And just for a change ...

I was up before the alarm clock at 08:30 - dunno what happened there. But it meant that I was in plenty of time to go down to the bank and pay for the bits for my broken anemometer before going to Marcillat to record for Radio Tartasse.

The guy from the Danish company that sells the bits sent me a nice e-mail with all of the information that I needed to know - the IBAN account, the SWIFT number and all of that and so I duly printed it out and took it to the bank. The bank official took one look at it and said "what's the company called?". It seems that the information wasn't as complete as I had thought.

And so after Radio Tartasse it was down across the Puy-de-Dome to Gerzat to record for Radio Arverne - but the major issue here was that the garage at St Gervais had sold out of diesel. An enforced trip to Les Ancizes solved that issue but that took a good 20 minutes out of our itinerary leaving us with just enough time to grab a butty and a coffee at Chatelguyon.

While we were in the Radio offices we could see the storm break over the Combrailles and impressive was not the word. Magnificent is much better and it did really make us wonder what it was that we might be coming home to.

The Carrefour at Riom came up trupms again - not only did I do my shopping but they were selling off electric 12-volt coolboxes at €24:00 - not very big but big enough to fit in Caliburn's footwell for when I'm on my travels and it'll hold a good few items and (hopefully) keep them cool. But not only that it was having a sale of SatNavs and I now have a little Western European Mio Moov M305 - for all of €59:00, to replace the other one that mysteriously disappeared. It has speed camera warning installed but not only that, I can sign for a 3-year update of the speed cameras for €49:95 and maps of North America are available for €49:95 as well - meaning that I can sell the Magellan that I bought in Canada last year and get some of my money back.

On the way back home the devastation caused by the storm was impressive to say the least. We stopped between Manzat and Chateuneuf to take a pic of what looked like snow but it was in fact hailstones. I measured them and they were about 20mm in diameter - and that was quite impressive too.

Back here, the temperature reached the high 30s but the storm had brought with it a total of 24mm of rain - and it's still raining. It's a mess here but then again the plants won't be complaining. They will be loving it all.

But talking of coolboxes, I've been thinking again - which I know is dangerous. I'm using almost no electricity from the solar panels on the barn, except for the washing machine once a fortnight. And it's a shame to waste it all. In addition, in a couple of weeks or so I'll be moving them to their final position and adding the 4th panel that has bee conspicuous by its absence.

It's a shame to waste all of this electricity and so I have a cunning plan. From mystats I notice that in the year to 2009, which was the last complete year that I was relying on the panels over there, I generated 9000 amp-hours of electricity over there with 3 panels. So with 4 panels that should give me about 12,000 amp-hours in total. That's in the region of 150 KwH. Now in that year about 40% of the days saw the batteries fully-charged, which meant that there was a good deal of electricity wasted. Add to this that with the solar panels in a much better position I ought to be getting much more electricity than I did back in 2009. Half as much again is not too much to hope for - I had 22,000 amp hours from each of the banks on the roof on the house - about 285 KwH.

Anyway, to cut a long story short "Hooray" - ed, I've been seeing some fridge-freezers - proper mains ones - that have a start-up motor of about 75 watts and (so they reckon) use about 135KwH on a normal daily basis - and so I'm wondering whether or not to splash out a bit of cash into a decent sine-wave inverter and small fridge-freezer, run it off the power in the barn and leave it in there.

That will be something to think about. But of course the most important thing to think about is where I'll put it. You can't even get a cat into the barn at the moment let alone swing it around.