Problems

Here we are 14 years since the build and a quick report on the state of things.

The hot water panels stopped working 5 years ago and neither Schwoererhaus or Buderus can help resolve the problem. Buderus do not even answer their emails.

We also have a leak between the gutters and the house on the south east facing side which is becoming more serious but Schwoerer want 1300€ to come to look at it and getting local roofing artisans is proving impossible. I think the problem is the same as we had when the house was first built which is rain going into the valley between the inverted V and the rest of the roof is inadequate to take the volume.

So I am stuck as to what to do.

 

Been here a long time what’s it like now?

After what seems like a life time I thought to add some photos of where we are at and what extra we have done.

This year the most important has been the installation of solar panels.

They are currently in their temporary positin until I clear the oats that are growing in front of the house

Solar panels in temporary position

 

But over the years it is the trees that we planted on arrival which are making the biggest difference. They are now upto nearly 5 metres high and growing. The fruit trees are now producing fruit and providing an abundance during the summer period.

The garden is now grassed and the veg plot produces enough to keep us self suffcient during the summer months.

After ten years I had to add more stone to the road. This was a big job entailing spreading 30 tonnes of stone. Here it is prior to being spread.

To give you some idea of how thins have changed, here is a view from the house looking over the oats towards the trees planted at the other side of the garden.

The house still delights us and is very comfortable except during periods of extreme heat, when the air system will keep the temperature at about 6 degrees less than the outside, but this can still be too hot.

 

 

Petrol and Diesel

The last few weeks has been a time of disruption in France; as the trade unions and the government battle about the retirement age.

Currently it is 60 and the government is proposing to increase this to 62 if you have 42 years of payments into a retirement fun.  This has not gone down very well with the majority of the population (70% according to the polling organisations).  The trade unions have organised day long demonstrations twice a week against this measure and others have taken action to block the refineries and the fuel depots.  The result has been petrol stations closed for want of a few litres of diesel or petrol or long lines of cars waiting to fill up at those lucky enough to have fuel.  And just to make things a little worse the railway workers have been on strike only providing the minimum of services, as prescribed by law.

Any way last week the government took the initiative and obtained the necessary votes to put the law into force. Needless to say the opposition was not happy but the conjuncture of the law being passed and the school holidays has rather defused the situation and the next few weeks should be a bit calmer and easier to use the car.

It has also exposed an interesting side battle, that of the figures.  Each time there is a demonstration two sets of figures for the number of demonstrators are published.  One from the trade unions and the other from the police.  Normally the police figure is slightly less than one third of the trade union figure.  Interestingly they both use the same system for counting, which is to estimate how many people there are in a row passing the counting point and then how many rows have passed.

Another, typical French action has been the “casseurs”.  These are groups of usually young people how attach themselves to a demonstration.  They have no interest in the topic of the demonstration, but are there to engage in a battle with the police and if possible indulge in a little pillaging of shops, setting cars on fire or just destroying public property.  This time the worse outbreak was in Lyon and involved over one hundred casseurs.

 

 

How to plant bulbs

Planting bulbs, but not the normal method
When you have 9000 bulbs to plant and the ground  is rock hard then the traditional use of a bulb planting trowel really does not work.  So other approaches have to be considered.  In my case it was the digger.

Digger in action

The advantage is that, if you scrape the surface and only take off a few centimetres at a time it turns the soil into a fine powder which is suitable for putting back on top of the planted bulbs. You get a better idea by going to the link and playing the slideshow (set to one second), unfortunately I am unable to insert the flash sequence here.
When the hole has been dug to a depth of 12cm then the bulbs are placed at the required distances and the covered over with the earth.  The later has to be done by hand so there is still a considerable amount of hard work – but tant-pis as the locals would say.

The bulbs are planted with the smallest next to the drive,  gradually progressing to the larger daffodils.

This should mean that the first flowering will be the daffodils in February to March with the tulips lasting to the end of May and the Ranunculus and De caen anemones filling out the intervening months.  Hopefully there will be some pictures next year.

The planting order was

• Ranunculus nearest the drive
• Anenome de caen next
• Tulip hageri
• Tulip linifolia
• Tulip turkestanica
• Daffodils

More work round the house
A couple of weeks ago I related the planting of the grass seed on the bank to the house.  And here it is – just visible if look closely.

The main problem has been again lack of rain so the seed is having difficulty in germinating and if it is not quick then it will be paralysed by the cold.  We had the first frost this morning at -0.9 deg C.

The main work is the continuing work of creating the path around the house with 20 -40 mm gravel.  Here it is arriving in my big wheel barrow

before being transferred to the little one and then tipped into position.
Hopefully this will result in an all weather path all round the house and one that is permeable.

Technically – I have put a geotextile under the gravel to stop the gravel mixing with the soil and preventing some of the weeds pushing their way upwards.

Some other bits and pieces

A couple of photos taken that I particularly liked.

The first is our meagre display of pumpkins.  They are reasonably large considering that they have never been watered.

The second is of a holly oak (Quercus ilex) that has survived the dry summer.

 

Lets chose which laws we will obey

Shopping

You will have seen from this site that I do a fair amount of DIY.  As a result I buy things from DIY shops. The local shops have a policy of not providing refunds when things are returned even if the reason for the return was that one of their staff advised you wrongly.  The French law is clear on the matter you have seven days to return an item and get your money back provided you have proof of purchase.

I was putting up a mast to mount the anemometer high on the roof, more on this later.  The one I bought would not fit on the existing mast and there was no alternative, so I asked for a refund so that I could buy it elsewhere.  This was duly refused so I suggested that as they chose which laws would apply then I would do the same.  I would take some things from their shop and pay them in a few days after I had tried them out. This was obviously done with a smile.  The point was made and I got the refund.

The main shop that I use for DIY materials does not apply this type of rule but they are 60 kms away.

Grants and things

Previously in this blog I have referred to making application for grants for the house and the solar panels. In France you can claim a credit against tax for installing solar panels of 50% of the material costs.  In the region of Poitou-Charentes there are additional grants for solar panels and high performance houses.

We applied for every thing, the credit against the tax arrived as soon as the calculations were done by the tax people and made a nice surprise when we received the tax bill.  The grants from the region took a long time to come and we had to jump through several hoops, but eventually they arrived last week, so they were well celebrated.

Schwoerer

Still no news on when they will come to mend the shutters, but this is not yet too pressing. Though the colder weather is coming and having a shutter that does not close will not do much for the energy efficiency of the house.

Schwoerer sell houses in several countries but I do not think they have got their head round the fact that not everyone understands German or lives in Germany.  Today we received a letter and questionnaire all in German and a prepaid envelope restrict to Germany.  Thank fully Google translate provides a rough understanding of other languages though I did have to type in the letter myself to get the translation. Anyway it turns out to be a questionnaire about energy consumption.  As you will know I am rather keen on monitoring this so did eventually manage to cobble together a reply.

Now another little point to mention, is that my internet service provide is called FREE, and as well as providing broad band internet at 18Mbs/sec they also provide free telephone calls to anywhere in the world and the ability to send faxes for free and receive them.  So I was able to use this to get the reply back to Schwoerer without feeling that I had been discriminated against with the prepaid envelope.

Stage two of putting up masts and things
The last blog showed the tower being used with a ladder.  This time it is being used on its own as I needed to get to the roof once again.  This time was to mount an anemometer so that I can accurately measure wind speed.  This means ensuring that it is above the roof ridge.

Now I am not keen on heights, in fact I would go so far as to say that I am scared to death. Sothe first stage was to get another friend to help me put up the tower, especially the last scary bit when it is at its maximum height.  So thanks Stephen.

Once that was done all I had to do was to climb the nine metres to the top and put in place an additional mast, with anemometer on top and then align it due south.  Remount the aerial and attach the wire from the top of the house to the temperature gauge under the eaves.

Eventually all was completed and the rain gauge installed as well.  The weather station, by the way, is a La Crosse WS-2355.  Chosen because it was cheap compared with many of the others but it still has data capture capabilities and the data can be transferred to a computer.  It comes with a program called heavy weather which looks like a modified DOS program from the early 1990’s.  however it does everything that I needed it to do and is now happily recording, temperatures, pressure, wind and rain every hour.

I found another program called Cumulus from a company called SandaySoft based in the Orkney Isles north of Scotland. This was a really good program but it requires you to have the computer on all the time which in a energy sensitive household is a non-starter.

Of Pensions, workers and governments

At present France is going through one  of its occasional upheavals as large numbers of people go out on the street twice a week to protest against a plan to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62.  As part of this “action” various worker such as refinery and railway worker have decided to block the petrol storage depots and refineries, resulting in many petrol stations closing as they run out of fuel.  As well as inconveniencing as many people as possible this has also prevented people getting to the demonstrations as they have no fuel for their cars and of course the trains are severely reduced in number as the railway workers are on continuing strike action.

There is one thing living here is always interesting.