Now remember this is my blog and I can be as nutty as I like. When I was doing my teacher training, they told us that writing a diary or a blog can be a cathartic experience (in other words having a gripe and groan can be good for you.
Well I kicked off November with a week off to catch up with paperwork, gardening and household chores. I also squeezed in one day doing absolutely nothing! Paid for it though, fell asleep that afternoon for five hours and couldn’t get to sleep that night!
We had the Barrett Family Bonfire Night, and was great to see the grandchildren enjoying themselves. I could just sit and watch them running around like loonies all day.
Unfortunately my boiler sprang a leak just the day before I was driving over to run a training course at Herne Bay. Which is about 150 miles from Oxford so I had a pretty miserable drive across country having shut the boiler down and knowing I had a cold house to come back to at the end of the week.
Somebody I thought was a good old mate of mine would normally help me out with any boiler problem but now he has ghosted me. Which has really hurt me. However, you never know what people are going through so I’m just taking it on the chin and hoping what ails him doesn’t defeat him.
So I’m doing what I should have done in the first place and taking out a contract with British Gas.
So where has Ted been this month? How about: Herne Bay, Reigate, Southampton, Isle of Wight, Daventry and Braintree.
Sometimes I wish I liked poetry, I can visualise myself sat in my smoking jacket beside a crackling log fire reading the collected works of Wordworth or Keats while sipping a small Amontillado sherry… I might even turn my hand to spot of poetry myself.
Trouble is when I try it always turns out like something a schoolboy would put together: “Here I sit broken hearted” No, we know where that’s one’s going.
Ok how about this:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd of Eco twits
I wondered what tablets in their tea would give them all the ….
No I give up, I’m just not very good at this poetry lark.
I see there is a bit of disquiet in the electrical industry with trade magazines throwing out headlines like “Mains Voltage to Drop!” shock horror! If you read beyond the headline I think you’ll see this is the biggest non-story going.
Lets have a bit of background first. If you asked most old-school sparkies what single phase mains voltage is most would say 240V.
Now, as I recall sometime around the 1980’s we entered into a European Electrical Harmonisation agreement where 230V would be the central standard nominal (named) voltage with a permissible tolerance of +10% and -6% (253V – 216V) for the UK.
What is being proposed is simply to bring the UK in line with the rest of the EU where the permissible tolerance (around 230V) is +10% to -10% which means the top end permissible deviation remains 253V but now a new lower limit of 207V.
Ok fine, but what amuses me is that final voltages come from the local substation, which is supplied from the grid fed from power stations. We are generating at 26kV and by use of transformers lifting voltages up and down we deliver energy around the nation.
Therefore to render change to the final TX output/supply voltage means actually reducing voltage level on the grid, so to drop and additional voltage of 9V could mean losing a couple of hundred volts on the 33kV side and proportional amounts all the way back to the power station.
I can’t really see National Grid dropping the voltage on a regular basis, I think this is an exercise to allow more variation on the supply as more and more smaller eco generators are feeding into the grid we are seeing more instability.
Now then, I’ve been happily living in 1887 for a few years now after I discovered the secret of time travel, which simply involves a powerful magnetic field and a frequency generator.
I promised I would update you with regard to my bike battery discharge unit, and if you missed my report from October you will know that all rechargeable batteries require a charge/discharge regime otherwise they begin to fail. Additionally, these lithium batteries do not like being kept in very cold conditions (like a garage in winter) so unplug and bring them indoors,
The upshot was I built the thing but it seemed to be taking a hellish long time to make a dent in the battery capacity (cos you need to get it down not below 50%. I was following a design I saw on Youtube that involved a 110V lamp. Monitoring the current I could see this was drawing about 300 mA. So to speed the process up I simply added another 110V lamp in parallel and this then took my battery charge indicator down to below 3 bars in about 4 hours, so that will do for me.
Its funny how all that bending over backwards from the silly hippies to not insult anybody hasn’t made a scrap of difference. Look what’s happening Stateside – certain foreign groups screaming “Death to America”. This to a country that let them in and gave them shelter. Mad dogs.
Anyway, forget that shit. It’s Christmas: Mince pies, sherry, Christmas dinner, ghost stories and my favourite carol “In the bleak midwinter”. So Merry Christmas to all my readers, I hope you have a great one and I hope the New Year brings new hope and joy to you all.