint is only a few meters away from the turbine and the internal diameter reduces from around 75mm of the 90mm(external) pipe to 54mm internal of the 63mm pipe. So I figured ‘worst case scenario’ if the pig gets stuck, I’ll get boodly wet when I break open this joint
By the time I’d done all this and loaded the quad up with the 2” Honda water pump to prime the system, found enough petrol for quad and pump it was getting late.
15:40 in fact, so I decided to just try out the new tyres by taking the pump and tools up over the hill ready for tomorrow. After all that was why I’d bought the boodly things in the first place.
Well I got there OK but it was never a problem getting there, it was getting back up that hill This usually meant going fast, sliding all over the place and depositing my tools in various bogs on the way. However the new tyres enabled me to leisurely potter up the hill without any drama or loosing anything along the way.
Not even the scary downhill bit Yup, it was definitely worth spending two days fitting those boodly tyres