Cabling

Today's been a mid-week day off for us both, which we've spent running a new power cable from the electricity cupboard in the utility room, up into the loft, all the way along the house, down the back of the guest room, into the floor space, through into the loft of the porch, and then into the garage loft. We also ran a shielded Cat 6 cable at the same time, as well as a second unshielded cable as far as the LAN nexus in our dressing room. In doing this, I also changed the route of the telephone extension cabling, and the LAN cables going to the garage, to take advantage of the way into the porch loft we found. Previously they'd gone along the edge of the floor in the dining room, which I didn't like: this is much neater.

The unshielded LAN cable is so that I can have an LAN port in the utility room (I don't have anything in mind, but while I was messing about, it seemed sensible, as there's not one in the kitchen already). The shielded cable is in order to hook a sensor up onto the main incomer from the national grid, to measure the electrical import/export; and to do the same on the cable from the solar panels, to measure generation.

These sensors will then be used by a controller to modulate the power going to an immersion heater in the accumulator tank, so that only electricity we're generating, and would otherwise be exporting, will be used: we won't import electricity to heat the water. The rest of the work will be done in a couple of weeks time: the job today was getting the cables through the house, which was always going to be a tricky, dirty, and time-consuming job.