Here are the new solar panel farms on the roof. On clear days here in late September they generate a peak of almost 8 kilowatts of power, enough for the whole house while charging the batteries in about 4 hours. Interestingly, the panels are almost as efficient at the tipped-back angle of 15 degrees you see here as they would be at their optimum angle of 41 degrees -- like 95% as efficient. They're unobtrusive and much less vulnerable to the wind at the low angle though.
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On Monday Sep 29 Pat had a long visit with our landscapers Alex and
Our big orange tree in front has been producing apparently ripe oranges for a few weeks now, which seems like the wrong season. They're supposed to be a late winter fruit. Many of them have split and fallen to the ground, also. Alex took a look at them, identified the tree as an early-season orange, and found that the split and fallen oranges were perfectly fine if you pare away the bad parts. He said the splitting might be due to insufficient watering during the summer, which was certainly true. So Pat gathered up the fruit, cleaned it up, and squeezed some fresh orange juice for us. (The oranges work just fine in sangria, too.) Next year we'll water properly since we'll have irrigation installed, and we'll start looking for oranges in September.
On Tuesday Sep. 30 we went to
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At the
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The robalo (or is it dourada?)
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 The dourada (or is it robalo?)
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On Wednesday Oct 1 a crew arrived to do the wall demolition and conduit installation required to put in our pool cover. We didn't have much time, since we were leaving on a trip in a week, and we told them that. They took down most of the low stone wall with a jackhammer, with the idea of leaving a trench for the conduit from pool to garage.
Aaand, the next day no one showed up. We got a message the night before saying that they could only come in the afternoon, but then that didn't even happen. Our expat friends agree: it is hard to get projects done here. Schedules are only suggestions. Patience and persistence are required. The latest "suggestion" is that a crew of four will absolutely be here without fail on Monday Oct 6 to completely finish the job. At about the last minute, this is. We'll see whether it happens.
On that day the solar panel installer Nuno was also here retrofitting a new garage electrical panel to separate main and backup circuits (and to provide for future growth), which is working fine now. Our solar panels are back on line, powering the home and charging the batteries, after several hours with no power at all. The crew installing the conduit (two at first and three after a long lunch, not four) for the pool cover has been doing a good job also, despite being nerve-rackingly late. This turned out to be a larger job than anyone thought, requiring some concrete work to shore up some eroded spots and deeper drilling than we expected, but they did finish at the end of the day.
We've heard this before, that Portuguese workers seem disorganized and late but after a frantic scramble at the end everything turns out okay. It kind of goes along with the more laid-back philosophy of "not to worry, everything will be fine". It will take some time for us type-A Americans to get used to that, but we are.
(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.)