You may remember the other day ...

... that I mentioned that there was a new digital 1200-watt inverter in the post on its way here. Well, it turned up a couple of days ago but I never had time to install it. Anyway, that all changed this morning and after cutting another huge pile of wood I set about fitting it in the system.

It's quite a monster and quite heavy too, and the cable is 25mm welding cable. And to fit it on my panel board it involved moving a few things around in order to make the space. But it's certainly impressive and if it works as well as it's supposed to, it will be a big improvement on the current (well, we are talking electricity here) analogue 600-watt inverter, which creaks and groans under the load that it sometimes has to bear but which has kept going for almost three years, day-in and day-out, nevertheless.

That's now been relegated onto the portable panel that I made the other week, and the 150-watt inverter that was on there, that has creaked and groaned day-in and day-out for even longer, has now been relegated into Caliburn where it will just be used for charging up the laptop and the occasional power tool once in a while, replacing the unsatisfactory 150-watt pulse inverter that doesn't seem to want to pulse when it's supposed to.

This afternoon I did something that is so unusual as to merit recording here on the blog. And that is something called "tidying up". That's a phrase that is contained in the vocabulary of many people but is somehow missing from mine. You can't see much of a difference because I seem to be the only person in the world whose tidying up makes more of a mess that it was before I started, but I've recovered 7 square metres of roofing tiles left over from the roofing of the house and the two lean-tos. I'll put them on one side for now and think of a way of using them. I also went into the field next door hunting for the nails that made a bid for freedom. I don't want the farmer's cattle to find them first. I recovered a dozen or so but that's just a tiny fraction of the number that got away. I'll go for another look tomorrow.

But the purpose of tidying up was to clear all of the wood off the floor of the first floor of the lean-to. Where the tarpaulin had been blown away, that area of the floor was soaking wet and the wood that was piled on it, much of it new stuff, was also soaking wet and it was stopping the floor from drying. So all of that wood has been arranged tidily where it will receive a nice current of air, and the floor is clear so that it might dry out. You might remember that it was only 18 months ago that I laid the floor and I don't want it rotting away quite yet.

In other news, I have two companies sending representatives around tomorrow to sell me these roof-top solar panel systems. I hate these cold-calling canvassers who ring up at 19:15 and 19:45 when I'm trying to drink a coffee and watch a film. Worse than spam e-mails they are - at least you can delete those - and so I'm fighting back. I can waste more of their time than they can of mine.

And in other other news, the water in the new immersion heater reached 28.5°C this afternoon. Not a lot you might think, but that was 25°C over the ambient temperature downstairs, and that's well-worth having. Not hot enough to use the washing machine or to have a shower, but it's all in the right direction.