Week 8/Term 1/Year 4 I don’t know what the peers are like at home, but they can really pull together to keep jobs going and to finish small tasks. Despite the weather getting cooler and so wet, we are slowly,
Day 14: Lighting Evades Downpour
It’s still raining. This autumn is setting new records in sogginess. Luckily, there is something we can do inside Steve, under his beautifully leak-free roof. The LED lights have arrived and can be fitted today. We look up to see
Day 13: You can control charge but there’s nothing you can do about the weather
What a summer to be fitting solar panels. It. Rains. All. The. Time. It seems. Or in any case it rains whenever we have people available to do the work. Since we can’t fit our panel we think about how
This afternoon’s DIY and gardening event is CANCELLED…
…You can probably guess why. It’s too soggy to do much and roads are flooded so we don’t want to encourage anyone onto them. But please book for next week even if it’s a bit rainy – it really has
Day 12: Rain out, sun in
We love Steve Shelter probably because he is so far from perfect. However, the bit of him we love the least is the roof, where endearing imperfection has crossed a threshold and become malfunction. The roof has been great for
Day 11: The only certainty in life… (Panel)
Taking our budget into account, Solar Stu has suggested one “410 Wp” panel for our purposes. It is so tempting just to say “Yes, you’re the expert, let’s go for that”, given that we are once again scratching our heads
Day 10
Day 10 The wattage (W) given for an appliance expresses how much power it consumes in an hour. Multiply that by hours of use in a given period and you get watt hours (Wh), which is the amount of power
Day 9
Our next question is: ‘How much power will our 12V system need to make available?’ The answer to this will determine the minimum size of the battery we need. To work this out, we need to figure out a typical
Day 8
More research is needed. We want to charge laptops and phones, see what we’re doing inside Steve Shelter and run festive string lighting to Napoleon the pizza oven. And possibly make our own pizza sauce and smoothies. So we need
Finally Painting Steve!
Week 7 / Term 3 / Year 4 It has been a while since we published a blog post. That isn’t because we’ve had nothing to say. We’ve done plenty, we just haven’t been very rigorous about taking photos of
Day 7: The Workshop
The workshop is fully subscribed and to make sure everyone feels supported we have a 1:4 adult to child ratio plus the Techie Teen who has come to teach soldering, this time to the kids. We start with an ice