Now this is exciting.

I told you a few days ago that Simon had an old 12-volt water boiler in his van but he had taken it out and replaced it with an Econowash unit like I have in Caliburn.

Anyway he very kindly donated it to the cause and this afternoon I fitted it in the barn wired up to another charge controller.

I don't use much electricity out of the barn right now and the batteries in there are fully-charged by 09:30 most mornings and that's quite a waste of power. So I've wired up a charge controller to act as a dump load and I've connected this boiler into there.

It's only 2.5 litres and that isn't very much at all but running the surplus current from 370 watts of solar panels into there should get that water pretty hot on most days. It's going to be an interesting experiment anyway and it was really nice of Simon to donate it.

But what else I have been doing today is to make my immersion heater. And here it is.

it's a 30-litre chemical drum and I cut the top off it so that I could get inside it. I've screwed in one of my 500-watt 12-volt elements, the one that I had floating on a pontoon in that large bucket. That's right at the bottom in a horizontal plane.

I then mounted a tap into the container - that's mounted higher than the element so that the element will never run dry.

Once they were all fitted and sealed in I fitted a connecting ring made out of old tin cans pop-riveted onto the top of the bottom half and then slid the top half over the top of that. And then I wired it in.

Once I'm sure that it's working I'm going to seal up the joint with some waterproof tape and then wrap it in rolls of insulation to keep the water warm. I'm thoroughly intrigued to see what this might produce. 20-odd degrees above the ambient temperature in an open bucket with 50 litres of  water - so what will 30 litres of water in a sealed and insulated container give me? It's exciting stuff.

In the winter of course I will be using any surplus energy to run an oil-filled heater in the attic. I had some good results from that last winter and if we mount this wind turbine when I come back from Canada things should be even better. And if the results from the other water boiler are positive then I can put this one in the barn in the winter and see what that brings.

But what with one thing and another, things are looking quite positive around here these days and I feel like I'm making enormous progress.