Tidying

I spent a fair bit of this morning trying to get to the bottom of why our intelligent solar-PV diverting water heater doesn't appear to be working. It seems to be a hardware fault, after a lot of diagnosing, and it'll have to go back to the manufacturer this Monday for repair. A real pain, but the company's been excellent in trying to resolve it, and the unit's under three years of parts & labour warranty, so it'll all be fine soon enough, I hope. And then we'll be back to having lots of hot water.

We're reinsulated the accumulator tank, which hasn't been properly returned to order since we installed the heating elements. That's meant reshaping the outer casing, and replacing the foam insulation I had to carve away in order to access the blanking plugs with expanding polyurethane foam. While I was messing around with the equipment, I've also cleaned (and fixed, in fact) the chimney exhaust fan, and swept the biomass chimney, as well as the sitting room chimney. The former needed it—the latter less so, but it's good to do every few months.

Having got the cables to the right position, and leading all the way back to the control unit on Wednesday, we've now mounted the external CCTV cameras, and positioned them to give us a good view of the outside of the house. I think they might need slight tweaking, but they seem about right.

Liz has undertaken a massive tidy-up while I've been so occupied, weeding all the fruit beds and cutting back the raspberries, cleaning the house, and weeding some of the ornamental beds. The garden's looking really good, even though it's October: so much so that actually there was no envy when we managed to get to Harlow Carr this afternoon. Our much smaller garden is, I think, stacking up well.