So after a really early night ...

... I was awoken at 05:00 by a torrential rainstorm. Ahh well - I just can't win.

Anyway we had more of the same this morning, but I had a little job to do outside.

There are two banks of solar panels on the barn - one that keeps the good batteries in charge, and the other one which powers everything in there. That second bank uses some second-hand batteries that I bought second-hand in 2004 and have done sterling service, but recently they have been sliding away into oblivion - not that I'm surprised.

I've bought some huge batteries for the house, and the plan is to move the ones currently in the house to replace those that are packing up. Anyway, what with one thing and another I'm a long way from that point, and yet the batteries in the barn have now given up the ghost - they were showing 6.53 volts this morning.

However, there's another lot of batteries around here - a job lot that I bought for peanuts in 2008 and which never seemed to do what they were supposed to do, and so I wrote them off. But having a ferret around with a voltmeter, there were three that were still showing 10 volts, which, considering that they have had no charge at all since 2009, is pretty good, I reckon.

Anyway, while 10 volts isn't much to write home about, it's far, far better than 6.53 volts so I changed the batteries over and I now have those three working the barn. With the charge that they had received during the afternoon, I noticed tonight at 22:00 that the batteries were registering 10.55 volts. I'll be curious to see what they drop down to in the early morning (the power meter has a "minimum volts" recorder), just as I will be interested to see what they will be at tomorrow night after a full day's charge.

Later on, I carried on clearing the hardstanding and doing a few running repairs on stuff that was on there and needing attention. That went on until about 18:00 when we had the downpour to end all downpours (altogether, 10mm fell today) and so I decamped to the barn where, under the light of the LED strip lights, that function impressively well at 10.55 volts, I did some tidying up, just for a change.

Having tripped over something on the floor in the verandah this evening and dropped a load of rice everywhere, I've decided that tomorrow I'll strip out the verandah. Tons of stuff in there that I don't need, and seeing as I'll be on my travels on Friday I can sling it all in Caliburn tomorrow and drop it off at the dechetterie when I'm out.