Lighting Up!
It’s that time of year again – time to for lighting up the Christmas decorations. New this year is a santa sleigh and reindeer, some stars for the hall and little houses for the window sill.
Author: Alan Cole
St Fagans and The Great House
We’ve just got back from a nice weekend away in South Wales. As usual at this time of year we try to combine my birthday, my Mums birthday, my brothers birthday and a Christmas get together into one visit. We usually meet the whole family either in Bristol or somewhere nearby. Covid precautions once again...
Aquarium Algae
I let my aquarium slip a little after my heart attack. I wasn’t really up to maintaining it as lugging heavy buckets of water around was out of the question. It did OK as it is quite self-sufficient, but it did suddenly get a little overwhelmed with algae after a while. Balanced Ecosystem The tank...
Is Clotting the Problem?
I’ve been wondering about clotting recently. First some background for context. As you may know, I was super-fit, super healthy and the last person on Earth that anyone expected to have any heart issues. Despite that I had a major heart attack earlier this year and have been recovering since. As is often the case,...
Free Electricity
We’ve been a little obsessed with our electricity usage lately. All prompted by the fact that we’ve had solar panels and battery storage installed. This came with the ability to track our usage a little easier and I built a nice addition to this website that shows how our solar panels are performing. I added...
Time to Rebuild
I wouldn’t say I’ve been ‘training’ yet, but it is time to rebuild. I don’t know if I’ll be competing in any triathlons, quadrathlons, cyclocross races or other events yet, so there’s nothing to actually train for anyway. I have however been very gradually increasing the amount of exercise I do. Rebuilding The volume and...
Building a Solax WordPress Plugin
I couldn’t resist building a Solax WordPress plugin as a project following the installation of our new solar panels and battery. The Solax Inverter has a Wi-Fi dongle that uploads data to Solax Servers where we can see various stats about the usage on the Solax Cloud portal. There is also a Solax App that...
Solar Battery Storage and Force Charging
Our new Solax solar system seems to be working well. There were a few teething problems and plenty to configure to get it all working in what we think is the most efficient way, so here’s the deal. The solar panels started working straight away. Even on cloudy days they were pretty much covering our...
Hibernation for Hector and Harriet
Hector and Harriet our robot lawn mowers have been busy since Spring. They head out several time a day whatever the weather to mow the lawns. They’ve done well, and have kept them looking constantly neat and trim. We decided over the weekend that it was time for them to have a rest and to...
Gradual Improvements
Sunday morning was a perfect morning for running, cool at 10ºC, overcast and still. After a quick walk to the beach where the surf was looking perfect I headed off along the flat straight road to Borth. I haven’t been back in the sea yet since my heart attack but with surf like that it...
