We have been loving our pool in this hot weather but there is no shade out there, so when we climb out we start to bake. We've been shopping for a big sun umbrella and got one at the local hardware store. It does a beautiful job, has 84 kg (185 lb) of ballast in the base to keep it steady, and makes a nice big patch of shade in the late afternoon. Until a good sized gust of wind comes along and knocks it over. Good thing it fell the other way from us so we didn't get skewered by an umbrella rib. Time to increase the ballast or batten that thing down.
Our solar panels are finally due to be installed, the second week of August. Gerrit has been fretting about the sails they will act like in high winds and calculated that we might expect peaks of about 7000 newtons of wind load force (1600 lb) on them. The plan has been to hold the panel assemblies down with concrete weights, but this is looking less reasonable. He thinks we will have to anchor them into the poured concrete roof. We'll be talking that over with the installer shortly.
On Sunday August 3 it was roasting hot. We had a delicious fruit and smoothie lunch provided by our friends Christoph and Atena, after visiting their almost-remodeled place, and then after some chores we took off for a tour of the countryside in our nice air-conditioned car. You can see the route here. We met some free-range goats along one desolate high-altitude road (check out the grampa with the huge horns and beard), and saw some beautiful villages and farms. Here is a valley view near the little town of
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Did we mention how our solar water heating system can overheat? Yes, it's unavoidable with our type of system. When the hot water tank reaches the maximum (75 C, 167 F), the pump which circulates fluid between the solar collectors and the heat exchanger in the hot water tank shuts off to prevent heating the tank to scalding temperatures. Good for the humans, bad for the collectors. With the pump off in the middle of a sunny day the collectors can quickly get very hot and there's no way to cool them down. Gerrit was inattentive one day and they got up to 150 C (302 F)!! That's like chicken-roasting oven temperature! We're lucky they didn't blow their pressure release valve. We are now turning on a trickle of hot water in a bathroom sink on hot clear afternoons, and that seems be be enough to keep the pump circulating and the collectors from blowing their tops. We are working on finding the proper trickle which we can leave on 24 hours a day during the summer so we have hot water and unexploded collectors without having to babysit it.
We finally found someone who looks like a knowledgeable, reputable, and available contractor for the major projects we have going here. On Monday August 4
(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done. Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)