Slab for the New Shed

Progress on the new shed at last. Here's the site levelled - the house site is to the left of, and behind the trailer.
Formwork in place - though it took a bit of pressure to get them to put in all of the holes for the piers under the columns.

Plastic moisture barrier under the reinforcing - also helps to control termites.

Pouring the concrete - all done in one day - all 15 cubic metres of it. The slab is 100mm thick, with a 200x200mm beam under all edges, and piers 300mm deep and 350x350mm square where each of the columns will go. It's 12m x 9m overall.

These two guys did all of it. Very hard work.

Nearly finished. It started raining gently just after this, then got heavier as the night progressed. We had to put covers over the two awning slabs around 7.00pm.

Most of the material for the shed was delivered the same day. The erector expects to start putting it all together around 11 June - should take about a week to put it up, weather allowing.

Our Green Frog is Recovering!

Remember the Green Tree Frog with the major wound on its face? There's a posting about it in the January 2008 archive.

Well, we got an email from the frog expert in Brisbane who took it in to see what the "disease" was and what could be done with it. Pearl is amazing - she knows so much about frogs and is so caring. She figured out soon after we left Frog with her that it was most likely a severe wound, and not some rampant virus eating into its face.

Here's the latest news Pearl sent on 17th May:

I still have your frog she is doing well and still eating lots of crickets. She will probably be getting ready to “hibernate” for winter soon. Just a recent photo- as you can see the face is still crooked but has healed in the upper jaw and there is a large area on the lower that needs to heal over still. I will leave her alone til it gets warm again.

And here's the photo that Pearl sent - quite a change in just a few months.

Solar Power System Installed - at last!

After many delays our new solar power system has been installed - where before we had three panels (total of 290 watts at 12 volts), we now have 12 panels (total of 1980 watts at 48 volts).
Hanneke cleaning the dust off the panels before we connect them up to the control gear. That's the satellite broadband dish behind her.
A view of the panels on the roof - taken from the roof of the shipping container we are using for storage.
Gordon spent about four days helping Dave (the designer and installer) put the system in, as well as another 4-5 days lining the walls where the internal controls are mounted, and building a box to house the 24 batteries. One day the whole shed (to become our office) will be lined.

Both Dave and Gordon ended up with "battery back" after lifting all the batteries (32kg each) into the box one evening and positioning them accurately so that they could be connected up. Those are (some of) the batteries in the box at the bottom of the photo.

It is amazing to have so much power available, after years of limiting ourselves to only two lights at a time and not being able to run things like power tools, washing machine, or iron unless we turned the generator on.

First big test was to do a load of washing in our antique, $100, washing machine that uses gross amounts of power and water. We tried it in the afternoon when the batteries were near fully charged - it didn't even take any power from the batteries, just some of what was coming from the panels on the roof, with some left over to go into the batteries. Wow!

The generator will retire now, until we get at least three days of no sun, when it will be needed to charge the batteries - maybe. Not sure just how many days the system can go without reaching a critical level, could be up to five.
You can see how the panels sit down low on top of the eastern and western awnings - to keep the wind loading down as much as possible.
All the bare ground is from the levelling for the house and new shed sites. The two steel pegs in the foreground with the yellow tape on them mark the western end of the house (one day).
[photos by Dave Keenan - system designer and installer - contact me for his details]